1999

22.3

Todd F. Tietchen

Released in 1988, Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back marked an important moment in Hip-Hop’s maturation. On an album which many still consider to be the finest Hip-Hop album ever produced, Public Enemy revolutionized the genre in regards to both its technical execution and lyrical content. While the album’s subject matter ranged from racial stereotyping in the media ("Don’t Believe The Hype") to the role of various police agencies in the systematic oppression of African-Americans ("Louder Than A Bomb"), underlying these overtly-presented lyrical expositions was a multi-layered musical backing of equal political relevance. As a creative unit, Public Enemy shifted fundamental rap music techniques such as "sampling" into a site of political contestation, as sound-bytes from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. mixed with various samples from commercial culture into a funked-out heteroglossia whose multiple voices and references did much to buttress the album’s more overtly-stated political concerns. By means of embedding tactically-deployed samples within new lyrical structures, Public Enemy demonstrated how the rearrangement of public discourse equates with a socio-political act of empowerment and, in the process, re-established the public language of popular music as a site of political dissent. Of course, the very notion that electronic reproduction technologies can produce alternate or politically-radical discourse has been the subject of substantial theoretical discussion. Jean Baudrillard, for example, has suggested that the continuing proliferation of electronic reproduction technologies has rendered alternative discourse useless—that any mode of protest (or insurrectionary knowledge) is immediately "framed" by various media and therefore subsumed directly into the commodity system it in many cases hopes to challenge. Generally, theorists such as Baudrillard have argued that the conditions of postmodernity force artists working in popular modes to depend on electronic mediums controlled by corporate capital, and imbedded within these representational fields, any resistive stance threatens to be played out as merely a compliant mode of performitivity which reifies the authority of our master signifying practices. Consider, for example, Baudrillard’s suggestion that "all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event—whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counterinformation , pirate radios, antimedia, etc." (82). Because various (and dominant) modes of the mass media frame every event, thereby subsuming the event directly into the realm of capital, Baudrillard argues that "it is useless to dream of revolution through content" (83).

In relation to popular music, Baudrillard’s thesis is prefigured by Theodor Adorno’s suggestion in "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" that popular modes of music are always complicit with the wishes of capital and result in a mass state of mental and artistic regression. Adorno suggests that not only do these modes result in listeners who are "forcibly retarded," but that they cancel out "the possibility of a different and oppositional music" because "nothing which strikes the ear remains exempt from the system of assimilation" (543). In regards to Hip-Hop, it has been similarly argued that because Hip-Hop is simultaneously a political and commercial form, it has been forced to perform in a sonic field marked by inescapable paradox; while on one hand it raises its voice to oppression and marginalization in a capitalist system, on the other hand it simultaneously supports that system through sales, thereby nullifying its own political stances. The thesis suggested by theorists such as Baudrillard and Adorno casts artists into just this sort of victim-role by suggesting that they have somehow been pimped by the all intrusive "system of assimilation," that they have somehow been hoodwinked (unbeknownst to them) into having their messages—which they originally intended to be radical—commodified in a self-defeating way. Some Hip-Hop artists, including Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) from Public Enemy, have suggested just the opposite: that Hip-Hop artists have consciously chosen, and should still choose, to pimp the system. In his recent book, Fight The Power: Rap Race and Reality, Chuck D offers the following suggestion to Hip-Hop artists: "I believe you can have a foot in the game and do your shit with the other foot…We need to have the double advantage of building our own and still [working] the game" (54). Similar to Russell Potter’s claim that "rappers have managed to bum-rush the spectacle [and] hijack the media by its own devices" (14), Chuck D implores Hip-Hop artists to use the entrenched signifying authorities against themselves, to both play the game and work the game simultaneously in a way that is consistent with other postmodern political gestures.

The creative/political stance that Chuck D articulates is analogous to Michel Foucault’s conception of the "masked other"—a model I find useful for explaining and understanding the paradoxical nature of postmodern political gestures. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault locates power in discourse and suggests that a historically-notable event is not to be understood as "a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it . . . the entry of a masked ‘other’" (154), and I believe that Public Enemy’s treatment of language and sampling on It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back occurs in just this sort of site. I would like to suggest that the notion of being simultaneously "masked" and "other"—the something-different which cloaks its deviance, the that-which-is-not-you which passes as that-which-is-you, the entity which can "play the game" and "work the game" simultaneously—is congruent with the consenting alternativism of the postmodern which, in the words of Linda Hutcheon, "works within the very system it hopes to subvert" (77). According to Charles Jencks, the postmodern aesthetic is marked by the presence of the "double code" (30)—the juxtaposition of the (pre)produced with the (re)produced, the (pre)scripted with the (re)scripted—and this ability of Foucault’s "masked other" to turn a vocabulary "against those who had once used it" functions within a similar field of play; the same ability which enables the "other" to use the dominant language in a way which (in Foucault’s words) "reverses a relationship of forces" is the ability which cloaks (to some extent) the fact that this "other" is actually participating in a counter-textual speech act.

In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose identifies double-coding as a major strategy of Hip-Hop artists and diligently links this practice to Afrodiasporic oral traditions. Rose suggests that

the arrangement and selection of sounds rap musicians have invented via samples, turntables, tape machines, and sound systems are at once deconstructive (in that they actually take apart recorded musical compositions) and recuperative (because they

recontextualize these elements creating new meanings for cultural sounds that have been relegated to commercial wastebins) (65).

Since the rise and fall of popular taste is directly related to the production and satisfaction of such tastes through electronic mediums, Hip-Hop’s interest in recuperation and regeneration via electronic technologies destabilizes the notion that alternative gestures are endlessly subsumed by the mediums which frame them; in other words, Hip-Hop’s interest in healing the breaks in black musical orality is accomplished via the same electronic technologies which cause these breaks and fissures in the first place. In the name of recuperation, Hip-Hop employs these technologies to (re)popularize that which has been previously popularized (and afterwards discarded) by means of the same technologies, thereby mending the rift in oral tradition caused by record companies who subjected that tradition to the whims of popular taste. Still, there are other instances in which a sample may be identified as dissenting and contrary, rather than affirmative and recuperative, and I believe these instances are equally alternative in nature. Rap music is undeniably a language-based art form, and in many instances Hip-Hop artists use language with the ultimate hope of turning the tables—or perhaps more accurately, turning the turntables—on their sampled material. Coinciding with the recuperative tradition modeled by Rose is another sampling tradition which identifies language as a site of ideological struggle and attempts to enact a syn(tactic)al terrorism from the position of Foucault’s masked other. While this alternate tradition is similarly based in a communal approach to musical composition, its ultimate hope is to deconstruct its sampled text by means of guerrilla semiotics.

In "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare," Umberto Eco suggests that "the battle for the survival of man as a responsible being in the Communications Era is not to be won where the communication originates, but where it arrives" (142). Sounding much like Foucault, Eco suggests that the path to individual empowerment can be discovered by "reversing the meaning of the messages" disseminated by the mass media, that "the message [the audience] receives can change the meaning that the Source had attributed to that message" (143). In other words, Eco realizes that a truly engaged politics operates in those spaces, and via those discourses, through which power legitimizes itself, and his realization results in his suggestion that the very same signifiers that constitute the original message can somehow be reformulated (by the guerrilla semiotician) into their own anti-message, thereby revealing the original message as arbitrary and contingent. One of the best and earliest examples of guerrilla semiotics in Hip-Hop can be found on Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. On "Party For Your Right To Fight," the album’s final track, Public Enemy engages in a mode of syn(tactic)al terrorism designed to reconfigure, and therefore re-orient, a pre-existing (ideo)linguistic deployment. By means of sampling (and reconfiguring) the chorus of the Beastie Boys’ "Fight For Your Right (To Party)," Public Enemy employs a commonly-recognized pop reference in a way that acknowledges its dominance while simultaneously re-scrambling its meaning; an original vocabulary, in the words of Foucault, "turns against those that had once used it" (154) as the original "message" is transformed into its own "anti-message."

In 1987, the Beastie Boys (an all white Hip-Hop group) had success on the popular charts with the teen anthem "Fight For Your Right (To Party)" which was included on the band’s equally successful album titled Licensed To Ill. While the Beastie Boys boast in the album’s first line that "Mutiny on the Bounty’s what we’re all about," the album’s remaining content fails to live up to its initial, renegade swagger. Released in the tail end of America’s Reagan Years, the album’s lyrics celebrate thoughtless materialism, the ability to "always bust the new routines." In a style that is anything but mutinous, the Beasties boast about various "friends in high places," that they "have money in the bank, [they] can still get high," and that their fathers are jealous "cuz they’re [the Beastie Boys] making that green." The Beastie Boys use that green to consume large amounts of fast food and alcohol, and since they never hesitate to mention their chosen victuals by name, their album at times sounds like a commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, Budweiser, and Heineken. Over the course of the album, the Beasties also accumulate a wealth of consumer goods capable of filling a large warehouse: Gucci watches, piles of gold chains, remote-control televisions, and beepers. In short, the Beastie Boys defined cool (or what they call "ill") as participation in a Reagan Era economy which lacked ideals, and this undeniable lack is best summed up in their call to "Fight For Your Right (To Party)," a vacuous call which suggests that listeners mobilize against authority in order to secure their right to consume various commodities.

Compared against It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, the Beastie Boys’ belief in all that is "ill" suggests belief in another type of illness, a thoughtless and uncritical acceptance of the Reagan Era values which Public Enemy’s album (released a year later) attempts to challenge. The messages contained in Nation Of Millions ran directly counter to America’s popular image of itself as expressed in Licensed To Ill and attempted to give voice to an often repressed ‘80s reality. As a group, Public Enemy suggested that for many life was the inversion of glamorized pop lyrics—that beneath the popularly-conceived glitter and glitz of ‘80s America, African-Americans were still enduring economic and social restraints on a daily basis. 1987 and 1988 were in fact marked by a heightening racial tension in America, especially in New York City, Public Enemy’s base of operations. As is often the case, this tension did not abate peacefully, but instead expressed itself in a series of brutal racially-motivated attacks and controversies: In Howard Beach, three white teens attacked three black men and one of the victims was run over and killed by a car while fleeing his bat-waving pursuers. In Bensonhurst, white teenager Joe Fama shot and killed black teenager Yusef Hawkins who was in Bensonhurst shopping for a car. Another black teenager, Tawana Brawley (who would later appear in Public Enemy’s "Fight The Power" video), claimed that she was raped by a group of white men in Wappingers Falls, and while a grand jury found no evidence to back her charges, the case was hotly debated in the media with the issue of race dominating many of the conversations.

It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back responds to these tensions by suggesting that for African-Americans, America had never ceased to be a dangerous place. Songs such as "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" not only suggest that the police and judicial system target young black men for arrest and imprisonment, but that the police in general do nothing to protect members of the black community. From Public Enemy’s perspective, America is not a place for thoughtless partying and consumption, but a place of thoughtless violence, racism, economic hardship, media exploitation ("She Watch Channel Zero"), and drug-use which destroys inner-city neighborhoods ("Night of the Living Baseheads"). Opposite to the Beastie Boys, whose interest in fighting for the right of America’s young people to consume may easily be aligned with the dominant values of the time, Public Enemy attempts to maintain an alternate discourse in the closing years of a Reagan Presidency that did its best to silence all dissension.

The difference in perspective which characterizes these two albums is most fully realized in "Party For Your Right To Fight." "Party For Your Right to Fight" finds its strength as an angry re-configuration of its sampled source in which the Beastie Boys’ chorus "You gotta fight for your right to party" is rearranged (via sampling) into "Party, for your right—fight, fight." Public Enemy constructed this new chorus directly from the original Beastie Boys’ chorus—the actual voices of the Beastie Boys’ are sampled and re-configured to form the chorus for "Party For Your Right To Fight." That is to say, by means of sampling, the words originally recorded by the Beastie Boys are re-framed and re-contextualized in a way that better suits the concerns of Public Enemy. The re-configured chorus of "Party For Your Right to Fight" embodies the consenting alternativism of the postmodern political gesture as articulated by Linda Hutcheon, in that Public Enemy’s intertextual chorus employs the same electronic reproduction technologies responsible for distributing the original recording as a means for interrogating it, and forcing it to act counter to itself. The countertextual nature of Public Enemy’s re-configuration is heightened by the fact that the pre-recorded voices of the Beastie Boys are sampled, re-configured, and forced to refute the vacuous content of their original statement; present in this new chorus is Foucault’s masked other—the person capable of using your voice directly against itself, that entity which sounds like you but has something quite different to say. This is also the epitome of postmodern irony as articulated by Charles Jencks in his writings on the "double code"; that which is being challenged (the original text) is forced to coincide dialectically with its challenger (the intertext) in the same aesthetic space (or in this case, the same sonic field), forcing a dialogue where only a declaration existed.

On 1990’s "Welcome to the Terrordome," Chuck D warns listeners that "every brother ain’t a brother / cause a color just as well could be undercover" and the sampled chorus of "Party For Your Right To Fight" serves as an aesthetic example of his warning. Public Enemy’s reconfigured chorus emanates from a hybridized subject position, speaking with a voice that is simultaneously "white" and "black." So to an extent, the masked other may be read as deconstructive (of race in this instance), an entity which occupies two opposite subject positions simultaneously and thus cannot be categorized according to binary configurations. Yet this notion of being "masked" or "undercover" suggests adherence to an agenda which runs deeper than show, a convenient front employed in the name of a legitimate core of concerns. Foucault’s masked other (or Chuck D’s "undercover brother") is more equivalent to a spy in enemy territory, faking an accent to avoid detection while planting bombs in strategic sites. While, to some extent, it blurs distinctions, the masked other should be understood more as an oriented pluralism (structurally equivalent to Jenck’s Postmodern), than as an attempt to eradicate difference via deconstructive strategy—a means to affirm, rather than deny, an identity that mainstream society (and its discourses) attempts to silence. The reconfigured chorus of "Party For Your Right To Fight," represents not a seamless blending of black into white, but an attempt at manipulating an existing (entrenched) discourse so that it reveals the concerns of those it previously excluded.

For those who feel threatened or oppressed, the "right to party" espoused by the Beastie Boys is hardly an issue, but their ability to mobilize, to organize or "party" themselves together into a resistive stance is. By means of reconfiguring the original chorus of the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy shifts the meaning of the word "party" from the beer-guzzling, teenage conception of the Beastie Boys to the notion of organizing into a political stance that "started in ’66 with a Pro Black Radical Mix." Public Enemy’s reference to the ‘60s (along with their subsequent mention of Newton, Cleaver, and Seale) establishes their concerns in stark contrast to the largely uncritical ‘80s while aligning the band with a tradition of truly radical protest. This allusion to America’s protest tradition is heightened by the inclusion of a sample from perhaps the most famous of Malcolm X’s speeches: "If the government will not protect us or defend us or mind those who have brutalized us and made us the victims for the past 400 years, then it is time for us to do whatever is necessary to defend ourselves." This segment from Malcolm X reinforces the notion that Public Enemy’s definition of the word "party" is based in organization, and that their conception of the word "fight" means not an argument with a parent or a teacher (as it does for the Beastie Boys), but a politicized conflict against a far more dangerous enemy.

Of course, guerrilla semiotics is most effective when directed against a commonly-recognized antagonist. That is to say, while the meaning and concern of Public Enemy’s composition can be garnered regardless of whether the listener recognizes the sampled voices of the Beastie Boys or not, recognition of the referenced work enhances our understanding of the intertext as a semiotically subversive act. Since "Fight For Your Right (To Party)" was a popularly known song, it seems to fit this criterion perfectly. By means of embedding the recognizable and reconfigured chorus within a new lyrical structure that radicalizes its meaning, Public Enemy demonstrated how the rearrangement of public discourse (through the use of the same reproductive technologies which deployed that discourse in the first place) may equate with a socio-political act of empowerment based on expanding the contents of what Chuck D calls "the game."

In Extended Play: Sounding Off From John Cage To Dr. Funkenstein, John Corbett makes a similar argument regarding the "postmodern alliance between deception, mimicry, and politics" (101). According to Corbett,

In [the postmodern] situation, the traditional anti-art position is abandoned in favor of a politics of invisibility, mimesis, speed, and paganism. What unifies these subversive currents is not their form, nor their material, nor their "message," but their relationship to the antagonist; it is a question, to borrow a current film title, of "sleeping with the enemy." (101; emphasis mine)

The subversive semiotics of NWA constitute yet another instance in which Hip-Hop artists have acted counter to the rules while appearing to follow them, and as such, are emblematic of the ways in which reproduction technologies allow their operator to enter into the dominant discourse on his or her own terms. Along with the work of Public Enemy, works such as "Straight Outta Compton" should be viewed as the foundational texts of Hip-Hop’s tradition of syn(tactic)al terrorism—a tradition which poses a serious challenge to Baudrillard’s aforementioned thesis regarding electronic technologies. In a more general sense, Hip-Hop aesthetics have posed a challenge to Baudrillard’s claim since their inception. That is to say, the birth of Hip-Hop is directly linked to the increased availability of reproduction technologies to the masses whom Adorno viewed as "submissive" and "retarded." Hip-Hop rose out of America’s inner cities precisely because mixing records on a turntable was more affordable than purchasing and maintaining instruments and musical equipment for an entire band. To a large extent, the alternative of mixing new songs from previously recorded ones on affordable equipment actually allowed the dissident, urban voice to enter Pop music where it was introduced to (and subsequently accepted by) a larger, more diverse group of listeners.

To this day, the work of Public Enemy continues to challenge the theoretical position of thinkers like Baudrillard and Adorno. On "Party For Your Right To Fight," Public Enemy demonstrated the political possibilities of working with popular forms of representation and popularly-encoded subject matter, and over the years, Public Enemy has remained committed to guerrilla semiotics and media sabotage. Currently, they are involved in legal actions against Polygram records (their record label) for attempting to block the band from putting tracks from their soon-to-be- released Bring the Noise 2000 on their website in MP-3 format, a format which would allow listeners to download these tracks free of charge. On 16 January 1999, Chuck D posted the following statement on Public Enemy’s website as an explanation of the band’s intentions: "It seems like the weasels have stepped into the fire. . . . The execs, lawyers and accountants who lately have made most of the money in the music biz, are now running scared from the technology that evens out the creative field and makes artists harder to pimp. Let ‘em all die. . . . I’m glad to be a contributor to the bomb." Again, this statement reinforces the extent to which Public Enemy’s understanding and use of electronic reproduction technologies has put them in the position to challenge—rather than reinforce—what they perceive to be the devious workings of corporate capital in America.

Todd F. Tietchen
611 Lead SW, #601
Albuquerque, NM 87102

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