Signifying Rappers

by David Foster Wallace

Twice in college, we had been through Dave’s breakdowns and defeated journeys back to Illinois. He could not abide kindness or niceness. A good midwestern kid, he understood politeness. Love was the other engulfing extreme.

In June, as I recall, Dave went to Manhattan for a dreaded authors’ panel. A fellow panelist launched a rote attack on rap as violent, anti-white, anti-women, bling-obsessed. Dave defended the artists he knew, praising the dexterity, the wordplay, the raucous, raw assault on the sententious Babbittry of the Age of Reagan.

These journalistic sections are a Didionish visit, homage to her travelogues through ’60s California, people trapped inside the colorful soap bubbles called their personalities, rising on vast updrafts of the culture until they pop.

Actual people, foolish, astute, venal, and dreaming, are writing the rhymes and mixing the tapes. They’re passing through those Gaelic barricades for peace. It’s cheating to avoid this life and call the whole thing lifeless. And it’s tragic to conclude, from this supposed lifelessness, that you have nothing left to say.

Schoolly D, the original Signifying Rapper, looms irresistibly from the pages of rap fanzines Hip-Hop and The Source; and RJam’s prime, unauctionable asset is the consuming ambition of the artists in its stable to be the next Schoolly D. Or the next Ice T or Kool Moe Dee or L.L. Cool J, or whoever’s the special hero of the kid cutting the demo.

De La Soul, whose 3 Feet High and Rising is considered by many rappers an artistic breakthrough of Finnegans Wake proportions, was sued not once but twice over samples on the album. Other suits will surely follow.

mounted American flags. Tam-Tam has star presence, and, like many who do, she seems to see very little of what goes on around her, the price of the star’s intense focus on self. She reminds you of Senator Gary Hart. He, too, had star presence. In front of a crowd, Hart was riveting; in the elevator riding up to the auditorium, he was barely there. Being barely there in the neighborhood Tam-Tam calls home is probably not such a bad thing, and perhaps her drive to be a star someday is an elaborate way to wall out the now and here.

Like the Salem witch complainants, Tawana Brawley entered the confusions of puberty in a time of paranoia.

To mainstream whites it’s a tight cohesion that can’t but look, from outside the cultural window, like occlusion, clannishness [sic], and inbreeding, a kind of reverse snobbery about what’s ‘def’ and ‘fresh’ and in-the-Scene that eerily recalls the exclusionary codes of college Societies and WASP-only country clubs. Serious rap’s a musical movement that seems to revile whites as a group or Establishment and simply to ignore their possibility as distinct individuals—the Great White Male is rap’s Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy. The music’s paranoia, together with its hermetic racial context, maybe helps explain why it appears just as vibrant and impassioned as it does alien and scary, to us, from outside.

And that resisted, alien, exhilarating cutting edge has always been black, and always an augury of pop’s every near-future, since everything we now recognize and salivate on cue over in the white teen and yuppie mass-market rock and dance world was invented by, then bought or bit from, an insular or regional, highly time-and-place-dependent black music scene, from swaying spirituals and front-porch minor fifths off baling wire3 to Dix, jazz, Blues, soul, James Brown, Motown, Jimi Hendrix, and the ’70s’ funk innovations of Clinton’s Parliament & Hayes & their votaries, to (umm) disco, then late-’70s dance-funk, Break, and now hip-hop/rap.

Black music is American pop’s breath and bread; and We, as both born audience and born salesmen, know it.

Maybe, in serious rap, the extreme new insulation of the black sound is not only intentional but preplanned, part of a neo-Nationalist, my God near-National-Socialist agenda, the hermetic new Scene’s tight circle more like something large coiled than something small flat.

this perverse? A kind of extra-expensive yuppie masochism? No-pain-no-gain type of deal?… Or like chasing after the girl not despite but because of the fact she wants no part of you—especially that part?

The late-millennial data indicate clearly that, whereas love, devotion, passion, seem only to divide, it’s fear and strangeness that now bind crowds, fill halls, unite Us, somehow, as audience, under the great tent.

For the white, behind his transparent cultural impediment, though, the Hard rap begins in mood to resemble something more like temblor, epiclesis, prophecy: it’s not like good old corporate popular art, whose job was simply to remind us of what we already know; issues of all kinds of distance enter in and complicate the rap matter, from outside, fear-wise.

the best rap records for young whites are the violently political or ‘Hard’ raps that are so much like getting fake-flogged by a mime, a for-art’s-sake dressing-down full of contempt and parody and vague menace… but all from the other side of a chasm we feel glad, if liberal-guilty, is there: some space between our own lawned split-level world and whatever it is that lends the authenticity7 to Schoolly D’s thuggish rip-offs of ’70s mainstream classics;

for people not in or of it, a community’s a thing, not a place. And it’s certainly not an environment where separate species in all their differences and complexity mingle and diffract.

For rap presents itself as synecdochic: its dual identity as both head and limb, speaking both to and for its audience, is a huge part of the authority it claims in every cut.

A synecdoche is a Part so powerful symbolically as to be eligible for the conceptual absorption, containment, and representation of what it’s Part of. A stereotype—immigrant Irish are butt-ugly dumb drunks; poor urban blacks are vulgar and lawless—is just a false synecdoche, a token of the conceptualizer’s ignorance or laziness, not of some certain distorted features’ representative power.

It’s way too easy for the pale to hurry across the deck, past the thick, light-wobbling window, and not once hear rap as anything but the weird anthemic march of one Other’d nation, marginalized and yet trapped in our own metropolitan center, a nation that cannot secede and may not assimilate and is thus driven still deeper inside, evincing all the brute anger and resentment we’d legitimate as political were it not anger with nothing visible else to it, no positive diode, none of the King-like ‘vision’ we’ve come to expect from any change that does not yield rubble.

Even powerful art can move only what’s moveable; and only a potential——er can actually commit a——, no matter how exhorted. The thing is, what if the Hard rappers’ lamest, shallowest responses to their critics are valid: what if the artists are not influencing or informing, but rather just reflecting their audience, holding up the mirror their world can see itself as world in?

We suspect here’s the root and hidden white mainstream fear: what if cutting-edge rap really is a closed music? not even pretending it’s promulgating anything controversial or even unfamiliar to its young mass audience? What if rap scares us because it’s really just preaching to the converted?

What better entitlements than these? For they segue so nicely into the really salient, rap-esque rationale: we get to because we want to.

The headlong pursuit of present-tense pleasure, after all, has risen to chief among American rights; no? And since a whole mainstream’s pretty much decided what it wants to need, apparently, the biggest challenge is just the new old one: how to get you to buy.

Early remastered pop was the first fake music ever, since what the record buyer of ’63 experienced as Aural Event on his turntable couldn’t happen live. Rock began to become an Illusion of Event that technology made possible; rock became more like the movies, starting down a long road at the end of which was MTV.

Sampling is also the source of the freaky slapstick, witting and otherwise, that is rap’s other half. Mr. Ed’s immortal ‘Hullo, Wilbur’ has turned up several times, the intro to The Bugs Bunny Hour, so far, only once.

But the one non-mediocre thing in “Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble” is utter rap genius: DJ Jazzy Jeff’s bold theft of the almost psychedelically out-of-place I Dream of Jeannie theme. It is, after all, one thing to steal a car, quite another to steal the daisy-painted prop the clowns drive under the big top.

But ask yourself: is it more far-fetched that Jim Brown would guest-spot on I Dream of Jeannie, or that a show about an astronaut living with a bottled sexpot, one that made no reference to sex, much less racial strife, would rivet America’s attention in the summer of ’67, when riots erupted in every major city? Which is weirder: an I Dream of Jeannie with blacks or without them? Answer: they’re equally weird. Yet the second has haunted syndicated airwaves for two decades, while the first would punch a hole in the walls of rerun worlds as familiar to us as the little screen itself.

Every travelogue is somebody else’s home movie. Every audience is two: that rapt because it finally hears its stories being told, and that rapt because it finally hears a story so utterly divorced from its own as to seem weird.

Rap’s sampling of I Dream of Jeannie blends homage and rampage, celebrating the open-ended transferability of shared culture and attacking the segregation of the icon by mock-integrating it.

Ironies abound, of course, as ironies must when cash and art do lunch. Tearing down the prop-thin symbolic walls, Run-DMC aim to celebrate desegregation, but miss the fact that Aerosmith, those whitest of white rockers, are merely big-budget Led Zeppelin rip-offs, and that Led Zep came straight outta the jet-black Rhythm & Blues of Chicago’s Chess Records.

Dancing with Steve Tyler, Run-DMC forget that Muddy Waters’s sideman Willie Dixon had to sue Led Zeppelin to get proper credit for their use of his blues. “Walk This Way” is an unwanted reunion of ’80s black street music with part of its rich heritage, as that heritage has been mined and mongrelized by Show Biz. If this is desegregation, then shopping malls hold treasure.

able to turn the stuff on and off, listening with the blank distant intensity of someone gazing out the window of a fast train.

Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it’s not depression, not even discomfort; it’s a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you, a horizonful of numbly complex vistas in slab-gray and spraypaint-red.

So an easy analysis, through the fast train’s glass, of rap as the latest occasion for the postliberal and highly vicarious guilt we find as exhilarating as it is necessary—that we like to play voyeur, play at being kept, for once, truly outside; it assuages, makes us think what’s inside that torn-down world refers to us in no way, abides here decayed because Meant To, the pain of the snarling faces the raps exit no more relevant or real than the cathode guts of Our own biggest window. The white illusion of ‘authenticity’ as a signpost to equity, the sameness-in-indifference of ’80s P.R.: Let Ghetto Be Ghetto, from the train.

In short, there are (comparatively) few of the accusations of selling out that accompanied a similarly oxymoronic co-opting phenomenon in late-’60s protest rock. Which if you think about it is passing strange. The white mainstream Other against which serious rap aligns and defines itself makes the ’60s ‘Establishment’ look downright benign. Apparently the devil’s credit is solid, downtown. Maybe it’s impossible to sell souls you don’t believe anyone has anymore?

Freedom is only true freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation.