Thoughts on Tricia Rose's, "A Style Nobody can Deal With: Politics, Style, and the Postindustrial City in Hip Hop"

Whew... ok... what was this article about? I had to pop in my heavy-duty reinforced brain for this one. I still struggled a bit with the triple word score vocabulary words, though. Now that I go and look back, I can’t find any words that I really don’t know (or can’t guess), but I think Dr. Bogad’s demonstration is pretty on-point – this Tricia Rose sure can sling a sentence! This was an article I had to read a couple times to digest… other than that, I didn’t have too many problems with the main ideas.

Rose walks us through the beginnings of hip hop culture (particularly in NYC) as we know it. Because of decisions by the government, Black and Hispanic neighborhoods were broken apart, but we able to reform in new communities with focus on different media: music, art, and performance. Rose wrote that “identity in hip hop is deeply rooted in the specific, the local experience and one’s attachment to and status in a local group or alternative family.” (407) She goes on to demonstrate how varied the hip hop culture truly is… I thought the connections made between non-traditional status attainment and the forging of new identities was pretty cool.

I think a lot of what she was saying can be represented through this line: “hip hop replicates and reimagines the experiences of urban life and symbolically appropriates urban space through sampling, attitude, dance, style and sound effects.” (402) Rose explains hip hop as a kind of… quilt, I guess… made out of scraps of other projects, reformed to make something new and artistic. That’s an odd example, but I see the similarities.

I do think that had this article been written during the internet era. Rose does give a nod to what she calls “multinational telecommunications networks,” but I don’t think 1994 can compare much to today. Also, I think hip hop’s movement towards the mainstream is much different today. A lot, I think, has been appropriated and marketed to white suburban youth (in what I’ve perceived as a kind of rebellion/escape message).

Heh… anyways. I definitely saw how this article related to past discussions, particularly the theme of social construction. Rose's article brings us through the construction of hip hop culture in way similar to Thomas Hine's "Rise and Fall of the American Teenager." I definitely have a better understanding now… I can’t pretend that I understand/know the black experience, but Rose’s article helped me quite a bit.

I think a lot of what Rose spoke of will transition nicely into what I'm planning to write about Juno... suspense!


See also: a post from one of my favorite blogs, Stuff White People Like. The satire screams so loud, you can hear it miles away. Here's a bit from a post about Mos Def:

He is everything that white people dream about: authentic (”he’s from Brooklyn!”), funny (”he was on Chapelle show!”), artistic (have you heard “Black on Both Sides?”), an actor (”he’s in the new Gondry film!”) and not white (”I don’t see race”).