Adam Serwer's review of Born to Use Mics, a new collection on Nas's seminal album Illmatic, is typically excellent, framing the problem as an attempt to win hip-hop the status of literature, an attempt that's driven by the fact that a lot of academics just want to prove they can flow:
The new anthology Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's IllmaticI'm sure Adam is right, and academics both want to be MCs, and want MCing to carry it with the status that serious academia has. But I want to interrogate the need to turn hip-hop into literature a little further, because I think it speaks to deeply internalized beliefs, across racial, gender, and age lines, that popular music is a really inferior form of art. Film studies may privilege art film, but popular movies are very much part of the conversation. Comic books get elevated into literature unapologetically by people like Michael Chabon. But of the 147 music classes Yale is offering for the spring semester, including in its School of Music, only two even come close to addressing popular music: a class on music technologies, and one on Afro-Brazilian music., edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai, is a love letter to Illmatic, a self-conscious effort to preserve the album as a classic of poetic nonfiction. There's plenty of academic work on hip-hop as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon. But despite being the most distinct and dominant form of poetic nonfiction of the past 30 years, it has yet to be given its due as literature. Sure, your average liberal-arts college has more than its share of rap-focused classes taught by hip professors ready to act as urban-culture guides for wide-eyed private-school kids. (My class at Vassar was called "Literature from the Underground.") But these are seen as quirky electives. For the most part hip-hop is still fighting a dulled American impulse -- the same one that dismissed jazz out of hand as "noise" for so long -- that the artistic contribu-tions of urban black culture are just fodder for the groundlings. If Illmatic fails to persuade the reader of hip-hop's intrinsic value as poetic nonfiction, the editors seem to be asking, what else could?
This strikes me as crazy. One of the reasons I like the (objectively not very good) Music & Lyrics is because the movie insists that pop music is important. At one point, Hugh Grant's character tells Drew Barrymore's that it's just as much of an accomplishment to have written a good pop song as a good novel, that the emotional impact of hearing "My Girl" is as legitimate and relevant as the satisfaction you get from reading a big book. Maybe it's that we're embarrassed by sentiment, and that's why we treat pop music as if it's a little bit silly.
All of which strikes me as too bad. If we recognized pop music as the critically important form that it is, it would be enough of a coronation for hip-hop to be taking over the genre. But because hip-hop is an outsider genre, to truly enshrine it in the artistic canon, it isn't enough to say it's become the dominant form of our popular music. So folks need to find another way to demonstrate its importance, to slot it into another genre. I understand why literature is a natural fit. But, as someone who's been called out by John McWhorter for putting too much freight on hip-hop, I wish this wasn't necessary.