THE WHITE RAPPER SHOW and the new Dark Age of hip-hop

To clarify before I’ve even said anything: No, I’m not going to step up here at my blog and bash hip-hop as an anti-civilizational force. I’m not going to criticize the whole hip-hop musical-cultural nexus for its elevation of crass consumerism to the perceived status of the Ultimate Ideal in the eyes of millions upon millions of American teens and twenty-somethings. I’m not going to lay into hip-hop for its egregious glorification of misogyny, gun violence, drug use, pornography, and all the other “gangsta” elements that have come to dominate it over the past two decades. And I’m certainly not going to come down on it for the brutalizing, coarsening, barbarizing influence it exerts over its makers and minions. No, I’m not going to do any of that.

Instead, what I’m going to do is point to something that’s currently going on in hip-hop culture, as reported in an Associated Press article that was carried yesterday in my local-area daily newspaper, and then use this to back up something I’ve been saying with increasing frequency in recent years.

But first, a brief preface: Are you aware that Jane Jacobs, the renowned, and indeed the legendary, social philosopher who died only a few months ago, and whose epochal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has served for more than three decades as the practical and theoretical template for modern urban planning — are you aware that Ms. Jacobs’ last book, published in 2004, was titled Dark Age Ahead? Are you aware that she specifically defined a dark age in terms of loss of cultural memory, as a period when people have not only forgotten previous knowledge, but have forgotten that they’ve forgotten? And are you aware that in this final opus she argued that America and Canada are probably entering just such an age with all of its attendant human suffering and misery?

Are you aware that cultural historian and social critic Morris Berman, who touched a nerve with his 2000 book The Twilight of American Culture (which The New York Times named as a “notable book of the year”), wrote a follow-up book, published in mid-2006, titled Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire in which he argues that America has passed from a twilight phase into a true dark age, and that it seems likely that nothing will be able to reverse the cultural death spiral?

Are you aware of Neil Postman’s famous warning to America in the age of television? In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Postman wrote, “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when a cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” Do you recognize that when Postman wrote these words, he thought — and feared — that the transformation he described might already be well underway?

Are you aware that all of these and many more dire cultural warnings from the recent past were presaged by a number of dystopian fiction classics such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which depict future dark ages in which cultural memory has disappeared and entire nations full of people are obsessed with trivia and titillation even as they live in unacknowledged misery and desperation?

Thinking of all this, in recent years I’ve talked repeatedly to classrooms full of high-school students about the galling transiency and vapidity of the things that occupy the attention of the pop media culture, which itself encases their consciousnesses like the matrix in The Matrix. I’ve pointed out that the span of cultural attention and memory in America has become so narrow and shallow that what seems so momentously important to these teenagers right now — the movies and movie stars, the pop music songs and icons, the clothing styles, the video games, the television shows, all of it, virtually every last element — will be forgotten with a swiftness that they’ll find hard to believe. I tell them they’ll be shocked only a handful of years from now when they’ll find that the new younger generation that’s replaced them knows virtually nothing about the things that they, today’s teens, have been programmed to regard as so earthshakingly important and entertaining. (Note that those last two qualities have increasingly collapsed into each other and become all but synonymous in the collective pop culture consciousness.)

And so, with all of that as background, my attention was instantly captured by an article in the entertainment section of yesterday’s newspaper titled “Reality Show Examines Race in Rap.” It seems there’s a new reality show debuting on VH1 today titled The White Rapper Show. As reported in the article, “The setup is simple and instantly amusing: Ten white amateurs are picked to live in an apartment in New York’s South Bronx (the birthplace of hip-hop), where they must prove their rhyming skills and gain respect. The winner gets $100,000.”

Then comes the part that really hooked my interest in relation to the dark-age ideas outlined above. I’ll quote it at length, adding my own emphases:

“The host is Michael ‘MC Serch’ Berrin, known for the early ’90s hit ‘The Gas Face’ with the group 3rd Bass, who schools the 20-something contestants on the history of hip-hop and the art of the rhyme.

“‘This generation can’t answer basic hip-hop trivia,’ says Berrin, 39. ‘Early on, there was a history that you had to know. I had to know who the Funky 4+1 was, who Sha Rock was. I had to know this because when I was coming up, guys would test me.’

“Like rock, blues and jazz, hip-hop began as a distinctly African-American expression. Unlike other genres, though, rap has remained a predominantly black art form.

“The guys of [the producing media company] ego trip (none of whom are white) are well aware that rap is now mainstream popular music and that its record-buying audience is mostly white. They joke that the show presents a vision of the future.

“‘There are more white kids who are captivated by the music and the culture than ever,’ says ego tripper Jefferson ‘Chairman’ Mao. ‘I think it’s a terrific thing because music should be shared. It’s for everybody — you just don’t want the origins of it to be lost.’”

So do you see why this drew my attention? I’ve been preaching for some time that in an age of shallow and transient cultural productions that are framed and marketed as being somehow “important” by the corporate-controlled media, it’s not only the memory of the ancient past but of the immediate past that’s going to be forgotten. I’ve preached that our situation is becoming just like in Fahrenheit 451, where the pathetic, zombified citizens of that hellish future society are captivated repeatedly by endless rehashings of the same meaningless, phony entertainments and distractions, to which they have been rendered susceptible by the infantilizing of their consciousness. And now we have a new television show whose makers have become emblematic of this truth in their very attempt to say something that’s supposedly important.

For the “ego trip” collective that’s behind The White Rapper Show really is trying to get across the idea that this show represents a significant reflection on race and culture. Ego trip, which began as a magazine, “has grown into a media company that produces books and provocative television shows (‘Race-O-Rama!) often dealing with race and hip-hop.” One of its founders, Elliot Wilson, says of the new reality show, “The power of the show is that when you hear the title, you already have images of what it’s going to be, whether good or bad. . . . Most of them are thinking, ‘Oh, it’s going to be some dumb nonsense.’ But it’s not that — it’s smart.” If you do a Google search using the show’s title, you’ll find all kinds of press-release material that claim the show will try to be provocative by testing and exposing the contestants’ views on race. Ken Mok, the show’s executive producer, claims the whole thing is “really about race and the context of white culture versus hip-hop culture.”

Leaving aside Mok’s interesting, if not downright astounding, choice of words (instead of contrasting white and black culture he chooses to contrast white culture with hip-hop culture, as if “black” and “hip-hop” are entirely equivalent), the most fascinating thing about all of this is the illusion of cultural gravity that the show’s makers are attempting to surround it with, in combination with host Michael Berrin’s comments about the dying sense of history among the younger hip-hop crowd. It’s been less than 20 years since he hit his heyday in the rap/hip-hop scene, and yet he’s already talking in terms of a loss of memory among the up-and-coming generation of young hip-hop artists. In other words, Berrin is recognizing the advent of a miniature dark age within his beloved musical/cultural milieu.  And that, my friends, just seems par for the course in the future that currently surrounds us and awaits us. Short of a radical deindustrializing of everything, spurred by the advent of peak oil, that will short-circuit the machinery of the military-industrial-technocratic-entertainment complex and push us all into a future of depopulation and neo-agrarianism, this accelerating cycle of disposable entertainment being consumed by a lobotomized public and then forgotten almost immediately will become the norm. Indeed, it has already done so to a remarkable degree, and this accounts in large part for the historic blunders in America’s foreign policy over the past fifty or sixty years, which have led to such increasing misery abroad and at home. The American public is sleepwalking into the future while the economic and political power brokers — who are often fundamentally just as somnolent themselves — ply their trade.

But hey, The White Rapper Show debuts tonight on VH1 at 9:30 Eastern Time, and it’s going to rescue the fading memory of hip-hop’s history and origins while simultaneously offering a serious meditation on race and culture. So all’s well, I suppose. Just switch on your television set and plug into the coziness of our ready-made matrix.

While you still can.