WHAT THE LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT MUST LEARN FROM HIP-HOP, MUTHAFUCKA: Part III
Practical Lessons in Attitude.
Should all writers (of poems, short stories, novels, or whathaveyou) parody themselves at some regular interval? That might be a bit extreme, and will probably just fuel the already overdeveloped generational desire to solve the sincerity dilemma with self-reflexivity. (And besides, hip-hop skits, when they’re bad, are really bad: there’s nothing worse than hearing a rapper getting a simulated blowjob). More so, I think it’s a question of attitude. It is possible to be a “real artist” outside the pretensions of art. Look at Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Eliot made a name for himself as an elitist before writing this book of light verse. I might go so far as to say that had the author of this book not previously been the author of “The Waste Land” and “Ash Wednesday,” it wouldn’t have come off right (and I’m not just saying that it wouldn’t have been noticed) Examples abound.
Take Alec Baldwin. What makes his portrayal of Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock so compelling? It’s instructive to take a look at his filmography and lifetime awards. Almost a third of all of his awards (six in the last three years) are from 30 Rock. Before that, he did muster a Best Supporting Actor nomination (not from The Academy) for his work in The Cooler, but that performance was much later in his career than, say, his role in The Shadow. His recent success, though, is not just due to Tina Fey’s brilliant writing on the show. In a sense, Baldwin is like an electron going through the double-slit experiment: he exists in a superposition of two states at once, the dramatic, serious (and not quite believable) Baldwin of The Juror or Glengarry Glen Ross, and the comedic and self-aware Baldwin of 30 Rock. It’s in this exact sense that we know how serious T.S. Eliot really is when he’s talking about Macavity: The Mystery Cat. It’s a game, yes, but a game played by someone who knows what its like to be in a world without games, a world all together too serious (whether that’s the hood or early 20th century modernism).
R Kelly is similarly brilliant in “Real Talk” (This is a video you must watch; ask yourself: is the end of the video staged? If so, does he realize his song is ridiculous? Does it convey some truth nonetheless?). Because we see the serious, and, of course, R&B bathetic, R Kelly co-instantiated with the dead-pan humorist (intentional or not), we arrive at a sort of pleasant cognitive dissonance. I tend to think that the very fact that we aren’t quite sure if he’s aware of how funny his song his, is part of what makes it brilliant. In particular, you need to see this song in light of the rest of R Kelly’s career and the history of R&B. His song is ridiculous and stupid and hilarious and parodic and real and we love him all the more for being able accomplish this seemingly impossible conjunction of styles without even realizing it (and if he does, he’s even more brilliant for crafting an impeccable persona of accident).
One of the reasons that hip-hop has been such a dominant force in American popular culture is that it refuses to take on airs, it calls itself entertainment and lets art happen when it happens: it’s not like punk, it doesn’t say “Fuck the system,” it says “I don’t give a fuck; it doesn’t say “There is something true and important to be said,” it says “All we wanna do is party and bullshit.” Now, there may be something true and important, and we can argue if James Joyce or Dave Eggers knows what it is. But why argue when we can pass the blunt. My challenge to every writer, to the women and men currently crafting the ‘literary establishment’ of our times: leave your valuables in the open, keep your holy book on the coffee table underneath an empty bottle of Miller Highlife, offer the reader the most true and important thing you can muster, believe its true and important, then brush it off and tell a dirty joke.
Next time: The Hip-Hop Business Model (Jay-Z – “I’m not a Business Man, I’m a business, man”). The force of persona; the conflation of art and publicity; making the idea of yourself a product.
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