A Parable of Thug Life.

Rip, Burn, Rip, and Burn, so goes the rhythm of these cogwheel days! Bundled in far too little plaid wool and missing horribly the old yellow scarf that I seem to have left in some room of the house, I am, as always, your State School (Long live OSU, lauding itself in the form of a poisonous nut!) correspondent, and bring you a strange piece of insight that is probably, in all reality, common knowledge, but which nonetheless has been plaguing my intellect and vexing my still-nascent social consciousness:

As I have half-announced on many an unsoliticited occasion, I frequent these halls (still reeking of the Morrill Land Grant Act) twice a week for a course suspiciously similar to Michigan TASP 2005 entitled "Cultural Studies/Perspectives in American Popular Musics." This is equivalent to two hours and some-odd minutes of complex, analytical swooning every Tuesday and Thursday. In short, the class has and is changing my life in more ways that I could ever anticipate. I have always been riveted by the strange connextions existing between all things--hence my uncanny mental rampages through the likes of Jung and Kundera and Nietzsche and our fairest Greeks and all manner of old white men with their empires and poetic lyres etcetcetc. But American Studies was something wholly unknown to me. The chiefest difficulty that TASP presented to my incredibly indoctrinated mind (all hail the New Urbanist Humanities Educational Paradigm!) was the struggle to reconcile aesthetics and literary studies and the loftier, less bloody arts with the stark realities of ghettos and terrible-looking buildings (is this what they call architecture?!?) and rampant elite-driven capitalism. So I must own up to my own difficulties: never, nevernevernever before our TASP, had I been forced to confront these truths about race and class and gender struggles in America. And never, before this class, have I realized with some infinitely sustaining glow that still haunts my heart, that the old world of dead scholars and marble-eyed philosophers can indeed be reconciled with the Here and Now of generational apathy and Pruitt-Igoe.

But here is the crux of what I am struggling to say, before I allow these high emotions to pull me into another moderately didactic-account of the American folk culture of the early 1920's and the existential politics of Bob Dylan in his Saguerties years. So hear me out--I am professing absolute ignorance, but I would love beyond anything to see what can be said on this topic.

To my great chagrin, my class is now studying Gangsta Rap.
Let it be said that I pride myself on knowledge of subtley below-the-radar countercultural sources of music-making, and that I play the banjo. In many ways, the suburban-white-pseudointellectual-largely-literature-Yes-I-Listen-to-the-Decemberists subculture is as sheltered and apolitical and largely senseless as one could be. So I am ashamed to say that I have never before looked into the p0litics and economic circumstances behind the work of Tupac and "Snoop" (O! Entering the canon of "Corbu" and "Joyce"?)--but ohdeargod, the politics are there.

I have spent the last twenty-two hours embroiled in a brilliant study of the rise of gangsta rap, entitled "Nothin' But a G-Thang," by the illustrious Eithne Quinn. And it is BRILLIANT. Absolutely. Believe me, I cringed when I saw it, and sort-of-kind-of cast skeptical eyes at the idea of spending some weeks discussing in a critical fashion the merits of a "music" that I dismissed as "Boom-Boom-Boom" plus the obvious attempt to grapple with our nation's historical legacy of chronic oppression and the inducement of inescapabale poverty. But Quinn begins with a study of LOS ANGELES and its physical set-up and the politics of Reagan and George H.W. and the malt liquor industry and how all of this led to the rise of West Coast Rap. And THEN come the chapters on American folklore and the black oral tradition and the role of "signifyin' " in African-American linguistics and the twin roles of the "badman" (==violence) and "trickster" (==pimp/ Mack Daddy [and yes, I, Jessi Holler, have used the phrase "Mack Daddy"]/hustler) and how such stereotypes have manifest themselves in the hip-hop/rap/G-Funk market.

Quinn's ultimate thesis is that these gangsta rappers, instead of weaving the stories about blacks thwarting the system, assume the personas of such figures, and then, like Tupac, face a chronic battle of authenticity when pressured to live out their raps. And all that they wanted to do was escape the ghetto by singing songs about the inescapability of ghetto living. Our America.

Needless to say, I am sure that I am coming across as a terrible racist, and my white teenager's fascination with all of this stems more from a resounding abhorrence at my own lack of awareness of conditions in my own country than from any attempt to glorify The Music or The Life that gansta rap has come to symbolize. But this is so important to learn. Excuse my public grappling while my horizons rip audibly, but it must occur. There is so much still to know.

&& long live American Studies and that strange multi-disciplinary framework set up by our TASP, because, impractical though it may be in any social light, nothing else seems to cut so close to vieiwing American society in all of its complexity without glossing over the ugly & discordant parts. And I apologize for not speaking enough of Los Angeles & Compson & Oakland & Watts and making overt connections to our seminar. Please believe me. Read the book. They are there.

Read it.

Your Shamelessly Transformed Folkie,
Jessi.