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Some Notes on a Hip-Hop Aesthetic

My homie and fellow Specter Clique Collective member, Court Merrigan, asks the question, What is a Hip-Hop Aesthetic? A good, important and difficult to answer question. The smart-ass answer would be: Wait until the Specter Hip-Hop Issue drops, read it and then you’ll have your answer, but that would be a dodge.

I purposely didn’t give a description of the phrase, “hip-hop aesthetic” in the submission guidelines to the hip-hop issue because I’m interested in the various interpretations of that phrase. How does the writer submitting from Ghana engage hip-hop in his or her work and how is it different than the Mormon kid from Utah? The gay writer from Poughkeepsie? The mother from the West Indies? There is no single answer or right or wrong interpretation.

I’ve long noted that writers (particularly prose writers) don’t use hip-hop the way Langston Hughes or Ralph Ellison used jazz. That is to infuse every sentence or phrase with the rhythms and turns of the music. When writers attempt it, often it doesn’t come off well. Adam Mansbach of Go the Fuck to Sleep fame makes a stab at it in his satirical novel Angry Black White Boy or the Miscegenation of Macon Detornay. While it’s a commendable try, there are too many false notes. It is too self-conscious to ultimately work.

A more successful example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s wonderful memoir The Beautiful Struggle. From sentence one the narrative revels in the licks and riffs of hip-hop. Coates doesn’t write in rhyming couplets, but there’s the discernible and subtle influence of the driving rhythm. Coates’s book has an understated quality that Mansbach’s lacks. Coates’s narrative often intersects with his love for the music and detailing that intersection in rap inflected prose is often a winner.

But being so overt and writing in rap-inflected prose is not the only way to express a hip-hop aesthetic. I once wrote a story called “202 Checkmates.” It was published in Fiction International. It features no rappers, allusions to rap songs, rap-inflected prose or any markers of hip-hop at all. It’s about a young girl playing Chess with her father. Still, if my favorite rap group, The Wu-Tang Clan, never existed, I would never have written the story at all. The group often raps about their love for the game and references various aspects of Chess all throughout their music. I had a brief, intense interest in chess that was born from my longstanding love of the Wu. My interest in chess ended when I realized I’d never be a good player and, on top of that, I was uncomfortable with how the game reveals one’s flaws and weak thinking. Using chess to reveal the flaws and weak thinking of a character, I thought, was a narrative strategy worth pursuing and it would have never occurred to me without the catalyst of hip-hop music.

A hip-hop influence or aesthetic, whether overt or more subtle, is out there and at play in, I think, very surprising ways. Send it to me.

  —-Rion Amilcar Scott

(Source: spectercollective)

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