The Genius of Hip-Hop, Church Women as Theological “Hos”, and Jay-Z

Recently I finished a book by my favorite scholar, Michael Eric Dyson, called Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip-Hop. Dyson, a Georgetown Prof, Princeton Ph. D, and a Baptist minister (that’s right – my intellectual hero is a Baptist minister. MLK was a Baptist minister, too.) offers an intellectual defense of hip-hop as art.

In one section, Dyson dissects the complaint that hip-hop artists don’t often play instruments or write music in the traditional way. He points out that school budget cuts in poor neighborhoods prevent children from receiving music training and instrument lessons. Dyson wants the audience to not “underestimate the genius” of the innovative young folks who engineered hip-hop out of a culture of hardships:

Many black and brown kids in vocational schools were sent to work repairing turntables for rich suburban school kids. But that circumstance drove their experimentation with various technological forms to under ground hip-hop’s aesthetic expansion. So these young folk ended up putting turntables next to each other, and out of that emerged the practice of cuing one record up while the other one is playing, and you’re listening to it, finding the exact spot to extend and repeat the break beat through scratching, and eventually with looping….

Look how it happened on the ground: what was essentially an attempt to repair broken turntables was used to generate an alternative sonic culture full of technological innovation that supposedly ignorant black and brown folk have now turned into a billion-dollar industry. Anthropologists call it bricolage, a French term first used by Claude Levi-Strauss to mean using what is literally at hand to create something…So these young black and brown folk took the technological leftovers of a richer consumer culture and fashioned a cultural and musical expression that has lasted to this day. [p 73]

Smart Ass – Harvard Prof Tackles Swearing

Steven Pinker, Ph.D recently wrote a book I intend to read called The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. The Times of London says it’s “A display of fiercely intricate intelligence and nobody with the least interest in language should miss reading it.”

In the book, Pinker includes a chapter on swearing. That chapter was adapted to an article for The New Republic and I have a copy of the article. It’s quite good and I need to read it again. Pinker says that taboo words are actually stored in differnt parts of the brain from other words:

THE STRANGE EMOTIONAL power of swearing–as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures– suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.