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Introduction 1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Spectacular Allegory: A Diagnostic Critique, Douglas Kellner 2. Reading Nickelodeon: Slimed by the Contradictions and Potentials of Television, John Weaver 3. Kids and the News, Carl Bybee 4. McDonald's, Power, and Children: Ronald McDonald/Ray Kroc Does It All for You, Joe L. Kincheloe 5. The Bitch Who Has Everything, Shirley R. Steinberg 6Are Disney Movies Good for Your Kids? Henry A. Giroux 7. Got Agency? Representations of Women's Agency in Harry Potter, Ruthann Mayes-Elma 8. Professional Wrestling and Youth Culture: Teasing, Taunting, and the Containment of Civility, Aaron D. Gresson 9. Home Alone and Bad to the Bone: The Advent of a Postmodern Childhood, Joe L. Kincheloe 10. Power Plays: Video Games' Bad Rap, Stephanie Urso Spina 11. From Tupac to Master P and Beyond: Hip-Hip and Critical Pedagogy, Greg Dimitriadis About the Contributors and Editors Chapter 11 Hip Hop and Critical Pedagogy: From Tupac to Master P and Beyond Greg Dimitriadis The first edition of Kinderculture (1997) forwarded several groundbreaking ideas about the role and importance of popular culture and education. Perhaps most importantly, the editors and authors argued for the fundamentally important role of the popular culture industry in "educating" youth. Popular culture, the authors collectively maintained, has become a key site of "cultural pedagogy," a key site where curricular "power is organized and deployed" (Steinberg and Kincheloe, 1997, p. 4). They go further, "The organizations that create this cultural curriculum are not educational agencies but rather commercial concerns that operate not for the social good but for individual gain" (p. 4). The charge was severe, the implications far-reaching. Indeed, because popular culture has become a increasingly important pedagogical site, the volume maintained, the need for critical, liberatory education has become more pressing. Yet, traditional educative institutions have largely lost claim to exclusive hold on young people's lives. We are, it seems, in the middle of several key tensions and paradoxes, ones that have become increasingly pressing since the publication of Kinderculture. No cultural movement marks these various tensions as clearly as hip hop. Hip hop music has emerged as perhaps the preeminent cultural movement of our time, the profoundest statement of the complexities of this generation of youth and young adults. Nearly a quarter of a century after the release of the first hip hop single, "Rapper's Delight," the music is still at the epicenter of popular controversy and critique. Over the last 25-years, hip hop has reinvented itself again and again, pushing its own creative parameters in important and always unpredictable ways. Hip hop emerged in the late 1970's and early 1980's in areas of NYC blighted by de-industrialization (Rose, 1994). The collective, party-oriented ethic of this moment spoke to the intense needs and desires of youth, the impulse to carve out space in increasingly hostile social and cultural terrain. In years hence, the music has morphed and grown in important ways. It has become a complex medium, reflecting a wide range of creative and substantive interests and impulses. Today, the aggressive "gangsterism" of 50 Cent, the entrepreneurism of Jay-Z, the pro-sex feminism of Foxy Brown, the pro-black sentiments of Mos Def, the ironic self-deprecation of Eminem, and the reflective poetics of Common, all sit side-by-side. Hip hop is a genre of music that has again and again defied the impulse to contain and control it. I argue here that taking up the challenges of hip hop means giving up our certainty and control over our understandings of young people and youth and entering into more thoughtful kinds of relationships with more and more unpredictable constituencies. Hip hop has collectively challenged those of us in education to wrestle with the specificity of our moment, in ways that force us beyond our ready-made pedagogical theories and models. Drawing together textual and ethnographic approaches, I highlight here the history and importance of hip hop music and culture, particularly that of Tupac Shakur and Master P. This work, I argue, tries to take us beyond nostalgia for the civil rights movement, to new terrain. This work, I argue, takes seriously the ways that contemporary popular artists are self-reflexively theorizing what it means to live in what Mark Neal calls a "post soul" moment. This work, I conclude, provides us with models for re-thinking our roles as pedagogues and intellects, a necessary gesture as this historical conjuncture. Tupac and the Transition from Soul to Post-Soul No artist reflects the contradictions and paradoxes of hip hop the way rapper Tupac Shakur did. Tupac began his career in hip hop in 1990 when he joined the rap group Digital Underground, where he danced and rapped. He released several albums over the next few years (e.g., 2Pacalypse Now, 1990) and starred in several films (e.g., Juice, 1992). Perhaps his most well known song, "Dear Mama," a tender ode to his mother, was released in 1995 on the album Me Against the World. At the time, Tupac was incarcerated for sexual assault. He would have numerous scuffles with the law. He was be shot and nearly killed in 1995, an incident for which he blamed fellow rapper Notorious BIG (or Biggie Smalls). The two would have a high profile feud which escalated when Tupac signed to the record label Death Row Records, a company which cultivated an outlaw image. The conflict became known as the War of the Coasts-the "West Coast" (represented by Tupac Shakur, and others on Death Row Records) verses the "East" (represented by Notorious BIG and others on Bad Boy Records). Sadly, the conflict ended in death for both. Tupac was shot and killed in 1996 in Las Vegas. Six month later, BIG was shot and killed in LA. Both homicides remain unsolved, but there has been speculation the murders were linked (see Nick Broomfield's 2002 film Biggie and Tupac). In many respects, Tupac's life was an allegory for the transition from a civil rights to a "post soul" ethic. As is widely known, Tupac's mother was a Black Panther, one of the so called New York 21, arrested for a series of suspected bombings. Under intense government pressure and surveillance, her ideals were increasingly challenged and she eventually became addicted to crack cocaine. Tupac was at the center of these tensions from a very young age, the idealistic impulses of the civil rights and pro-black movement side-by-side with more immediate and individualistic kinds of physical gratifications that emerged as so compelling in the movement's wake. In fact, he "claimed" two fathers at points one a Black Panther, the other a local gangster. As Mike Dyson (2002) made so clear in his brilliant book, Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur, Tupac had to figure his own way through these various tensions and complexities. He was surrounded by activists as well as gangsters. From a young age, Tupac was also deeply interested and invested in the arts both in school (he attended Baltimore School for the Arts) and out of school (his very early interest in hip hop). Dropping out of school, he never stopped pushing his own intellectual boundaries and limits. In perhaps the book's most moving and provocative chapter, Dyson had the opportunity to look at Tupac's collection of books, highlighting the eclectic nature of his reading practices from Richard Wright to Frederick Nietzsche to JD Salinger to Maya Angelou to Gabriel Marquez to Henry Miller (p. 94). Largely on his own, Tupac wrestled with a complex set of ideas outside of traditional school settings. Dyson writes, "Tupac's voracious reading continued throughout his career, a habit that allowed him to fill his raps with acute observations about the world around him.... Tupac's profound literary rebutted the belief that hip-hop is an intellectual wasteland.... Tupac helped to combat anti-intellectualism in rap, a force, to be sure, that pervades the entire culture" (pp. 99-100). Tupac's music reflects the paradoxes and conflicts he faced as a youth. His music ranged from tender odes to his mother (as in, noted above, "Dear Mama") to brutal invectives to his rivals (as in "Hit Em Up"). He looked towards a broad, black power agenda, just as he detailed his own intense conflicts with other black artists. These conflicts and paradoxes marked his high profile career. He publicly presented himself as an "unfinished project," always struggling to make sense out of a broader social context, while dealing with the pressing immediacies of the moment. He speaks from a context where he can not fall back on notions of monolithic black community, just as he could not ignore the historical durability of those narratives. In many respects, Tupac can be seen as signaling a transition from the relative certainties of narratives of racial uplift, to more uncertain contemporary terrains. Tupac's life seems endemic of the landscape academics now face, a landscape that challenges our own certainties. His work forces us-intellectuals, pedagogues, and concerned adults alike-to decenter our ready-made intellectual and political paradigms. To understand Tupac, we can not only look to the discourses that pervade academic life. As Tupac's own mother so eloquently said: I've heard enough of [our youth] to know that we ought to be holding them up and sharing with them what we know instead of standing on top of them telling them what they're not doing right. They're doing a lot right and some things wrong. We continue to fail these brilliant, very talented, very creative and courageous young people because they're not saying what our message was. But for Christ's sake ... we're about to enter the 21st century. Something should be different. And they may be right about some things. (Kitwana, 2002, p. 3). In giving up her own sense of certainty about racial politics, Afeni Shakur provides a model for what it means to re-position oneself as an intellectual. For me, this repositioning was effected through four years of ethnographic work in the urban Midwest. In this study, I looked to understand the relationship a group of young black adolescents and teens had with hip hop. The study was conducted in a community center where I held weekly focus groups and also worked as a volunteer and staff member. In the book that resulted, Performing Identity / Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice (2001), I looked at how young people constructed notions of tradition, history, and self through talk about hip hop. In the follow up book, Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs: Young Black Men Coming of Age in Urban America (2003), I looked more closely at the lives of two teens over a six year period, as well as my evolving relationship with each. I discussed what it meant to de-center my own agenda on popular culture in time. I found, throughout this all, that Tupac provided many of these young people with a certain kind of "equipment for living" (to evoke Kenneth Burke [1941]), discursive strategies for confronting and coping with specific day-to-day concerns. For example, one youth who had a history of both personal and familial confrontations with the police, drew on Tupac to talk about these experience: "Like when he's [Tupac's] talkin' about the police harassin' him all the time? ... Every time the police see me, they got something to say to me, about my daddy, and my brothers ... tellin' me I sell dope and all this." This young person's feelings towards the police and the life-stance he has had to take, gelled together into a kind of philosophy of invulnerability and a kind of grim resignation to death. Drawing on the work of Tupac, he noted: To live in fear is not to live at all.... You can't run from every damn thing all the time.... You might as well not even live.... It's like you dead anyway, you keep thinking motherfuckers gonna kill you.... I ain't trying to say make yourself die.... [But] don't worry when it comes to you 'cause its gonna happen anyway.... We live to die. You know what I'm saying? That's one thing we know for sure. Like, like you say you're gonna go to college when you get older? You might not make it to older. Like you say ... I finna go down to the gas station and get some squares [cigarettes]? I might not make it to the gas station.... But I know I'ma die. I know I'ma die. We live to die.... Don't fear no man but God.... Just like Pac [Tupac] said. This research gave me greater focus on young people's relationship to and with black popular culture, helping me expand my extant textual and historical work in important ways. I would come to see the role of rap in offering these young people (especially the young men) hyper-real, super-invulnerable figures, ones which helped to mitigate against a brutal and unforgiving social context. Clearly, Tupac was a mythic figure to this young man, one who allowed him to face the contingency of life with a steely resolve towards death. His relationship with Tupac speaks to the specificity of concerns and needs of the "post soul" generation. Post Civil Rights and "Soul" In his controversial 2002 book, The New H.N.I.C. (Head Nigga in Charge): The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop, author Todd Boyd argues that we live in a post-civil rights moment, that the complexities and contradictions of hip hop music and culture have supplanted the transcendent claims of earlier generations. Above all else, Boyd stresses the dangers of nostalgia. Elsewhere, Cameron McCarthy and I have linked nostalgia to a broader set of "resentment" discourses, all of which have tried to contain the complexities of our contemporary moment (Dimitriadis and McCarthy, 2001). These include the certainties of race and of nation, both of which were so critical to the civil rights movement of the 1960's. Yet, as Boyd so powerfully implores us: We cannot live in the past forever. Civil rights had its day; now its time to move out of the way. Civil rights was a struggle, and it remains an ongoing struggle for all disenfranchised people of color to pursue their civil rights. But many in the civil rights era have for too long gloated in a sanctimonious fashion, assuming that their day would never come to an end. This arrogant posture did little to inspire a new generation but went a long way toward alienating them. The posture of civil rights was such that it made future generations uncomfortable having to wear such restraints as they attempted to represent themselves. (p. 152) Boyd argues throughout his book that hip hop music and culture "attempt[s] to navigate the world in a very different way." Boyd's comments clearly dovetail with Afeni Shakur's, the need not to lodge critiques from previous generations but perhaps listen and learn as well. Boyd points to the stress on material survival and wealth that marks this generation's needs, concerns, and desires. We see a desire to survive, to access the resources of capitalism, while still retaining a strong notion of blackness. We see these concerns instantiated in the critiques of black men who have attained some degree of wealth. Boyd documents the intense public criticism from older blacks as well as whites that many rap artists and record label owners face, many of whom are accused of "selling out" when they make some money. He cites Master P, Snoop Dogg, and Puff Daddy, among others. In part, such changes reflect an ambivalence about African Americans entering mainstream American life. Boyd notes, "What in an earlier generation might have been called 'showing off' has now grown into an integral part of self-expression in hip hop circles. The idea of the 'come up' represents social mobility in spite of overwhelming obstacles and the politics of this move are deeply embedded in hip hop's master narrative. The expression of this upward mobility by these lower class individuals, flossin' on one's cars, homes, clothes, money, and lifestyle, have become commonplace" (p. 77). Boyd is not uncritical of these tendencies. But he stresses that their wholecloth condemnation is often about earlier and nostalgic notions of blackness. He writes, "Change in status, be it financial, cultural, or political, is not always the worst thing in the world, nor should it be. Actually, it represents progression. Change is at the heart of creativity, and that should be embraced while one maintains a solid understanding of the history that precedes it" (p. 101). According to Boyd, charges of "selling out" sometimes impede the organic creativity and unpredictable social impacts of rap music. Such charges work mostly to maintain center / periphery or, better yet, mainstream / underground dichotomies that no longer strictly hold. Others have wrestled with the specificity of this moment and this generation in similarly powerful ways. For example, Mark Anthony Neal's Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic describes what he calls a "post soul" moment, the moment when the transcendent certainties of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements have largely been elided. According to Neal, "soul" was the most powerful expression of modernity for African Americans of previous generations (p. 3). For the next generation of African Americans, however, these claims to certainty have been called into question. This new generation, "came to maturity in the age of Reganomics and experienced the change from urban industrialization to deindustrialism, from segregation to desegregation, from essential notions of blackness to metanarratives on blackness, without any nostalgic allegiance to the past (back in the days of Harlem, or the thirteenth-century motherland, for that matter), but firmly in grasp of the existential concerns of this brave new world" (p. 3). For this next generation, hip hop music and culture has emerged as the defining cultural statement. The music and culture are filled with complex and often contradictory narratives. Yet, according to Neal, these need to be met with an expansive set of explanatory criteria. He writes, "We cannot simply reject these narratives on a moral basis that is itself the product of a profoundly different world; we must at least critically engage them with the same energy and passion that many of these artists themselves inject into their creative efforts" (p. 11). Neal spends a great deal of his book attempting to unravel the work of hip hop artists and their whole cultural surround. In the book's final chapter, Neal discusses how hip hop music and culture provides the cultural soundtrack to his own life and the lives of his students. He discusses, as well, the ways both try to unravel some of its complexities and contradictions. For example, many of his students have middle-class aspirations that are cross cut by some strident and at times impossible ideals about "keeping it real" and "being black." He writes, The radical transformation of hip-hop over time, especially its crossing over into the market of white youth, has complicated its ability to proclaim black identity. It has come to symbolize the utter ambivalence of the black situation; on the one hand, serving up versions of a richly "black" identity, on the other showing an eagerness to join the American dream. (p. 189) He continues, "the challenge to 'keep it real' and 'still get paid' may seem crass to older generations, but it is the dominant ethos of Generation Hip Hop" (p. 194). Navigating these waters is quite complicated, the desire to "succeed in the mainstream and survive in the margins" (p. 194). Neal, like Boyd, shows a willingness to take on the specificity of this generation, without falling into the trap of nostalgia. As the above indicates, it seems, our moment necessitates moving beyond the kinds of liberation narratives so often associated with modernist movements. These narratives often rely on stable notions of identity and clear notions of ideology critique. I argue here that we need to perhaps give up our ideological certainties if we are to meet young people "where they're at" today. More and more, we need to "work the hyphen" between these different roles, responsibilities, and positions (Dimitriadis, 2003). Master P and Material Imperatives of the Post-Soul Generation I would like to focus now an artist who emerged in the wake of the Tupac-Notorious BIG conflict-Master P. P himself acknowledged as much on his 1997 album Da Last Don, released months after BIG's murder. Here, he said that Biggie and Tupac "took the kiss of death" so he could be "The Last Don." P was part of an emerging group of Southern rap artists who seemed to look beyond and transcend the "East vs. West" controversy that ended so tragically. His work marks many contemporary existential anxieties around racial identities, offering educators a key lens for grappling with the realities of race today. Like Tupac, Master P's biography is part of his public claim to authority and authenticity. Part of Master P's mythos is his former life as a drug dealer in Louisiana, his brother's violent death, and his effort to "get out of the drug game" and go legitimate with music, specifically his label No Limit Records. The label's symbol and moniker is a tank (known as "the tank") and artists all wear diamond-studded tank medallions and frequently reference it on record and in film. All this is part of the group, familial ethic, which P stresses on all No Limit recordings. He often, in fact, deploys Mafia-like imagery on his label's releases, as underscored by album titles including Da Last Don (1997), Made Man (1999), and Goodfellas (2000). Master P's story was documented, in rough autobiographical fashion, in his straight-to-video film, I'm Bout It (1997), filmed on location in the Calliope projects, New Orleans, where he grew up. The film also features other members of P's No Limit Family, including his brothers Silk and C-Murder, as well as Mystical, Mia X, and Fiend. The film opens with Master P and his crew sitting around a table, crowded with money, guns, and drugs. The group, as the scene unfolds, puts their fists together, and says, in unison, "true," a sign of solidarity and unity. Master P then rises, taking center stage, and informs the group about a stolen "kilo" of cocaine, a betrayal which prompts him to say "this shit is crazy ... think motherfuckers are your friends" before confronting and shooting a suspect. We thus see the complexities of trust and betrayal play out here, the notion that one's crew is one's family, cross-cut by the idea that one can only really trust oneself in the end. I'm Bout It details these concerns throughout P's efforts to leave the drug game and invest in the music business, his confrontations with crooked cops, the multiple betrayals of his own "crew," and his own sense of personal triumph and invulnerability. Similar such anxieties and themes play out in I Got the Hook Up (1998), P's follow-up effort, though they are more closely linked here to material survival. This film stars Master P and AJ Johnson as "Blue" and "Black," friends who run a large, open-air pawn shop / flea market down South. The duo, by chance, get hold of some cell phones and conspire to steal air time. Though they make a great deal of money, the phones prove faulty and both, along with various and sundry others, wind up on the run from some local thugs. I Got the Hook Up is about "making a dollar out of fifteen cents," the everyday hustle often necessitated by life in the ghetto. We see P evoke here the day-to-day concerns that propel the lives of many young people today the reality of having to scheme to survive, the necessity of having friends and family to look out for you at all times. In such a world, racial affiliation is not given a priori, but is a function of moment-to-moment and day-to-day survival. These films, like Master P's work more broadly, are part of a broad structure of feeling among young people today, young people who have similar desires for, and anxieties about, trust, friendship, and survival. Hence, we see fierce notions of individual autonomy, notions that one can in the end only rely on oneself, juxtaposed and cross-cut by the necessity of local allegiances, of the social networks that often make life in poor and dangerous communities livable. These twin imperatives are embodied in gang life and imagery, in the fiercely individual and independent gang member whose sense of personal respect and autonomy is paradoxically linked to his or her crew. This image reached its apex in mid-nineties rap, as noted, in the public personae of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls as well as the conflict that ensued between these men and their record labels, Death Row and Bad Boy. In many ways, such images have taken center stage in rap today. They are the "myths" that help define this particular social and cultural moment for contemporary youth. Artists like Master P foreground complex personal biographies that young people articulate with and against, often fatalistic narratives that register unique tensions around trust and betrayal, vulnerability and invulnerability. On a telling track, "Would You Hesitate," from the soundtrack to I Got the Hook Up, Master P's brother C-Murder spells out some of these anxieties, simultaneously affirming and questioning the loyalty of label mates including Kane and Abel, Fiend, Mac, and Big Ed. One senses intense anxiety here, the anxiety of having to place yourself over to the group as well as the uncertainty of doing so. One cannot ultimately trust anyone, a theme evidenced by the constant anxiety of C-Murder who asks, plaintively, "Would you die for me?" "Would you kill for me?" and "Would you hesitate?" throughout. These are existential demands, demands that inform much of the fatalism and anxiety so pervasive in the popular imagination today, demands necessitated by the stark material reality many young people face. We thus see a complex set of tensions registering in contemporary black film and music today, as fundamental questions of distrust vs. trust and autonomy vs. collectivity proliferate. Racial identity is not given in the popular cultural forms, but is radically contingent and dependent upon moment-to-moment and day-to-day survival. These narratives are crucial for disenfranchised youth today, who have watched these spectacles unfold and draw upon them in their own intensely fraught lives. These resources, these stories and myths, are the ones that young people gravitate towards while making sense out of their lives, in the unfortunate absence of other models and in the face of day-to-day struggle. These resources exceed the explanatory frameworks offered in traditional approaches to multiculturalism and take us to the terrain of everyday struggle, a terrain that does not privilege nostalgia and transcendence, but the very real and the very immediate. This work signals a set of concerns that cannot be explained away in a civil rights era discourse of racial uplift, of "good" and "bad" role models. I would like to highlight now a telling set of interactions around Master P from my ethnographic study of young people and hip hop noted earlier, highlighting some of the complexities around generation and generational identity (Dimitriadis, 2001; 2003). Master P was a big favorite early in 1998, particularly after the deaths of Tupac and Biggie. P was not a "studio rapper," according to these youth, "wasn't fake." Clearly, Master P embodied many of the dualities which are so much a part of the so-called hip hop generation. In key example, he talked about his wealth but also kept in touch with his roots. This was a precarious balance. I recall one focus group discussion, where one young person commented, "I hate rappers who talk about how all they got this and they got that." Such rappers, it seems, aligned themselves too closely and uncritically with the mainstream. I asked if Master P talked about his wealth, this kind of conspicuous consumption. The youth responded, "He in between, he talk about both. He talk about how much money he had, and ..." Struggling for the correct phrase, another youth finished his thought-"where he came from." Master P, it seems, occupies the kind of "in between" space Neal evokes above. Yet, older community members didn't quite see the same balance being struck. I recall another focus group discussion with older teens, which the Education Director, Bill, walked in on. While Bill was supportive of young people and felt the work I was doing was important, he was distrustful of some of the tendencies within hip hop. When he walked in, we had been talking about the history of rap and hip hop. As an older staff member, it seemed like he might have something to say. One teen said that we were talking about how "things were easier in the 80s." Bill responded: It was easier back in the 80s than it is now ... I done heard too much "murder murder" [a popular song]. That's what I think. Think teenagers done lost it.... They feel comfortable picking up a gun. It don't prove nothing.... In the 80s people had fun. I don't think people have fun these days. I think people out to see how macho they can be. How many women they can call "bitches" and "hoes" and all that. It's all about dissing somebody. Soon as somebody hit you, you ready to do something.... I mean they was starting in the later 80s, but early 80s [it wasn't like that]. And all because of, what's this stuff called? Rap music. After his rhetorical question, Bill continued, "Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Tupac, I was never really into that" to which another teen responded, "That was old school." Bill then said "That's old school? So what's new school? Master P? He 'bout it bout it' huh? ... I don't know fellas. I heard he's a millionaire. He got a lot of money. Isn't he putting some money back in his neighborhood?" Another youth said immediately that he did. Bill didn't seem convinced. We can see some important distinctions between older and younger people around Master P. Clearly, there was a strong investment in P from those younger. He was "real" to these youth, and his life was evidence of this on multiple levels, wrapped up in his efforts at day-to-day survival. For Bill, a staff member in his 50's, the issue was whether or not P "gave back" to his community. As I noted elsewhere, rap music has provided youth super-invulnerable figures, resources for survival for dealing with a profoundly hostile social, cultural, and material reality. The conflict between Tupac and Biggie, and the rise of Master P evidences much of this, in ways that often escape the purview of those older. Indeed, these young people explicitly compared Master P to Tupac. One youth said of Tupac, "He was a true mug, right there. He got shot in the balls, shot in the chest," to which another responded, "I think he got shot in the head too." Another said "Master P gonna end up dying. He gonna be the next one to go" to which another responded "cause he right after Tupac." The first youth continued, "What he say in his songs? ... 'Keep an eye on your enemies.' . . He already been shot in the back." Both Master P and Tupac talked about dying in their songs, these youth said. Specifically, in the wake of Tupac's death, these youth combed P's songs for similar references in his songs. Master P and Tupac both offered new models for "blackness," for what it means to engage with the American dream on new fraught and dangerous terrain. Both embody the gangster archetype, standing inside and outside of the American mainstream at the same time. On the title track to his popular album, Da Last Don (1997), Master P evokes much of this ambivalence from the very first line, addressing "America" and its seeming hypocrisy: "Good Day America this is Mr. No Limit!" He continues, "You always point the finger at the bad guy / But what if the bad guy points the finger at you? / Fuck the politicians the media and the government / The fucking world was built on corruption." P then says he "made millions from raps," but is still tied to his "No Limit niggas," "strapped thug niggas [who] bust caps" or fire guns. It is here that he ties himself most explicitly to Tupac Shakur and his legacy-Tupac "took the kiss of death" so he could be "The Last Don." We see this thread continue to this day in rap. While in 2003, Master P's career seems somewhat in decline, a "new school" has risen. In particular, the work of 50 Cent picks up on many of these themes detailed throughout. Material struggle, for example, is evidenced by 50's album title, Get Rich or Die Trying (2003), while songs like "Many Men (Wish Death Upon Me)" highlight the dangerous terrain he walks-a theme he does not shy away from in discussions of his life. 50 Cent has pointed out again and again how he survived an attempt on his life and has hinted of his own retaliation. He himself elaborates on his near-fatal shooting, "Sneaky motherfucker, man ... He [the gunman] did it right. He just didn't finish. He like Allen Iverson shakin' a nigga, go to the basket and miss ... You don't actually feel each one hit you ... The adrenaline is pumping. You movin' and tryin' to get out of the way" (quoted in Toure, 2003). He raps about the shooting in the song "Many Men," hinting at the retaliation he has also denied, "In the Bible it says, 'what goes around, comes around' / Almost shot me, three weeks later he got shot down / Now it's clear that I'm here for a real reason / 'Cause he got hit like I got hit, but he ain't fucking breathing." The comparisons to Tupac were perhaps inevitable. Popular rapper Eminem notes, "One of the things that excited me about Tupac ... was even if he was rhymin' the simplest words in the world, you felt like he meant it and it came from his heart. That's the thing with 50. That same aura. That's been missing since we lost Pac and Biggie. The authenticity, the realness behind it" (quoted in Toure, 2003). On the 50 Cent song "Patiently Waiting," guest star Eminem raps about the deaths of Tupac and Biggie, "It's like a fight to the top, just to see who'll die for the spot / You put your life in this / Nothing like surviving a shot." The sense of existential angst and danger has remained a constant theme in the music, underscored by a profound ambivalence around the "American dream" and "crossing over." Reworking many of the generational distinctions discussed throughout, notions of racial uplift are inscribed on and through the bodies of performers themselves. Popular Culture, Pedagogy, and New Roles for the Intellectual Throughout this essay, I have tried to access some of the specificity of the "hip hop generation" and its needs and concerns. These texts articulate much of the specificity of this moment, what Boyd has called a "post civil rights" and Neal has called a "post Soul" moment. I have highlighted some efforts to stand "side-by-side" with hip hop and not "above" it. This work, I think, can go some way in helping us re-think the nature of intellectual work today. More and more, we need to re-think the ways we position ourselves as cultural studies of education scholars and activists. We need to understand and engage with this generation, in ways that look past our own modernist notions of emancipation and liberation. I would join, as well, a growing group of scholars who are attempting to articulate a kind of specific politics from "the ground up" in hip hop. While not the focus of this essay strictly speaking, this work is worth highlighting. For example, according to Bakari Kitwana (2002), young people who came of age in the eighties and nineties "share a specific set of values and attitudes." He continues, "At the core are our thoughts about family, relationships, child rearing, career, racial identity, race relations, and politics. Collectively, these views make up a complex worldview that has not been concretely defined" (p. 4). The specific concerns of this generation are not so clearly linked to an overarching political movement like the Civil Rights Movement, but they are no less pressing. In particular, he discusses: the continuing rise of stark economic disparities; police brutality; gangs and drugs; new generation gaps within black communities; exploding racial tensions; and finally, the continued deferment of the American dream (pp. 37-44). He writes, "the older generation can't entirely identify with the mode of oppression facing our generation. Oppression for us is not simply a line in the sand with white supremacists blocking access-us over here and them over there" (p. 41). For Kitwana, this emerging worldview with its specific needs, concerns, and desires first emerged in rap in the mid to late eighties in the "sociopolitical critiques of artists like NWA, KRS-One, Poor Righteous Teachers, Queen Latifah, and others" (p. 4-5). Since then, hip hop music and culture has emerged as a uniquely relevant landscape for this generation sorting out these issues and concerns. Since then, hip hop music has emerged as a uniquely relevant landscape for this generation of youth sorting out these issues and concerns, as evidenced by figures such as Tupac, Biggie, Master P, and 50 Cent. To echo Neal (2002) again, "We cannot simply reject these narratives on a moral basis that is itself the product of a profoundly different world; we must at least critically engage them with the same energy and passion that many of these artists themselves inject into their creative efforts" (p. 11). We must face them head on, I argue, without recourse to nostalgia. At stake is a new, truly relevant critical pedagogy for urban youth.
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Early childhood education -- Social aspects -- United States.
Popular culture -- United States.
Critical pedagogy -- United States.
Curriculum planning -- United States.
Child development -- United States.
Educational anthropology -- United States.