More On Rice

I've really appreciated reading the posts about Rice's uses of hiphop to redefine literacy, and they've helped me to think about what his article is and isn't doing. In my reading of it, he's making comparisons between traditional conceptions of rhetoric and a rhetoric embodied by hiphop, and doing so to show that traditional rhetoric needs to change in order to respond to changes in culture fomented by new technology.

The article may make it seem like he's trying to claim academic cred for the Notorious BIG and the Wu-Tang Clan, and/or to give street cred to his academic piece (which has been a hot rhetorical move, maybe, ever since Barthes mythologized pop culture); what I took from it is that hiphop doesn't claim any academic membership, but embodies aspects of culture that academically spawned rhetoric can't, since its focus has been drawn from the image and the print media, and not from the aural realm that McLuhan and Ong defined as the rhetorical territory created by new technology. In his view, traditional rhetoric hasn't ventured into that territory; hiphop, more than any other form of music, has.

I believe that his article outlines at least three ways in which hiphop rhetoricizes aural media. First, hiphop's use of sampling foregrounds the text as assemblage. Second, its reliance on mixing different sounds together, more than other forms of music, foregrounds those sounds as representing different contexts--instead of a guitar and drums, we might get a guitar loop from an Aerosmith song and a bass/snare track from another hiphop song, so each song becomes a mixing of cultures that embodies the simultaneity of aural culture delineated by McLuhan. Finally, the stance assumed by the Notorious BIG, the Wu-Tang Clan, and the Beasties, establishes the primacy of the individual voice--not as a mood, the way Lunsford defines it, but, literally, as the sound of a voice. Using that voice, the rapper doesn't belong to the traditional rhetorical establishment, but to the rhetorical alterity of hiphop, with its own science, its own ka-knowledge, and its own cred, based on the power of the individual voice to carry the rhetoric. As Aaron wonderfully pointed out, other forms of music do all of the above (the boast claimed by Rice as an aspect of ka-knowledge comes, I think, from the blues). However, hiphop combines them with greater frequency.

The article's juxtapositions can lead to the idea that Rice is trying to install hiphop in the academy, and/or that rappers are trying to claim a particular rhetorical territory; I got this funny vision of Ad Rock rushing to his fellow Beasties with a copy of McLuhan's article, saying, "We need to rhetoricize the auditory domain!," and Mike D gleefully shouting, "Fellows, let's drop some science to drive McLuhan's thesis home!" What I think Rice is trying to say is that hiphop is rhetoricizing aural technology in a way that traditional rhetoric is not, and that examining the particulars of that rhetoric will help us to shape a pedagogy more informed by that rhetoric.