by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The rap group 2 Live Crew and their controversial hit recording “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” may well earn a signal place in the history of First Amendment rights. But just as important is how these lyrics will be interpreted and by whom.
For centuries, African-Americans have been forced to develop coded ways of communicating to protect them from danger. Allegories and double meanings, words redefined to mean their opposites (“bad” meaning “good,” for instance), even neologisms (“bodacious”) have enabled blacks to share messages only the initiated understood.
Many blacks were amused by the transcripts of Marion Barry’s sting operation, which reveals that he used the traditional black expression about one’s “nose being opened.” This referred to a love affair and not, as Mr. Barry’s prosecutors have suggested, to the inhalation of drugs. Understanding this phrase could very well spell the difference (for the Mayor) between prison and freedom.
2 Live Crew is engaged in heavy-handed parody, turning the stereo- 4 types of black and white American culture on their heads. These young artists are acting out, to lively dance music, a parodic exaggeration of the age-old stereotypes of the oversexed black female and male. Their 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, and where the best signifier or “rapper” is the one who invents the most extravagant images, the biggest “lies,” as the culture says. (H. “Rap” Brown earned his nickname in just this way.) In the face of racist stereotypes about black sexuality, you can do one of two things: You can disavow them or explode them with exaggeration.
2 Live Crew, like many “hip-hop” groups, is engaged in sexual carnivalesque. Parody reigns supreme, from a take-off of standard blues to a spoof of the black power movement; their off-color nursery rhymes are part of a venerable Western tradition. The group even satirizes the culture of commerce when it appropriates popular advertising slogans (“Tastes great!” “Less filling!”) and puts them in a bawdy context.
2 Live Crew must be interpreted within the context of black culture generally and of signifying specifically. Their novelty and that of other adventuresome rap groups, is that their defiant rejection of euphemism now voices for the mainstream what before existed largely in the “race record” market—where the records of Redd Foxx and Rudy Ray Moore once were forced to reside.
Rock songs have always been about sex but have used elaborate 8 subterfuges to convey that fact. 2 Live Crew uses Anglo-Saxon words and is self-conscious about it: a parody of a white voice in one song refers to “private personal parts,” as a coy counterpart to the group’s bluntness.
Much more troubling than its so-called obscenity is the group’s overt sexism. Their sexism is so flagrant, however, that it almost cancels itself out in a hyperbolic war between the sexes. In this, it recalls the inter-sexual jousting in Zora Neale Hurston’s novels. Still, many of us look toward the emergence of more female rappers to redress sexual stereotypes. And we must not allow ourselves to sentimentalize street culture: the appreciation of verbal virtuosity does not lessen one’s obligation to critique bigotry in all of its pernicious forms.
Is 2 Live Crew more “obscene” than, say, the comic Andrew Dice Clay? Clearly, this rap group is seen as more threatening than others that are just as sexually explicit. Can this be completely unrelated to the specter of the young black male as a figure of sexual and social disruption, the very stereotypes 2 Live Crew seems determined to undermine?
This question—and the very large question of obscenity and the First Amendment—cannot even be addressed until those who would answer them become literate in the vernacular traditions of African-Americans. To do less is to censor through the equivalent of intellectual prior restraint—and censorship is to art what lynching is to justice.
Source: The New York Times, June 19, 1990