My Art is Barren

I want to start off by saying that I'm not nearly familiar enough with hip hop. I guess a small part of it is because I didn't grow up in an environment where music and its history were valued all that much, especially because my parents both moved to the U.S after college. I remember a few singers from Taiwan my mom was particularly fond of when I was little and sometimes I'll hear my dad blasting opera but beyond that I didn't start listening to music with any preexisting knowledge or interest exactly. It made me a blank slate in a way that's proved to be a double-edged sword (although a lot of it is probably just my character); I'm easily persuaded to see the validity in all sorts of music; force me to listen to something I think I dislike and tell me to at least try to take it seriously, even if just for pretend, for awhile and you will have me convinced, emotional, mentally dumbfounded in much less time than expected. Say, listen to this song, and I'll probably like it (to various extents), because I like you. In a way, this is a good thing because there is indubitably beauty and validity in all art -- as long as it's created out of some genuine purpose and meaning -- and being able to see where it comes from and how it's present in everything gives you a beneficial open-mindedness. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like the narrator in Invisible Man after he's eaten the yams, unable to even articulate what he likes and dislikes. Each time I think I've found a "reality" that resonates with me, I find that I'm able to accept, reject, and accept again another and another because all of them have obvious elements of "realness" in them. Furthermore, I've realized just how ignorant I am of each reality, I'm still blind in the way the narrator is even as he immerses himself in each one, so I"m hesitant to ever fully immerse myself in one I'm starting to really get into because not only might there be a better one out there, but I'm blind to this reality as well. I know that music is different, you can like all sorts of music and still have one reality but when I can't articulate and argue why I like what I like over what I reject strongly enough, I begin to feel lost --  because it also means I don't love my reality strongly enough -- and it goes beyond music and art, because like religion and so many other things, they are mechanisms to understand and express reality, making you able to get out of bed in the morning, keeping you living off of the strength of it's truth.

I've gone off on a bit of a tangent but this brings me to what I want to discuss about hip hop, the poetry in White Boy Shuffle and two related ideas from the spoken word poems "Diary of the Reformed" by Will "Da Real One" Bell and "Dead Man Walking" by Amir Sulaiman:

In White Boy Shuffle, poetry bears significance to Gunnar's ultimately nihilistic attitude. During the LA riots, Gunnar says, "I learned that it meant nothing to be a poet. One had to be a poet and a farmer, a poet and a roustabout, a poet and a soon-to-be revolutionary." Maybe the critics of Ellison are coming from a similar place; one can try to explore, express, and understand reality all they want but the evidence of the difference it makes seems so subtle and lost or inferior to what is going on right this second. Before performing "Dead Man Walking," Sulaiman mentions that the purpose of his poem is to remind and inform. At one point in the poem, he says:

"But my balance is off
My talent is lost
I've married my art, but
She's barren of course
And I hear in her voice that
We're headin' divorce"

And a lot of Gunnar's feeling of meaninglessness in his poetry is his powerlessness over how people interpret his words (for example, the  students at BU), representing this fear of being misunderstood and unseen that has been a strong theme in every single book we have read this semester. Numbers and words are paradoxes: all we have, wonderful when it allows us to communicate and connect but never allowing us to fully do so.

Sulaiman's poem is built very much around the theme of an invisible man. In one stanza, he brings hip hop into it, saying, "They don't see our music as musing / Merely amusing amusement." Similarly, in the poem I presented in class (performance linked at the bottom), I interpreted the same desecration of hip hop in how Patterson says:

"now this damn near sound like a hip-hop song,
but it's slavery at its peak,
a circus for all the freaks"

Along the lines of being misinterpreted and feeling powerless in art because of peoples' (perhaps specifically/ mostly non-black people's) blind approach to it, in his poem, Will "Da Real One" Bell says

"And maybe it all went down at...Or maybe it was at North Miami Senior High..
When they studied my poems for 'black history'
Or maybe it was in that letter from my inmate in Raiford Penitentiary
Stating that now
Through my poetry
He could be free
But nevertheless I'm sitting in a strut with a fully loaded Glock to represent the man in me
And someway, somehow, this has to stop."

There's the significant contrast of someone sitting in jail believing himself to have inner freedom and enlightenment and Bell sitting with a loaded gun thinking feeling his poetry is ultimately powerless because there are still obviously unresolved issues and struggles in the tangible world.

I feel a little bit absurd discussing his poem, with the line about his poems being studied in black history. It's a bit ridiculous, in a way, the privileged setting in which I am studying "African American Literature," However, at the very least, we're thinking about art in a way that goes beyond taking it as "amusement." I want badly to believe that art ultimately matters. I think it's clear that it has a profound effect on the creator and audience but it is communication as well as a kind of religion/philosophy/reality that brings you to inner freedom. And it comes down to having enough faith in "art" as communication (like Ellison/ the narrator) and as a reality, to achieve complete freedom. My fear is that, like Gunnar seems to ultimately believe, it's a distraction from pain, necessary and potent, but meaningless coping. I'm inclined to think however, that Gunnar's discovery of how his poetry represents more desire than fulfillment is what gives it meaning, in the same way he believes death or the desire it represents gives life meaning. Perhaps, in Beloved, the significance of Sethe's past to the present through the desire involved with haunting fits along these  lines.

P.S
I know this was an especially long and rant-like post
Sunni Patterson's performance of "We Made It":