...But What Do You Think? (Okay, I'll say. And what I say is, I agree. There, I've said it. And that's all I'm going to say. For now.)
Black Culture Beyond Hip-Hop
As Linda Richman would say, "Tawk amongst yer selves... Discuwss..."
** UPDATE: 5.29.07 **
I promised my buddy, Gunfighter, if he wrote about yesterday's Post article, I would post a link. Here is Gunfighter's response to "Black Culture Beyond Hip-Hop."
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4 comments:
knew it!
I knew someone would do this while I was writing tomorrow's blog entry!
Would do what? Post this article? Or write the featured op-ed? I'm gonna go with the latter, because when I read it, I thought of you. I thought, "Heck, Gunfighter could have written this piece...."
If by "[knowing] someone would do this" you meant someone posting this article and preempting you, my apologies....
Well, I hope you still write and post your blog entry tomorrow. I'll add a link to it here, if you do.
I didn't think there was much analytic rigor to this piece. It's a hodge-podge that I don't find all that convincing or compelling. In particular, I think the statement that "in the hip-hop era -- from the late 1970s onward -- black America, uniquely, began receiving its values, aesthetic sensibility and self-image almost entirely from the street up" {emphasis mine) can't stand as presented, without evidence. And I seriously doubt statements like this can be supported, even if we accept that there is something called "black America" about which we can make generalizations. Isn't it likely that since the late 1970s, significant segments of "black America", the middle class particularly, have increasingly taken cultural and aesthetic cues from all over the place, identifying less strictly with traditionally "black" sources of cultural identity?
I also really doubt that the younger generations of the black middle class are in fact devolving or whatever through an embrace of "street values" to the exclusion of other values. If the children of the black middle class were losing ground economically compared to their parents, I think we would be hearing a lot more about it.
I'm not a fan of so-called "hip-hop culture", but I'm not convinced it is as pernicious or enveloping as the op-ed and other commentaries suggest. I'm also not convinced that it makes any more sense to talk about a monolithic "black culture" than about a monolithic "white culture".
Indeed, black culture is not monolithic... but I don't think that the author is too far off the mark.
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