Date: Thu, 30 Nov 1995 09:24:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Adolph Reed on the politics of rap music


Louis:

In this week's Village Voice (Dec. 5), Adolph Reed finds himself 
moved to comment on "youth culture" after having participated in a 
DSA youth conference panel whose members, excluding himself, were much 
taken by rap, and having received a paper from a graduate student who has 
turned from endorsement of rap music to William J. Wilson styled concern 
with loss of "social control". Reed says:

"These incidents threw into relief for me the key problem with 
progressives' current romance with youth culture and cultural politics 
in general: it rests ultimately on a rejection of the kind of direct 
political action that attempts to alter the structure and behavior of the 
institutions of public authority, what used to be called the state. And it 
ignores the action of state itself. In both the graduate students' pro-rap 
and pro-social control arguments, there is no discussion of the 
government's regressive development policies, tax and foreign policies 
that reward capital flight and deindustrialization, chronic 
underfunding of education and housing for poor people, unequal 
delivery of public services, criminalization of poverty, or legacy of 
direct and indirect support for racial discrimination in defining 
impoverished black and Latino American's lives. Nor is there space in 
either formulation for considering the use of government or other 
political institutions to improve people's lives. The rap videos' 
projection of flamboyant cynicism, the pose of hard-bitten alienation 
that masquerades as "real", contrasts as sharply with Wellstone's and 
Moseley-Braun's focused resolve to fight for humane public policy as 
the rappers' avant-garde stylishness does with the senators' very 
straight self-presentation. The DSA advocates of youth culture's 
strategic importance elevate it as more vital than political work 
focused on government and public policy.

This dismissal of state-centered politics is a signal weakness of the 
left. It offers no guide for emancipatory action; rather, it is deeply 
harmful to the pursuit of progressive interests. It amounts to a don't-
worry, be-angry politics of posture. Beneath radical-sounding rhetoric, 
the shibboleths of academic cultural studies and the presumptuous of 
identity politics come together to celebrate alienation by labeling it 
'resistance'. Alienation is the opposite of politics; it is by definition 
resignation and quiescence."



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