Rapsody in Black: Utopian Aspirations

Abstract

“It is not rapping per se—the style of vocalization, its syncopations, or its driving, percussive rhythms—that is dreaded by the protected white world. What threatens is the cultural and attitudinal blackness of the music, the verbal brashness of its performers, their irruption of speech, their ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’. … The Jesus of old-style gospel is ‘white’ because the message that black people are nothing coincides with what long has been told them by white America. In gospel hip-hop, however, this tradition is being radically overturned.”