Monday, May 11, 2015
Hip Hop Culture and Sag Harbor
I feel like after today's discussion in class it would be madness for me not to delve into the comparisons being made with Benji's summer and hip hop culture. You can see that when he and his friends are posing with guns and even said that they looked like they were a cover of a future N.W.A. album cover (probably mirroring 'Straight Outta Compton'), that they are acting out the form of rap known as "Gangsta Rap". Even though Benji and Ice Cube are from completely different backgrounds, I don't think that it is a coincidence that they both come to similar ideas. Just because Ice Cube grew up in a shitty part of California does not mean that he and Benji are facing completely different social issues. They are feeling pressured to be apart of an older generations culture and the struggles their parents had to face. They are being taught these 60's mentality's but having to deal with minor things like being patted on the head. I think that Ice Cube is kind of the version that Benji's coworkers wanted him to act like when confronted with something that was some "racist shit" like the head patting instance. I feel like these kind of moments are what led to the hyper masculinity of Gangsta Rap. It makes these kids feel like they have to validate themselves and Benji even comments that later on in life one of his friends even died to drug , and presumably, gang activity. It would have been impossible for Whitehead not to make the comparison and I am quite interested to see how it will play out in the rest of the novel. I think that it might take a larger hold of Benji and i think it also something that affects a lot of people coming of age. The fact that you can find something like music that relates to you in a much deeper way because it's discussing what you want to be or what you had to deal with.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think it is funny that Ice Cube is the poster-child for Gangsta Rap, because now he makes kids movies. I don't think anyone else personifies that era of rap culture better than him, but his later life maybe reveals the extent to which he was pretending. Maybe he, like Benji, was experimenting with different personalities, but did not stick with one particular one. I think that the ridiculousness of his lyrics supports this--he is just a kid having fun with a persona, much like Benji and his friends. Perhaps Ice Cube looks back on his N.W.A days and considers himself back then a different person (The Other Cube).
ReplyDeleteYou touch on one of the main themes of the novel, which is this racial identity paradox. Benji and his friends are "black boys with beach houses" and deal with the small stuff like getting patted on the head, and there's all this influence to be more tough, more 'black'. This is coming from their parents from the civil rights era, who had to fight and be beaten to get their rights, and popular culture where all this tough street hypermasculinity is something to be desired.
ReplyDeleteMusic is often used as a way to express yourself and your feelings, so I feel that the overtly masculine tones of Ice Cube and Gangsta Rap reflect how those artists might want to act, or feel they should act, in frustrating situations. However, this may be misconstrued by listeners (like Benji and his friends) who think that this masculine behavior is how they should act naturally.
ReplyDeleteThe curious thing about Benji and his friends posing with guns is that they *aren't* acting out some idea of gangsta rap, because it didn't exist in 1985. This is him retrospectively framing gangsta rap as a slightly more grown-up, less innocent, but implicitly similarly poseurish version of the same impulse that leads these guys to pose like cops or action heroes. Chuck Norris is likely their point of departure more than any rapper. But "Ben" notices these parallels later--as you say, it's a "future" NWA cover they resemble. A perspective only possible, obviously, in retrospect.
ReplyDelete