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Hip‐Hop Percussion and Cubist Vision: “Africa” Climbing the Spine Like an Unwanted Mime at the Post‐colonial Crossroads

2010; Wiley; Volume: 60; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cro.2010.a782459

1939-3881

Jim Perkinson,

Music History and Culture

Hip‐Hop Percussion and Cubist Vision: “Africa” Climbing the Spine Like an Unwanted Mime at the Post‐colonial Crossroads Jim Perkinson This essay begins somewhere downside of the word up.The New York Times of October 30, 2005, reports on a new Alzheimer’s treatment it calls “The Pablo Picasso Therapy.” Sitting in front of the Malagueño painter’s 1932 picture titled “Girl Before a Mirror,” an 88‐year‐old former real estate broker—dyspeptic, cantankerous, fixated in confusion at the edge of a chasm, at the precipice of the void he stares into every day as the march of memory loss advances—says suddenly, astonishingly, “It’s like he’s trying to tell a story using words that don’t exist. He knows what he means, but we don’t” (Kennedy, 1D). Here, at the crossroads between narrative representation and expressive conjuration, where story stands mute before its genesis in inchoate groan and wordless bone patterns, something is happening outside the Western text of healing. Speech is being animated by color. Memory is finding restoration in fractured gesture. An old body is suddenly moved like a young volcano. The dementia‐word waxes melodic from a scrambled lip code, freed by the base beat of a visual throb of paint, itself a haint of power channeled through the Andalusian‐Jew‐Spaniard’s palette by a portent pirated from Africa’s Dahomey more than 100 years ago, as we shall see below (Salmon, 81–82). In Detroit in 1999, at a conference at the Institute of the Arts, after a presentation of the history of hip‐hop up to that moment by a post‐modern African‐American poet/activist, a white kid in his early twenties, baggy pants, cap on backwards, gesturing “typically,” stands up and says earnestly, unapologetically, naively, “Hip‐hop—I would die for this shit!” That “shit,” of course, had begun before his birth, in the South Bronx in the 1970s, when an impossible adolescence, arched in agony above broken brick and ripped pipe, weed‐wild‐lot and garbage‐gutted‐gutter, had spun on head to heavy dub and hard drone of a DJ Kool Herc amp‐mix, ricocheting like syncopated trance of high romance bubble, between eight‐story apartment building sides in a sonic ride of inner‐city bromide against the tide of early death. In a later coming into this insane game of break‐neck b‐boy‐and‐girl meeting Flash‐fingered‐sample warped in a Wizard‐wipe‐scratch of vinyl, giving aural texture and somatic‐signature to the outlaw tag of turf, rap emerged like a slow‐growing tsunami of the tongue. Here, the word had begun ancillary, secondary, served as mere filler over the real‐deal thump under the rib—occupying minds with entertainment signs, while the DJ‐ed feet negotiated the harsh heat of a concrete street‐mortality—before that word found its own stature in the 80s as a freestyling capture of ring‐shout cipher‐rapture, wrapping an entire globe in a high‐tech‐probe of low‐down‐truth. In one case, a splash of color, provoking an old mind back to life; in the other, a sonic flash stirring a young body to (im)possible sacrifice! Between these two worlds—the visual rub of a polymorphic plasticity giving rise to the word and the sonic drub of a polyrhythmic sagacity preceding the word—the entire Western world is queried like a quarry of rock and demons (Read, 96, 144). The essay to follow will focus on this unanticipated convergence of “African” traditions of percussive insurgence rupturing modernist consciousness from within, beginning as early as Picasso’s appropriation of “instinctual things” in mask‐forms adopted from the mother‐continent and as late as rap riffs giving rise to rhythmic trips around the planet in the new millennium. Auguring like a sign of the times at the edge of both aesthetic traditions is the “potency of heightened contrast” derived from what Robert Farris Thompson would call the syncopated stylistics of African poetics and hip‐hop scholar Tricia Rose shouts out as “ruptured flow.”“Africa” here is not offered as essence, but rather as place‐marker for the continent furthest out in transnational...