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In this sense Everything But The Burden is also about what white people can't see when they see Black - the sight of a Black imagination "playing in the dark" to use Toni Morrison's apt description, making hay of what happens in the wily and wounded African American psyche when it goes messing about and marketing, and making sense of race in these United States and abroad. Given that most of these writers are, like the editor, civil rights and black power era babies, our take on The Burden differs from my very hip, septuagenarian Southern-born mother. Our take on white appropriation has been colored when not softened by the socioeconomic gains, opportunities and legal protections earlier generations struggle have provided for Black thinkers and cultural entrepreneurs (no longer if they ever were, separate categories) today.

Nelson George once correctly identified the African American equivalent of postmodernism as post-Soul culture. Soul music, widely understood as the sound black gospel vocalists like Sam Cooke made as they turned away from praising Jesus and towards the more lucrative romantic pop market, subsequently produced a secular faith of sorts around the verities of working-class African American life. Soul culture succinctly describes the folkways African Americans concocted in the desegregating America of the 50s and 60s, as the Civil Rights movement was on the ascendancy. Post-Soul is how George describes the African American culture that emerged out to the novel social, economic and political circumstances the 60s Black movements produced in their wake. Post Soul would include the plays of Ntozake Shange, the novels of Gayl Jones, the films of Spike Lee, the music of Fishbone, Tracy Chapman, and Living Colour, the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, the songs and the cosmetic surgery of Michael Jackson, the art of Jean Michel Basquiat and of course that postmodern expression par excellence hip-hop. All this work managed the feat of being successful in the American mainstream in a language that was as easily referenced to white cultural models as to African American ones. Its signature was not it's smooth blackness but its self-conscious hybridity of Black and white cultural signifiers. Hence, Basquiat referenced Raushcenberg and Dubuffet before Bearden, as the members of Living Colour and Fishbone found Led Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols as praiseworthy as James Brown and George Clinton. By the same token all of these artists left an African American critique of racism visible in the foreground - a recognition that Black discontent was as alive as white supremacy in the land of the hybridizing freakyfree.

But with post-Soul's new forms came new psychological relationships to older and arguably perhaps even outdated takes on such platitudinous topics as Black oppression, Black propriety, Black identity, Black community, Black family, Black femininity and feminism, and most of all, Black marketability. For the first time in history mainstream success becomes a defining factor in the cultural value of an African American arts movement - primarily because it would be through the country's major channels of mass communication and mass marketing that debates about these figures moved from margin to center, from the 'hood to the floors of Congress.

The 70s, 80s and 90s saw lively and sometimes bitter debate arising in black America over whose idea of African American culture would prevail in the public imagination. The Black feminist writers who emerged in the 70s - Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Michelle Wallace may be said to have kicked off the aspect of post-Soul that critiqued black cultural nationalism, and particularly the patriarchal strain of same. Camps and divisions within Black culture became more pronounced and hysterical as time went on: old guard Afrocentrists versus our freakydeke bohemians and newly minted Ivy League buppies, all of the above thrown in relief by those gauche ghettocentric's who would come to be known as the hip-hop nation. The omnipresence and omnipotence of hip-hop, artistically, economically and socially has forced all within Black America and beyond to find a rapprochement with at least some aspect of its essence. Within hip-hop however, as in American entrepreneurship generally, competing ideologies exist to be exploited rather than expunged and expelled - if only because hip-hop culture and the hip-hop marketplace, like a quantum paradox, provides space to all Black ideologies, from the most anti-white to the most pro-capitalist, without ever having to account for the contradiction. The aura and global appeal of hip-hop lies in both its perceived Blackness (hip, stylish, youthful, alienated, rebellious, sensual), and its perceived fast-access to global markets through digital technology. The way hip-hop collapsed art, commerce and interactive technology into one mutant animal from its inception seems to have almost predicted the forms culture would have to take to prosper in the digital age.

By now the basic history of hip-hop will read as holy writ or apocryphal horror story depending on where you're standing: From the predominantly African American and Puerto Rican populated South Bronx it came in the mid/late 1970s, a cultural revolution whose first shots were hardly intended to raze Babylon. Reflecting the age-old desire of underprivileged teenagers everywhere to invent their own entertainment, hip-hop expressed the zeitgeist of your average South Bronx youth of that moment in music, dance, fashion, and visual art. That the music was made by turntables, the dance made by whirling the top of the head on the floor like a helicopter and the visuals were murals painted sometimes overnight on ten new York subway cars from top to bottom, is what caught the attention of the rest of the planet. 25 years on this thing we call hip-hop is not only a billion dollar subset of the music industry but one whose taste-making influence makes billions more for every other lifestyle and entertainment business under the sun, from the manufacturers of soft drinks, liquor, leisure wear, haute couture, automobiles, sports events, electronics, shoes, cigars, jewelry, homes. With this affluence and newly-minted mass cultural power have come debates that have divided the U.S. Senate, incited police organizations and political opportunists of every ideological stripe, and cleaved generations, genders, classes of people belonging to every ethnicity in America along the way.

One of the more peculiar outgrowths of hip hop's popularity has been the birth of the "wigga: - the so-called white nigga who apes Blackness by "acting hip-hop" in dress, speech, body language, and in some cases even gang affiliation. Some in the African American community see the appearance of the wigga mutant as a comical form of flattery, others as an up to date form of minstrelsy.

Copyright © 2003 by Edited by Greg Tate.

Tags: Society

About the Author

A cultural critic for The Village Voice, GREG TATE is also the author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk and contributes regularly to national publications such as Rolling Stone, VIBE, and the New York Times. In addition, he helped found the Black Rock Coalition, produced two albums on his own label, and composed a libretto that was performed at the Apollo Theater. He lives in New York City.