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Notes From The Hip-Hop Underground

What does rap offer young people? Freedom from feelings.

Shelby Steele

Think about it. If you were a slave, what sort of legend or myth would most warm your soul? One of the
great legends in black American culture has always been that of the Bad Nigger. This figure flaunts the
constraints, laws and taboos that bind a person in slavery. The BN is unbound and contemptuous, and takes his
vengeance on the master's women simply to assert the broadest possible freedom. His very indifference to
human feeling makes him a revolution incarnate. Nat Turner, a slave who in 1831 led an insurrection in which
some 60 whites were massacred, was the BN come to life.

But for the most part, the BN is the imagination's compensation for the all-too-real impotence and
confinement that slaves and segregated blacks actually endured. He lives out a compensatory grandiosity--a self-
preening superiority combined with a trickster's cunning and a hyperbolic masculinity in which sexual potency is
a vengeful and revolutionary force.

This cultural archetype, I believe, is at the center of rap or hip-hop culture. From "cop killer" Ice-T,
Tupac Shakur and, today most noticeably, Sean "Puffy" Combs and Eminem (who is white), we get versions of
the BN in all his sneering and inflated masculinity.

Having beaten gun and bribery charges in a high-profile New York trial, Mr. Combs--who has just
announced that he wishes to be known, henceforth, as "P. Diddy"--is the baddest BN for the moment. A man
with both the entrepreneurial genius and the fortune (estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars) to live far
above the fray, he has nevertheless tried to live out the BN archetype in a series of ego feuds, thuggish assaults,
and late-night escapades that ought to bore a man of his talent and wealth.

Mr. Combs is caught in a contradiction. At the very least, he must posture, if not act out, BN themes,
even as the actual condition of his life becomes conspicuously bourgeois. Rap culture essentially markets BN
themes to American youth as an ideal form of adolescent rebellion. And this meeting of a black cultural
archetype with the universal impulse of youth to find themselves by thumbing their nose at adults is extremely
profitable. But the rappers and promoters themselves are pressured toward a thug life, simply to stay credible, by
the very BN themes they sell. A rap promoter without an arrest record can start to look a lot like Dick Clark.

But the Puffys of the world cannot market to an indifferent youth. The important question is how the
BN archetype--the slave's projection of lawless power and revenge--has become the MTV generation's metaphor
for rebellion. And are conservatives right to see all this as yet more evidence of America's decline?

I think the answer to these questions begins in one fact: that what many of today's youth ironically share
with yesterday's slave is a need for myths and images that compensate for a sense of alienation and ineffectuality.

Of course, today's youth do not remotely live the lives of slaves and know nothing of the alienation and
impotence out of which slaves conjured the BN myth. Still, the injury to family life in America over the past 30
years (from high divorce and illegitimacy rates, a sweeping sexual revolution, dual-career households, etc.) may
well have given us the most interpersonally alienated generation in our history.
 Too many of today's youth experienced a faithlessness and tenuousness even in that all-important
relationship with their parents. And outside the home, institutions rarely offer the constancy, structure, high
expectations, and personal values they once did. So here is another kind of alienation that also diminishes and
generates a sense of helplessness, that sets up the need for compensation--for an imagined self that is bigger than
life, unbound, and powerful. Here the suburban white kid, gawky and materially privileged, is oddly simpatico
with the black American experience.

The success of people like Mr. Combs is built on this sense of the simpatico. By some estimates, 80% of
rap music is bought by white youth. And this makes for another irony. The blooming of white alienation has
brought us the first generation of black entrepreneurs with wide-open access to the American mainstream.
Russell Simmons, known as the "Godfather" of rap entrepreneurs, as well as Mr. Combs, Master P and others,
have launched clothing lines, restaurant chains, record labels, and production companies--possibilities seeded, in
a sense, by this strong new sympathy between black and white alienation.

Rap's adaptation, or update, of the BN archetype began in the post-'60s black underclass. As is now well
established, this was essentially a matriarchal world in which welfare-supported women became the center of
households and men became satellite fathers only sporadically supporting or visiting their children by different
women. The children of this world were not primed to support a music of teen romance--of "Stop in the Name
of Love." The alienation was too withering. Not even the blues would do.

I think the appeal of the BN, on the deepest level, was his existential indifference to feeling--what might
be called his immunity to feeling. The slave wanted not to feel the loves and fears that bound him to other
people and thus weakened him into an accommodation with slavery. Better not to love at all if it meant such an
accommodation. So the BN felt nothing for anyone and had no fear even of death. He could slap a white man
around with no regard for the consequences.

Rappers, too, gain freedom through immunity to feeling. Women are "bitches" and "ho's," objects of
lust but not of feeling. In many inner cities, where the illegitimacy rate is over 80%, where welfare has outbid the
male as head of the household, where marriage is all but nonexistent, and where the decimation of drugs is
everywhere--in such places, a young person of tender feelings is certain to be devastated. Everything about rap--
the misogynistic lyrics, the heaving swagger, the violent sexuality, the cynical hipness--screams "I'm bad because I
don't feel." Nonfeeling is freedom. And it is important to note that this has nothing to do with race. In rap, the
BN nurtures indifference toward those he is most likely to love.

Conservatives have rightly attacked rap for its misogyny, violence and over-the-top vulgarity. But it is
important to remember that this music is a fairly accurate message from a part of society where human
connections are fractured and impossible, so fraught with disappointments and pain that only an assault on
human feeling itself can assuage. Rap makes the conservative argument about what happens when family life is
eroded either by welfare and drugs, or by the stresses and indulgences of middle-class life.

I listened carefully to Eminem's recent Grammy performance expecting, I guess, to be disgusted. Instead
I was drawn into a compelling rap about a boy who becomes a figure of terrible pathos. He is a male groupie
who selfishly longs for the autograph of a rap star while he has his girlfriend tied up in the trunk of his car. Easy
to be aghast at this until I remembered that Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground"--the first modern
novel, written more than 150 years ago--was also about a pathetic antihero whose alienation from modernity
made him spiteful and finally cruel toward an innocent female.

Both works protest what we all protest--societies that lose people to alienation. This does not excuse the
vulgarity of rap. But the real problem is not as much rap's cartoonish bravado as what it compensates for.

Mr. Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author, most recently, of "A Dream Deferred: The Second
Betrayal of Black Freedom in America" (HarperCollins, 1998).
The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, March 31, 2001
www.opinionjournal.com