- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
**Crossposted at This So-Called Post-Post-Racial Life**
The spirited defense of 2 Live Crew was no more about
defending the Black community than the prosecution was about defending
women.... Black women can hardly regard the right to be represented as
bitches and whores as essential to their interests. Instead the defense
of 2 Live Crew primarily functions to protect the cultural and
political prerogative of male rappers to be as misogynistic and
offensive as they want to be.
~Kimberle Crenshaw, Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew
One more thing before we move on from "Gatesgate." Only a handful of bloggers in the Black blogosphere---notably Acts of Faith and Love and What ABout Our Daughters ---have mentioned an interesting aspect: Professor Gates' defense of the rap group 2 Live Crew during their obscenity trial.
This post, however, really is not about Henry Louis Gates and his defense of the rap act. It's actually more about me.
Me and 2 Live Crew
Boston, post undergrad.
My little sister, an undergrad at the University of Miami, Coral
Gables came up to stay with me one summer, bringing a suitcase full of
bootleg 2 Live Crew cassettes. My friends and I couldn't get enough of
the wicked beats and ridiculously profane lyrics. Catchphrases from the
songs would become inside jokes in my circle of highly educated, middle
class Black male and female friends. For example, just uttering the
phrase---usually randomly as a non sequitur---"Nibble on my d___ like a
rat does cheese" could send us into a conniption fit of laughter for
several moments.
The music from my high school and early college years was what is
now considered "old school": LL Cool J, Kool Moe D, Fat Boys, Run D MC,
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Sugarhill Gang... 2 Live Crew
was something new. Completely over the top, cartoonish, pure
performance and artifice.
I cannot remember listening to a single 2 Live Crew song past the
fall following my sister's return to Florida. It is likely, in fact,
that I would not have had any reason to think about the group again
were it not for the high profile of their obscenity trial.
Interlude: The Signifying Monkey
- "Monkey Belly Tattoo." TeddyBare, http://www.flickr.com/photos/teddybare/24891625/
Deep down in the jungle so they say
There's a signifying motherf***** down the way.
There hadn't been no disturbin' the jungle for quite a bit,
For up jumped the monkey in the tree one day and laughed,
"I guess I'll start some sh**."~Kermit E. Cambell,
The Signifying Monkey Revisited:
Vernacular Discourse and African American Personal Narratives
(And Dolemite's version)
Signifying Luke Skyywalker and America's Funniest Videos
Gates called on this tradition of language as a game in
helping to defend the rap group 2 Live Crew against obscenity charges
in Florida in 1990. He wrote... that 2 Live Crew's "exuberant use
of hyperbole (phantasmagoric sexual organs, for example) undermines —
for anyone fluent in black cultural codes — a too literal-minded
hearing of the lyrics. This is the street tradition called 'signifying'
or 'playing the dozens,' which has generally been risque." Gates further tied the group's approach to the black mythic tradition, explaining ... that in
2 Live Crew's music "what you hear is great humor, great joy, and great
boisterousness. It's a joke. It's a parody and parody is one of the
most venerated forms of art." (Source; Emphasis added)
Kimberle Crenshaw, in the piece cited at the beginning of this post,
does a much better job of deconstructing the defense of 2 Live Crew
than I ever could. She touches on an issue that is still difficult, it
seems, for Rights positions of any kind to adequately encompass: intersectionality:
"My sharp internal division---my dissatisfaction with the idea that the
'real issue' is race or that the 'real issue' is gender--- is
characteristic of my experience as a Black woman living at the
intersection of racial and sexual subordination."
My own "sharp internal division" goes beyond than this: How
can I at the same time recognize something as "funny"---and even enjoy
it---and fully understand that that humor may be dangerous and
hurtful---even to myself?
I'll use a pretty low-brow example. One of my children's favorite television shows is "America's Funniest Videos."
Every single AFV program features at least one montage of "crotch
clips." These are videos sent in from Americans far and wide of their
loved ones being hit in the crotch with baseball bats, being bitten in
the crotch by angry geese, and falling crotch-first on all manner of
metal rails and wood fencing. These clips are often accompanied by
corny commentary by
