WORD IS BOND: The definitive text on hip hop music
Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America; by Tricia Rose; University Press of New England; 237 pp.; $14.95

reviewed by Paul Tullis

Tricia Rose is the Snoop Doggy Dogg of hip hop scholarship. For those who follow the debate around rap with the intensity and voraciousness of a DJ scouring used record bins for new samples and breaks, who fax the latest articles on rap by Houston Baker and Kimberle Crenshaw and Cornel West around the country like a New York b-boy copying tapes of DJ Red Alert's most recent show on WBLS, her book is the most eagerly anticipated debut in the short history of writing and discussing the significance and meaning of rap in (African) American culture.
Rose has a unique take on the birth of hip hop. Instead of becoming bogged down in an intellectual Vietnam of who did what first and where (as some authors have done), she links the emergence of hip hop style, which includes graffiti and breakdancing as well as rap music, with conditions in the economic, educational and political spheres. She demonstrates with creative and informative research that hip hop's birth was a direct result of "social and political conditions of disillusionment and alienation" associated with the decline and destruction of New York City, particularly the "urban renewal" projects of the 1960s and 1970s overseen by Robert Moses in the Bronx.
As Crips and Bloods sprung up in Los Angeles following the FBI's infiltration and subversion of the Black Panthers, hip hop culture emerged in New York "as a source...of alternative identity formation and social status in a community whose older local support institutions had been all but demolished along with large sectors of its built environment." In a city that left them no other avenues of expression, graffiti artists proclaimed their identity by writing their names on trains that would travel beyond their neighborhoods and throughout the city; breakdancers occupied public space formally and informally denied to them with their "physical manifestation of hip hop style"; and rappers and DJs combined oral expression with a def(t) appropriation of technology to create "internal and external dialogues that affirmed the experiences and identities of the participants and...offered critiques of larger society."
In strictly musical terms, the most significant aspect of Rose's work is her comparison of rap to Western music aesthetics. Hip hop is blithely dismissed by everyone from academic music theorists to rock critics as not being "music" in the formal sense at all, but simple and repetitive noise that lacks the harmony and melody around which European music since the Baroque era has been based. Rose employs the useful rhetorical device of approaching critics on their own terms, asking, "What is the point of rap's volume, looped drums beats and bass frequencies?" She challenges the notion that "Western classical music (is) the highest standard for musical creation" by positing rap as a sound that descends from an entirely different set of aesthetic categories.
These categories, according to Rose, derive in part from black cultural history and in part from the approach producers take to the technology they employ, particularly samplers. Rap producers have revolutionized the use of samplers. By organizing several sounds (rap songs can be created with as few as three and as many as thirty different pieces of music and sound), producers employ these sophisticated and complex computers to compose music that is entirley new, despite all of the sounds contained in the song having existed before.
Rose relies primarily on an interview with Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee, one of the most admired and mimicked producers in hip hop, to show that endemically black cultural categories are at work in the creation of hip hop music. The rhythm and repitition that power rap "are part of a rich history of New World black traditions and practices." Rose believes that the recontextualization that occurs when sound is sampled "challenge(s) institutional apparatuses that define property, technological innovation and ownership." Rap music sublates the bourgeois concept of art as property because, by taking a sound and adapting it for one's own use, the producer declares that music belongs to a community of ideas to which everyone must have access. Rose also contends, quite rightly, that the debate over "ownership" of a sound- a debate begun by record companies- obscures the fact that, in many cases, the record companies basically stole the music from its creators in the first place by failing to pay a fair price for rights to the songs written by black artists. It is perhaps to be expected that multinational corporations would complain so vociferously when music they stole fair and square gets stolen (back) from them.
Chapter Four of Black Noise details the political and cultural expression of rap. The sometimes cryptical speech of rappers is a function of its insular dialogue; rap music "uses cloaked speech and disguised cultural codes to comment on and challenge aspects of current power inequalities." Rose breaks down raps by KRS-One (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone), LL Cool J, and Public Enemy as examples of rap's multiple meanings and complex symbolism, and she shows that the misconstruence of rap lyrics by whites in power combine with institutionalized racist policies to keep the rap community down. Rose's dextrous ability to straddle the lines of academia and hip hop culture give her a unique persepective among those writing on rap; she backs up her assertions about the oppressive stance the police take to rap and black youth generally with accounts of her own experiences with the policing of rap.
But Rose overstates rap's significance as a dialogue with the past through its use and recontextualization of old black music. Rap's samples are often so manipulated by adjustments in pitch, tempo and timbre (sometimes samples are even played backwards) that they are rendered unidentifiable. Also, the number of "listeners, bluntheads, fly ladies and prisoners" (Nas) able to identify a particular sample is miniscule. Most hip hop heads wouldn't know Lee Morgan from Jimmy Hughes.
Rose's final chapter concerns the sexual politics of rap and the ambiguous relationship that female rappers have with sexist lyrics and white feminism. She calls out the sexist aspects of rap while refraining from falling prey to those that foster division among black intellectuals by encouraging them to criticize each other in a public forum. In this respect, Rose becomes similar to the female performers she discusses; she finds them wary of criticizing male rappers' sexist lyrics in the mainstream press, choosing instead to "defend (the men's) freedom of speech and focus(ing) their answers on censorship." Rose views the largely white world of feminism as having failed to present a positive epistemology for black women who, under conditions as they exist, are unwilling and unable to separate their race from their gender.
Tricia Rose presents in Black Noise a fiercely intelligent analysis of the most misunderstood and misrepresented cultural and artistic practice in America today. Rap music is a sophisticated, developed and diverse form of communication for a demographic that has been raped of its expressive outlets. It speaks poignantly and in secrecy to a segment of America, black and white, which has grown up to find the promises of the Civil Rights Movement to be mostly vapid and unfulfilled. Rose's book, while defending rap from its many ignorant critics, also describes the contradictory aspects of the music which disappoint its neoliberal fellow travellers. It has something to teach a wide variety of readers interested in popular culture; whether fascinated or confounded by rap, a reader will become convinced by Rose's persuasive and eloquent arguments.

Paul Tullis is Associate Editor of Might magazine.