A Bitter Response

I agree with Faith that the intellectualizing of hip-hop makes for unintentionally funny reading. In particular, Rice's early discussion of Biggie and Wu-Tang feels awfully forced, and neither of these examples really show off what Rice ultimately finds most rewarding about aural writing in a digital world. Rather, the references feel like a desperate stab at street cred. The first pages of the Rice article feel a bit arbitrary at best, obvious at worst. For instance, I'm still not entirely sure how Rice moves from McLuhan to hip-hop. Oh, I generally see how he moves from one to another, but I don't specifically see how he does so, except that he sees a special connection to hip-hop, and that's all that matters. I also didn't really follow how Elbow's comments about "Juice" led Rice to awkwardly transition into, "In hip-hop, 'Juicy' is a song by the late Notorious B.I.G." While we're talking about Biggie, Rice's discussion of Biggie states the obvious, with the obvious simply translated into academic-ese: "Graff's 'literacy myth' might be understood, in this context, as the myth of knowledge mastery. 'My success,' B.IG. seems to say, 'came from somewhere else than education mastery.' There is an additional dimension to B.I.G.'s rejection, however. Within the rejection of conventional literacy [. . .] and its 'in your face' style is the simultaneous preference for another kind of literacy, an aural literacy of sounding out" (270).

Simple translation into regular-speak: Biggie, like most hip-hop artists--heck, like most rock artists--proves that people can have smarts that don't have their roots in the classroom.

Duh.

I don't mean to sound bitter. I just have lots of problems with academic writing that dresses up what it has to say. I remember reading this psychoanalytic reading of Faulkner where the author spent twenty pages invoking Lacan just to say that women in Faulkner's fiction have agency. Hell, I knew that before I even read the article!

The good news is that Rice's article is much better in the second half, when he spends less time establishing street cred and spends more time drawing analogies between the pastiche, bricolage style of hip-hop and the direction he sees digital writing headed. Rice is right. Hip-hop folds in a lot: spits, samples, loops, rhythms. All of these hit the listener at once and are "read" (or downloaded, in LaTourian language) instantaneously. In fact, I thought of LaTour when reading the second half of the Rice article. Just as the social only becomes evident in a glimpse seen when mediated elements are assembled, the assemblage of hip-hop works similarly. Any given hip-hop song has the potential to produce its meaning on the fly, as it hits the listener's ear; the listener cannot possibly "process" all the elements, but that's not what's important; the overall assemblage produces its effect. Thus, I could kind of see where Rice was going with his desire for future writing.

Too bad most of the article still sounded unintentionally silly.