Category Archives: Non-academic

Hip-hop is so misunderstood. For real.

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I went to see a new documentary recently put out by the National Film Board of Canada, United States of Africa. In it, the director, Yanick Letourneau, basically follows around a Senegalese hip-hop artist, Didier Awadi, as he creates a hip-hop album entitled Présidents d’Afrique; much of the film is a meditation on the role of hip-hop in politics, particularly African politics. The film was excellent, as is the album. But one thing about the film wasn’t excellent: its introduction (since the film was part of a festival here in Edmonton, a person talked about the film before the showing). The dude had good intentions, but in placing the movie in the broader context of the hip-hop cultural movement, he missed the mark, both objectively and perhaps more fundamentally. His argument went something like this: “We kind of took a risk in showing this film because of the association with this music and violence. Well, I just want to say that this film is not like that. This film is about hip-hop. It is not about rap, like gangsta rap and violence and all that other stuff related to rap. It’s important to clarify what hip-hop is compared to rap, because a lot of people don’t see the transformative power of hip-hop to be a force for good in the world. That’s what this film is about.” Okay, he didn’t explicitly say that they took a risk in showing this film, but it was pretty obvious from everything else he did say. What was also obvious was that he thought hip-hop was fairly misunderstood, that it was associated with violence, and that he wanted to correct this misunderstanding.

As you can imagine, I had a bit of a problem with this intro; the fact that I’m writing about it a week later means the problem hasn’t gone away. First, this guy’s distinction between hip-hop and rap was just plain wrong, and second, it is wrong to associate hip-hop or rap, or whatever you want to call the genre, with purely negative social phenomena, and to do so euphemistically, potentially with classist or racist undertones. I’ll get back to that second point in a bit. First, it seems lots of people don’t know the difference between hip-hop and rap. I say this having written an academic paper on hip-hop, in which even the reviewers were not clear about this distinction, so it’s not just my friend from the film festival.

Hip-hop vs. rap. I’m not even quite sure how to classify homeboy’s distinction of hip-hop vs. rap, other than on some evaluative dimension like “hip-hop is good, rap is violent and therefore bad”. Hip-hop, as anybody who’s curious enough to look up the term on Wikipedia will see, is a term for a cultural movement encompassing visual art (graffiti), dancing (b-boying), and music. The musical component is twofold, DJ-ing and MC-ing. So in theory, when people talk about the musical element of the movement, they should say something like “hip-hop music”. But realistically, that’s kind of long and thus annoying, and it’s usually clear from the context that only the musical component is being discussed, hence the shortening of the musical genre to simply “hip-hop”. Perhaps because of this use of terminology, many people have started using the term hip-hop for only the music and are not aware that the broader cultural movement also bears this name.

But back to the music. A DJ spins records, and an MC presides over a show. In hip-hop, DJ-ing started as a way of extending and repeating the break of popular songs; MCs of parties would talk over the records. The talking, however, would generally be rhythmic, like spoken poetry — it would be rapping (here again, a Wiki search suffices to kill the curiosity). That is, ladies and gentleman, rapping is the spoken component to hip-hop songs. It has its origins in the African-American oral tradition, and thanks to hip-hop, it is probably the most popular form of poetry actively listened to in the U.S., if not the world.

Thus the distinction between hip-hop and rap is more like a part-whole relationship than a sub-genre classification, like gangsta rap vs. the rest of hip-hop. Why then, you ask, is gangsta rap not called gangsta hip-hop? According to this site, Dr. Dre invented the term gangsta rap music to describe the albums he produced. I haven’t read the Rolling Stone article cited on that page, so I can’t say what was going on in his head when he came up with this term, or if that’s even the right etymology. But perhaps he wanted his music to be marketable to mainstream audiences, who often think of the musical genre as rap, not hip-hop, particularly back in the early 1990s.

Clearly as a linguist I’m aware that the meanings of words change over time and across social groups. So at the end of the day I don’t really care if you refer to the music as hip-hop or rap, as long as you and your listener understand each other. But it does bother me to see a false dichotomy created to discuss the music, and worse, a false dichotomy in which neither side is fully explained, but in which one side is judged as having fairly negative associations, which people often euphemistically dance around.

Hip-hop is so misunderstood. It seems that one way in which to go about talking about such associations is to phrase the problem in terms of how misunderstood the genre is. You, dear listener, who may or may not associate hip-hop with negative social phenomena, if only you would hear some “decent” hip-hop — and by decent, I mean uplifting, positive, or funny — then clearly you would stop thinking about violence and the like when you think about hip-hop. The movie introducer invoked this trope when discussing hip-hop, while at the same time failing to mention what exactly “rap” is, other than gangsta rap, which he sees as negative. Here is another example of the “hip-hop is so misunderstood” trope: the Edmonton hip-hop artist The Joe was on local TV in early 2011, and the host, wanting to make The Joe’s music as relevant as possible to his viewers, said (6:00 – 6:10), “I think a lot of people might have a misconception of what rap is… uh, if you want proof, of exactly how excellent this work is, keep it locked right here…” This statement was promptly followed by a cut to a commercial. Like before, the misconception isn’t followed by a well-defined conceptualization of hip-hop (here “rap” again, although interestingly he does use both terms in seemingly free variation to me throughout the interview). Instead, what follows is an implication that hip-hop, unlike the current work being discussed, is usually not excellent.

Because these claims are pretty vague, it’s difficult to see what the speaker thinks hip-hop is, and specifically, what is so misunderstood and/or not excellent about the genre. I will hazard a few guesses though, based on people who actually say what they don’t like (some) hip-hop for: the emphasis on violence, the braggadocio, the ostentatious/”pimp” lifestyle, the swear words, the misogyny, the homophobia. These are some serious claims, and so to do them justice I’ve just been focusing on one: the violence in hip-hop songs, since if anything the movie introducer seemed to associate the genre with violence.

One of the overarching themes of the hip-hop is that it is a mechanism for underrepresented peoples to express themselves. Hip-hop started in the U.S. as music by Blacks and Hispanics, but it has expanded to a worldwide scene in which, for example, African hip-hop artists use it to critique their government on behalf of politically oppressed people, as seen in United States of Africa. And a sad-but-true correlate of being underrepresented, as for example an ethnic minority group often is, is lower socio-economic status and higher rates of violence.

I once got in a huge fight with a friend about the universal appeal of different genres of music. Well, he might say it was about gangsta rap vs. I dunno, indie rock and slowcore. His point was that he hated the negativity of gangsta rap, as exemplified by the gruesome discussion of violence, particularly that aimed at police officers. He felt like music with such themes did not have the universal appeal that the often introspective lyrics of his favorite bands, such as Low, have. My point was simply that the music we listen to and like is a product of our own socio-cultural experiences and biases, not just our emotive side and hankering for good beats. For God’s sake, both he and Low are from Minnesota! How much more of a shared experience can you get? I then asked him what hip-hop artists he did like: Atmosphere. “That’s another Minnesota group!” I yelled. “And their lyrics are extremely comprehensible to you!”

I personally have no gangsta rap in my music collection and know very little about the sub-genre, so I’m probably the worst person to talk about it, let alone defend it. I do know that some prominent African-Americans, such as Spike Lee, do not like gangsta rap because they feel it is the 21st century minstrel show. I get that. Violence sells, and perhaps some artists are taking advantage of this fact. But still, if the streets are going to be violent, as is the case in too many inner-city communities, then to some extent it’s only natural that hip-hop artists from these communities would discuss violence in their songs, and would do so in a variety of ways. But for me personally, Eminem’s lyrics are some of the most violent you can get, yet he’s not associated with gangsta rap. In fact, I feel that for the level of violence portrayed in Eminem’s songs, he gets off pretty easily.

That hip-hop artists talk a lot about violence, if indeed they do so more than other genres of music, should not be viewed as something regrettable about the genre, but rather about our culture: inner cities are often violent; furthermore, this narrative sells. Hip-hop, then, is simply a reflection of our culture at large. It is perhaps these inconvenient truths that are too difficult to discuss, and which are the true reason for which “hip-hop is so misunderstood”.

On reading, a joy that has always sustained me

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The first book I remember having a more than fleeting interaction with was Roald Dahl’s The Witches. I must’ve been about five or six, and my mom and I read it every night before bed. Every night I would beg her to please just read me one more chapter. “Vitches of Inklannndddd!” she would scream in her Grand High Witch voice. I was terrified, but needed to know if the boy protagonist would escape his encounters with all those witches.

Roald Dahl's The Witches

Vitches of Inklannnddd!!!

Although my mom read most of the book, I remember there were times where she would let me read a bit. If I could’ve read the entire thing myself, I would’ve, so I wouldn’t have to wait until nighttime until Mom was ready.

Fast-forwarding to reading as an adult, one piece of advice I would give all incoming graduate students is to never stop reading. Read the popular-audience books in your field. Read outside your field. Read fiction. Read the New Yorker. The cross-disiplinary insight you gain will help you come up with original research questions in your field. The recent devaluation of fiction in our society is, in my opinion, not only sad, but worrisome for our innovative edge in domains like technology. The astute fiction-writer will make ingenious observations about human nature, societies, and technological possibilities well before science can empirically test such hypotheses, and before engineers can build such realities.

Several of my professor friends complain about their (native-speaker) grad students’ writing abilities. To be fair, I’m not talking about people in linguistics, as perhaps the field lends itself particularly well to an appreciation for language. Good writing is tricky to pick up, and one of the best ways is to simply read more. Even after years of training in linguistics, sometimes I have difficulty explaining why a particular written formulation doesn’t flow well: it’s an intuitive knowledge I’ve picked up after reading thousands and thousands of hours of both academic and non-academic literature.

As an undergrad, I initially majored in English and French not to be a linguist, but a creative writer. In an interesting twist of fate, the MFA student-instructor I had in my creative writing seminar as a freshman was obsessed with Hemingway and his reportage-style fiction, which I hated. We once spent half an hour analyzing a line from a Hemingway short that went something like this:

She tasted the tea, and set it down.

I can’t remember the name of the story, and I can’t find the quote online anywhere, but I assure you that it was something about a woman tasting something and setting it down on a plate or saucer. We all had copies of my instructor’s personal copy, so we could see that she had underlined set it down. “What does that mean, she set it down?” she asked. The class hesitated until somebody came up with the answer she was looking for. “She doesn’t like it?” somebody hazarded. “Exactly!” the instructor said. “In this one detail about her actions, Hemingway is giving us a clue into her psychological state.” This is total bullshit, I thought. I had to raise my hand: “All I’m really getting from this is that she set down the cup. I don’t know if we can impute more into it than that — I taste things that I like and set them down all the time.” This view was not encouraged from the class; the other students had spent precious minutes of their lives trying to interpret the “right” way of thinking about this setting down of the cup. I needed out.

Still in the English program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I turned more to the literature side of things and took a class with J.E. Rivers. Rivers turned me on to Nabokov, one of my favorite authors ever, and tolerated my quirkiness, such as writing a critical essay in iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets. He was great, and I don’t think I gave him enough credit for my sticking with English. I sat in my dorm devouring Lolita on a Friday night instead of going out — here was my kind of writing! Hemingway seemed mad at the English language, using the most basic vocabulary with no rhetorical flourish. Nabokov, on the other hand, would romance his prose and make it sing.

In my junior year at the University of Minnesota, I became more interested in linguistics. I felt literary scholarship didn’t focus on language as much as I wanted to. And, it was not scientific enough. I remember a literature discussion section in which we offered our interpretations of the works we were reading. One student came up with interpretation X, and the TA, perhaps desperate for us to contribute, said, “That’s good.” Then another student said that she felt it was the exact opposite of X. “That’s good,” responded the TA again. No, no, no! I thought. This cannot be possible. Both X and the opposite of X cannot be good! At least not the same degree of good! But still, I kept my undergraduate majors of English and French so as to graduate on time.

From that point on, I have never needed to read anything other than works in my field. And although I know academics’ schedules are tight, I’m still amazed at the number of those — without kids, mind you — that don’t read outside their field at all.

Having moved to a new country and started a new job four months ago, I’ve had little time for anything but work and figuring out my new surroundings. For the first month, I would fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Doing nothing but work was making me grumpy, and the situation had to change. Since moving to Edmonton, I’ve not slept much, but I have now managed to read You are not a gadget by Jaron Lanier; The Heart and the fist by Eric Greitens; Rafa, the Rafael Nadal autobiography; Life, on the line by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas; and currently I’m two-thirds into Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. It seems I’ve been on an (auto-)biographical kick of people I find inspiring.

I once read somewhere, although I’ll never be able to find it again, that we read the majority of books that “change our lives” before age 22, or some similarly young age. While this is probably true for me too, I still find a lot of gems out there. Here are just a few of the works outside my field that have deeply impressed me, in rough chronological order of my reading. Please note that these aren’t recommendations per se, as the subject matter of at least the first two aren’t for everyone:

  1. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita is pretty well known, so I won’t belabor the point. It’s a great story, written from the unapologetic perspective of a wry middle-aged European professor transplanted to America. You know it’s good when you find yourself cheering at atrocious turns of events despite yourself. Example: when Charlotte Haze finds out about Humbert’s love for her young daughter but then is immediately killed by a car while running across the street. It’s terrible, right? But Charlotte was just getting in the way of Humbert’s relationship with Lolita. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Good literature should challenge your intelligence.
  2. Love in a dead language, by Lee Siegel. I saw this book on the shelf when I was working for an independent bookstore. The cover and, as you can imagine, the title, intrigued me.
    Lee Siegel's Love in a dead language

    Let the rollercoaster begin: my favorite work of Lee Siegel's.

    This novel has a ton going on in it. First there’s the not-so-subtle Lolita spoof. Second, it’s written on several different levels. An Indologist prof (which, by the way, author Siegel happens to be) plans a field trip to India to seduce the only student he’s taking with him, Lalita Gupta. The main text is his diary/translation of the  Kamasutra. But he mysteriously dies before the project can be published, and his frustrated grad student is left to edit the text, which he does with footnotes and multi-media examples, such as an example paper of Lalita’s (all academics can relate). Those who find it over-the-top don’t get it: that’s the point. This book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but was too far out there to win.

  3. The Importance of being Ernest, by Oscar Wilde. This work is also well known, so I’ll just say that in reading it, I saw that conversation could be an art form, not just a means of communication. That was a fun revelation to have, and it fostered my interest in language and hence linguistics.
  4. Mémoires d’Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian). As a French major in the U.S., you normally read The Canon of French literature, and for some reason Marguerite Yourcenar’s works often aren’t included. I would say they’re a little complicated for the sheltered U.S. foreign-language university classes, but we read plenty of Racine and Molière, and 300-350 years passing can really complicate a text. So I moved to France without knowing too many French authors I liked. I asked a friend of my roommate’s, a professor of English literature in Dijon, who to read, given that I liked Nabokov, D. H. Lawrence, Siegel, etc. He suggested Marguerite Yourcenar, and particularly Mémoires. I was a bit skeptical at first, since a pseudo-autobiography of a Roman emperor didn’t sound too appealing. But it was very well written, taking the form of a letter in which Hadrian retraces his life as he’s close to death. It’s quite moving, and I’m told the English translation is well done. After this, I went on to read many other Yourcenar books: they’re all good.
  5. Diffusion of innovations, by Everett Rogers. This non-fiction book discusses the diffusion of several types of innovations across many different societies. I cannot proselytize enough about this book, especially to sociolinguists. The modest uptake in citations to this book from linguists has only happened recently, despite the first edition coming out in 1962. As of November 29, 2011, this book has 38,418 citations on Google Scholar. Why? It’s relevant to almost every field in social sciences, and it’s extremely well written, including a great organization scheme and index. Even if you’re not in academia, this book would still be fun to read.

A couple of years ago, I got the opportunity to babysit a cousin of mine, who was five at the time, on a weekly basis. Samuel has an excellent imagination, and loves books. Of course I immediately thought we could read The Witches together. I imagined reading it in the same tone my mom read to me in: “Vitches of Inklannndddd!!!” I started the book, and Samuel was spellbound. But soon it became apparent that he wasn’t scared and loving it, he was just scared. We didn’t even make it to the Grand High Witch. He was fine with dragons in his closet, and an entire people he’s invented named the Gee-Gees, but hearing about witches was too much. “Let’s not read that anymore Paula,” Samuel said. I really wanted to read it, so I made sure to tell him it was make-believe. But that didn’t assuage his fears any, and I didn’t want to traumatize him, so I gave it up. With my own kids though, I just don’t know what I would do if they didn’t want to read The Witches. I have few dreams about being a parent, but that is one of them.

Las Vegas adventure I: the casino stakeout

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I went to Las Vegas for a sociology conference last week (American Sociological Association 2011). It was my first time ever in Vegas, and also my first time at a sociology conference. This combination, coupled with all the travel and moving I had done in the month prior (Apostle Islands -> Minneapolis -> Florida -> Edmonton -> Montreal -> Edmonton -> Las Vegas), made for a slightly overwhelming experience. But in the end, it was an educational and entertaining trip. I got to watch a wedding — wearing my swimsuit — in which the bride’s processional was “November Rain” (an interesting choice given the line “Nothin’ lasts forever, and we both know hearts can change”). I’m dividing posts into the three most salient events of the trip for me: my casino “stakeout”, my chance encounter with Steffi Graf, and an excellent talk I saw at the conference. Stay tuned for the latter two.

My goal in visiting Las Vegas was not only to go to the ASA, but also to see a long-lost connection who lives in Vegas who I’ll call Ray. Ray is an intriguing and engaging individual, but he is notoriously difficult to get a hold of. He doesn’t have a phone or an email address, and he receives all his mail at a post office box that he checks once a week if the sender’s lucky. How would you reach him in case of an emergency? Well, when Ray’s dad died, his family took out a large ad in the sports section of the Las Vegas Sun, which Ray reads regularly. It worked.

Anyway, I sent Ray a card two weeks before my visit in Las Vegas, telling him the dates I would be there and giving him my phone number so he could call me to set up a time to meet. I specified that my phone number was a U.S. number, and not Canadian, so he wouldn’t be charged international rates when calling me. I crossed my fingers as I paid the $30 Canadian it would cost to send him the card from Edmonton fast enough so that he might read it before I got there. But in the end, I was never too optimistic.

Before leaving, I asked our mutual acquaintances what would be the best way to find Ray. “Just show up at a casino and look for him,” were the responses. “He sometimes goes to Binion’s or the Golden Nugget.” I looked these places up: they were both in downtown Vegas, at a place called the Fremont Street Experience. I called Binion’s, and the bartender said Ray frequents the Golden Nugget now. I called the Golden Nugget, and the bartender said he can’t give any information about his customers out to anyone. I suppose that’s fair, given the nature of the establishment.

I was down on the Strip, about five miles south of Fremont Street. It seemed silly to skip the conference for the low probability of randomly seeing him downtown, but then again, it also seemed silly to be in Vegas and not try my all to see him. I The last afternoon of the conference, I skipped the sessions and decided to walk north on Las Vegas Boulevard to downtown.

Walking places in lieu of car, taxi, or bus, has always been a passion of mine. Especially when I’m somewhere new: what better way to see the surroundings than walk? The 105° F (41° C) heat, with blazing sun, didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. It was a dry heat, much better than the humid summer days we can have in Minnesota. I got out the most appropriate outfit I had for the occasion, which was, alas, my running gear. And not just any running gear: my marathon-running outfit, a skintight black outfit that looked more like a professional swimmer’s getup than anything else. It was the only outfit I had found when packing so long ago. If I was going to sweat and look ridiculous, at least I would do so wearing wicking fabric. And my backpack and running shoes.

The walk up Las Vegas Boulevard was as fascinating as it was slow-going and blindingly bright (I had lost my sunglasses amidst all the recent travel). It was clear that this place had a unique history, and that the theme of that history was seediness. Everything that you could imagine in a city’s underbelly, you could find on Las Vegas Boulevard: pawn shops; old hotels that rented by the hour, day, or week; wedding chapels; strip clubs; deserted, deserted parking lots and buildings; and of course, gambling. Between the Strip and downtown, Las Vegas Boulevard was actually pretty run-down, so much so that a local woman, perhaps sensing I was a tourist given my outfit, told me I should be careful. The one thing that was missing were prostitutes milling around, but it was the afternoon. Then again, I never saw prostitutes at all in Vegas, but instead many ads and fliers for “Girls in 20 Minutes”. Apparently Vegas has a discrete side.

After one water break at a random Chinese restaurant and a failed attempt to buy sunglasses, I reached the Golden Nugget, one of the oldest casinos in Las Vegas. The other times I walked through casinos, I did so as quickly as possible, en route to the conference, not wanting to look around. If I allow myself to look around, I inevitably imagine the worst: the grandma in the corner, whittling away her life savings on slots, for example. This time, though, I had to look around: I was looking for Ray. Due to his introverted nature, I doubted he would be at the poker tables. I also doubted he would be at slot machines, because he likes to watch sports. After uncomfortably winding my way through a series of snug-fitting chairs all lined up facing a series of games and horse races, with the people sitting on them all staring back at me, I settled on the slots bar in the center. Leaning over the slot machine, I described Ray to a bartender and then asked if he knew him. “Oh yeah, I do,” he said. “He’ll come here every so often, and I never know the next time I’ll see him. When he does come, he sits down at the end of the bar over there,” he pointed to where Ray sits.

Realizing the futility of what I was about to do, I said, “Okay, I think I’ll just sit over there and see if he comes. If you see him, can you point him toward me? And I’ll have a Coke.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the woman next to me was looking at me and listening to our conversation. Yes, I thought, yes, right now I am one of those people who goes and looks for their loved ones at a casino because it’s the best way to possibly get in touch with them. Don’t judge me. I’m sure this type of thing happens more often than you think.

Sitting in a casino on my own personal stakeout, and wearing a bunch of black spandex running gear, I did what any good academic would do. I whipped out the paper I was reviewing and started to read. I also drank my Coke.

The paper was excitingly good, but I couldn’t help but look around a bit. Is this what Ray prefers over his friends and family? Why had Ray been in Las Vegas so long, and is this what made him want to move? What was the allure of this environment beyond one or two trips? The people-watching was interesting, but the artificial environment was tough to take. How many of these people had Parkinson’s? Well okay, I thought, the link between gambling and that Parkinson’s medication is old enough news that I bet nobody here does. Still, this was a Monday afternoon, and several people were alone playing slots. Average dopamine levels in the room seemed pretty low.

I focused on my review so as to avoid the at once comical and highly emotional situation. Finishing it up, I asked the bartender if I could give a note to Ray, tipped him highly, and took off to wander around Fremont Street. When we can’t see the person we’re looking for, we take comfort in seeing the same things that person sees. This is how I felt when walking around the Fremont Street Experience.

Wandering around the Fremont Street Experience, with Binion's on the left and the Golden Nugget on the right.