Brent Wood

Trent University
bwood@trentu.ca

 

Russell Potter. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY, 1995.

 

Spectacular Vernaculars is the most recent book on hip-hop to appear on university library shelves, and the first to deal squarely with hip-hop as a specifically postmodern phenomenon.

 

Did I say “phenomenon”? Russell Potter would have my head. The central claim Potter makes in the intriguing introduction to Spectacular Vernaculars is that hip-hop culture constitutes a “highly sophisticated postmodernism” (Potter, 1995: 13). By characterizing hip-hop as a “postmodernism,” rather than a “postmodern phenomenon,” Potter begins to build his case for understanding hip-hop as a self-conscious political practice, not merely as a collection of commodities and customs. Furthermore, he means to insist, against Paul Gilroy to whose work Potter often refers, that hip-hop is fundamentally a postmodernity rather than an instance of oppositional modernity (4).

 

Hip-hop, in Potter’s view, is a successful postmodern guerilla resistance against both the New Right and the corporate juggernauts that rule economic life in North America. Moreover, argues Potter, hip-hop is a resistance which has had “more crucial consequences than all the books on postmodernism rolled into one” (13). On the other hand, hip-hop is not simply a postmodernist praxis complementary to the postmodernist theory purveyed in the academy, but also a theoretical practice in its own right.

 

Why hip-hop ought to be thought of as postmodernist rather than modernist has something to do with the guerrilla nature of its strikes and the ruthlessness with which it employs capitalist weaponry and the found objects of the postindustrial urban mediascape. Unlike Richard Shusterman’s 1991 essay “The Fine Art of Rap,” which discussed the postmodern aesthetics of hip-hop music, Spectacular Vernaculars is concerned with hip-hop’s political dimension. Ultimately, for Potter, hip-hop cannot be modern because it operates, in Sun-Ra’s words, “after the end of the world.” Potter also makes reference to Shaber and Readings’ characterization of the postmodern as marking a “gap” in “the modernist concept of time as succession or progress” (3). Potter compares this kind of interruption in a culture’s perception of historical time to the interruption in musical time caused by the use of the sample in hip-hop music. He also relates it to the concept and practice of “signifyin(g)” as defined by Henry Louis Gates, which implies a different relationship between the present and the past than the one supposed by modernism. As a “signifyin(g)” practice, hip-hop is always reclaiming, recycling, and reiterating the past, rather than advancing from it.

 

The book’s title, “Spectacular Vernaculars,” plays on the double meanings of each of the words (and is a bust-ass four-syllable rhyme besides). The vernacular meaning of “vernacular” is something like “language of the common people,” and to his credit Potter makes an effort to speak in the language of the street. That he does not wholly succeed is probably inevitable, given his theoretical reference points and academic orientation. “Vernacular”‘s ancestry is more to the point of the book. It can be traced back to the Latin vernaculus–“a slave born in his master’s house.” “Spectacular” refers not only to the quality of Potter’s rhyme, but also to Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Thus hip-hop is read fundamentally as a use of media and capital by the common people to further their own ends, rather than the ends of the hegemonic power structures which we generally assume are in control.

 

Spectacular Vernaculars is divided into five chapters, which deal, respectively, with hip-hop in terms of art; language; the politics of race, class, gender and sexuality; tactical resistance; and political theory.

 

Potter begins by characterizing hip-hop as a vernacular art, and seeks to demonstrate what he feels are its essential aspects. He argues that its fundamental practice is one of citation (or signifyin(g)), and that, as a result, hip-hop necessarily resists the categories of production and consumption. Three versions of the song “Tramp” are presented to illustrate this point: Lowell Fulsom’s 1966 “original” solo version, Otis Redding and Carla Thomas’s 1967 duet re-make, and Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s 1987 hip-hop track of the same name, which samples from and refers to the earlier versions. This treatment of a song lyric in its entirety and its evolution is one of the book’s high points. Unfortunately, this is the only in-depth “reading” in the book. The remainder of its arguments are supported only by short quotations.

 

The second chapter, “Postmodernity and the Hip-Hop Vernacular,” has little to do with postmodernity per se but much to do with the vernacular as a language of resistance. Potter uses the medieval troubadours, Malcolm X, and Deleuze and Guattari as reference points as he builds a case for “Black English” as a resistant vernacular. He then takes this argument to another level, citing the subversive verbal and representational practices of rappers Paris and Da Lench Mob (Ice Cube’s crew) as building on this vernacular premise. Paris is cited to demonstrate the use of layered sampled dialogue (in this case, George Bush’s), while Da Lench Mob’s record Guerillas in the Mist is offered as an illustration of how hip-hop deals with racist verbiage from the likes of the LAPD.

 

The title of the third chapter, “The Pulse of the Rhyme Flow,” is also somewhat estranged from its subject matter. Its subtitle, “Hip-Hop Signifyin(g) and the Politics of Reception,” is more to the point. Potter deftly shows how rappers’ rhetorical strategies are often misunderstood by their audience, and how “moral panic” can be used as a tool of powerful interests to keep insurrectionary culture at bay. He also deals here with inflammatory issues of sexism, violence, and homophobia in hip-hop, and with the question of black “authenticity.” In the end, Potter concludes, hip-hop is a culture whose roots and flowers are mixed and many. Hip-hop is not purely the domain of straight black men from the ghetto, although that image is often put to use by both rappers and the forces of moral panic. Its roots spread deep into the African diaspora, and its flowers transcend class, gender, sexuality, and nation.

 

The fourth chapter is devoted to the politics of resistance, showing how hip-hop relays history to a society of amnesiacs. Potter calls hip-hop a “cultural recycling center” and a “counter-formation” of capitalism” (108). Here the central reference point is Michel de Certeau’s theory that consumers trace their own paths through the commodity relations with which they are presented. Thus the “eavesdropping” of white kids on black culture (Ice Cube’s term), Potter argues, can be read as an invaluable step toward an anti-racist society. The book’s final chapter continues this thread, emphasizing hip-hop’s multi-cultural and international aspects, and argues that essentialist definitions of what counts as “black” and “white” are ultimately more useful to the “powers that be” than to the people who are held in their thrall.

 

Spectacular Vernaculars concludes with some insightful commentary on the relationship of academics to hip-hop, focusing on an interview between KRS-One and Michael Lipscomb. Potter argues that Lipscomb continually misses KRS-One’s main thrust by insisting on literal interpretations of language and conventional definitions of politics. Here Potter reminds us that “some real ground would be gained” by a dialogue between the sociologists of popular culture and the “vernacular cultural expressions” (153) they find so intriguing.

 

Potter’s book is positioned as a translator between these two cultures and their respective dialects, yet it is obviously directed squarely at the academy. No young hip-hopper is going to read a book where rhyme is referred to as “homophonic slippage” and quotations from de Certeau open the chapters. Rather, Potter accomplishes much the same thing that Tricia Rose accomplished with Black Noise in clearing up the prejudices toward rap music and hip-hop in general that exist in the academy.

 

Rose, however, eschews the term postmodernism and succeeds without it. Potter’s own formulations of the postmodern as an interruption in a collective sense of time and history and of hip-hop as a spectacularly resistant political practice are convincing enough in context, but in the end may leave the theoretically-oriented reader unsatisfied. Reference to James Snead’s worthy essays are absent from Spectacular Vernaculars, as is detailed consideration of the work of Cornel West. Furthermore, since we are dealing here with time and tradition, one can’t help but feel that there ought to be some consideration of West African concepts of rhythm, music, and social organization, and the cosmology that goes with them.

 

In one sense, “Hip-Hop and the Politics of Resistance” might have been a more accurate subtitle for the book. For it is at its best when recounting hip-hop’s political history and serving up readings of the discourse between rappers and the media, rappers and politicians, and rappers and critics. Potter’s lens is a wide-angle one; he clearly considers himself a part of the culture in question, and he writes from a political position that is progressive without becoming preachy.

 

One final issue is the relative neglect of aesthetics (postmodern or otherwise), a neglect which tends to reduce hip-hop’s musicians and poets to speech-writers and celebrities. After all, there is more to the hip-hop story than the self-consciously political, and there is more to the political itself than can be consciously thought. The greatest power of hip-hop is rhythmic and is felt as strongly as it is heard, yet the musical and poetic dimensions of hip-hop are hardly touched on here.

 

In spite of these criticisms, Spectacular Vernaculars stands up as a complement to other recent academic writing on hip-hop such as Brian Cross’s It’s Not About a Salary, Rose’s Black Noise, David Toop’s Rap Attack and Michael Brennan’s “Off the Gangster Tip.” It’s never what Potter says that disappoints, but occasionally what he doesn’t say, especially given the book’s tantalizing title, the unresolved questions of African-American culture’s relationship to postmodernism, and the power of hip-hop rhyme and rhythm.

 

Works Cited

 

• Brennan, Michael. “Off the Gangsta Tip: A Rap Appreciation, or Forgetting about Los Angeles.” Critical Inquiry 20.4 (1994): 663-693.
• Cross, Brian. It’s Not About a Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles. NY: Verso, 1993.
• Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
• Rose, Tricia. Black Noise. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994.
• Shusterman, Richard. “The Fine Art of Rap.” New Literary History, 22.3 (1991): 613-32.
• Snead, James A. “On Repetition in Black Culture.” Black American Literature Forum 154 (1991): 146-154.
• —. “Racist Traces in Postmodernist Theory and Literature.” Critical Quarterly 33.1: 31-39.
• Toop, David. The Rap Attack. London: Pluto, 1984.
• —. Rap Attack 2. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991.