I presented my senior thesis to my fellow seniors last night, on “The Politics of Hip-Hop.” The occasion was the Mellon Forum, named after Paul Mellon, Yale class of 1929, who never held a job and devoted his life to giving Yale the money that his father, Andrew Mellon, made from exploiting steel workers. I stood, white, male, privileged, in a coat and
tie, playing Public Enemy and preaching revolution.
I had something to prove. I spent my first year at Yale in a Great Books program called Directed Studies, starting history, philosophy and literature with the ancient
Greeks and not moving past Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf. At Yale, Directed
Studies is an instant ticket to respect — the Western canon is what you’re supposed to
get from an Ivy League education. Hip-hop isn’t exactly that.
As an American studies major, I’ve grown accustomed to jibes about the legitimacy of my classes and papers. When I first announced my major, one of my parents’ friends laughed, asking, “Does that mean you’re going to actually get credit for studying Madonna?”
I never studied Madonna. But rap music is a long way from Thucydides, and it doesn’t have quite the same academic cachet. I considered calling last night’s presentation “Subaltern Ideology and Hegemonic Instability in Late 20th Century Racialized Discourse,” or
something similar. Such a title would spring from vanity as much as anything else: As a proper academician, I felt, my work should be incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t taken as many classes in cultural theory or struggled through Adorno and Foucault, anyone who didn’t add “-atize” to words like “problem” or construct sentences that last for hours. To be properly academic and complex, shouldn’t I dress my subject up a little? Almost everyone in the room had something interesting to say about rap music, whereas I had nothing on cell biology or Hungarian novelists.
But not dressing it up is the point. I see American Studies as a critique of some of the fundamental assumptions that govern what we do at Yale:
Why the distinction between the classroom and the rest of life? Why should professors speak only to other professors, in language only professors can understand, about things only professors care about? Why should academia be apolitical, outside the wonders, dilemmas and controversies of our time, rather than engaged in the world?
The gap between my life and my academic work is growing slim. Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” is the first rap song I remember as a revelation, though like everyone else of my generation, I had been introduced to rap well before 1989. Chuck D shaped my political consciousness as much as any other thinker, and Ice Cube shaped my knowledge of my country as much as any pundit. Growing up in America in the hip-hop era, I couldn’t help it.
Hip-hop battles America’s economic and political structures on a cultural front. It offers both an alternative vision of how America is and a new vision of how America could be, in an age when MSNBC and the New York Times make it easy to believe that we all live in the luxury of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. From Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” in 1982, to Jay-Z’s enormous hit “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” last year, hip-hop has been not only the CNN of black America, but a subversive CNN to all young America.
But I don’t often think about politics when I’m dancing to Nas’ “If I Ruled the World.” When every product from Gap jeans to, yes, Public Enemy is advertised and sold as liberation itself, messages of political revolution sound like just another sales pitch.
So maybe I’m the only white rap fan in the world who listens because no other pop music has such central political intentions. But I’m certainly not the only white rap fan. White people buy at least 70 percent of rap recordings, and the “wigger” — baggy jeans and all — has become a familiar enough character to get a whole episode of “Oprah.” But people rarely blink at the rage for rap in white suburbs anymore.
That doesn’t stop a lot of my friends from questioning what right I have to be writing about hip-hop. After last night’s presentation, I answered questions about whether I had considered underground rappers and Asian and Latino rap; whether even well-intentioned white people should listen to music about black empowerment; who was responsible for the recent neutering of rap’s overt politics. (I also got troubling questions about the misogyny and homophobia so prevalent even in the most political rap.)
I don’t have all the answers. But simple numbers suggest where rap’s most important effects will lie. White people make up the majority of rap’s listeners; black people make up a minority of the American population. There will be no racial justice without white people.
I can’t help thinking that hip-hop will have something to do with it. And if hip-hop can’t incite political consciousness, I don’t know what will.
Can academia? Though I stood in a suit and used terms like “hegemony,” my role models last night weren’t my professors. I wanted to be like Queen Latifah and KRS-One, though white and lacking flow; I wanted to speak truth to power, to provoke, to engage, to struggle. In other words: I wanted to rap.
Last week my friend Alex woke up to find graffiti on the hallway across
from his dorm room. One line read: “Cock tastes good!” The next: “Fuck
faggots!”
My college dean sent out an e-mail that afternoon: “We consider such
conduct intolerable … These hostile and demeaning acts poison the goodwill
and trust that make possible our hard-earned feeling of community.” The
Yale Daily News ran a news story about the graffiti along with an
editorial promoting National Coming Out Day, which happened to fall on the
same day.
Although hate speech is rare here at Yale, it’s not so rare that one more
outrage will interfere with most people’s daily routines. Last semester,
during Yale’s Gay Pride Week celebrations, posters advertising “Gay Lust,”
“Gay Avarice” and the rest of the alleged homosexual Seven Deadly Sins
were placed anonymously around campus. And my classmate Katherine Kramer
still says that she feels like she’s a target. “I still get called ‘dyke’
regularly as I walk down the street,” she told me.
Hundreds of students gathered a year ago this week for a vigil in memory
of Matthew Shepard, a fellow college student 2,000 miles away whose
murder was too close for comfort. Hundreds more attend dances sponsored by
the Lesbian/Bi/Gay/Transgendered Co-Op, making these bashes among the most popular
parties on campus. Eight academic departments offer courses on sexuality.
It’s hard to imagine a majority-straight environment in America that’s
safer and more welcoming for lesbians and gays. “Yale is a fantasy world
that’s not reflective of the real world,” says one gay student. “We’re all
going to be slapped in the face when we leave this place.”
Yet for some, the fact that Yale is better than the rest of the world isn’t
enough. “Yalies are very tolerant of more mainstream, straight-looking gay
people,” Kramer says. “But there’s a substantial section of Yale [students] who
don’t accept people who look more stereotypically gay or have more radical
views.” Describing herself with a smile as a “big-ass butch dyke,” she
adds, “People are often uncomfortable around people like me.”
Although Yale is famous for being a liberal, queer-positive enclave, I
still hear “gay” used pejoratively, when it’s assumed that nobody in the
room is gay. Every so often I hear “fag,” mostly as an insult for the
presumed straight.
Last Monday, I stood in the middle of campus with other students wearing white T-shirts and blue jeans, the uniform requested for all students on National Coming Out Day to show support for gays and lesbians. There were only 15 or 20 of us. “You should be embarrassed if you think Yale is an accepting place, yet do nothing to show that you too
are ‘accepting,’” wrote Thom Cantey in a campus newspaper. If Cantey saw students not wearing the uniform, he wrote, he would know they were “obvious traitor[s] to the beliefs [they] supposedly hold.”
Maybe the kids in red plaid and black jeans were traitors — or maybe they
just hadn’t done their laundry. Or maybe they think that gays are fully
liberated and create too much commotion, or maybe they simply can’t be
bothered. In America we condemn bigotry and excuse apathy, but at their
core, are they really all that different?
I find that many straight students here, particularly straight males, take
a not-in-my-backyard view of homosexuality: Sure, be gay; but don’t sleep
in the bunk bed above me and for God’s sake don’t tell me about your lover.
The last time I saw two men holding hands on campus was about a year ago.
The last time I saw a straight couple making out in the courtyard was last
night. Gayness may be a popular slogan here, but it doesn’t mean it’s a
visible part of the landscape. Learning the appropriate, non-offensive
language is one thing. Living that language is another.
Last Monday, the National Coming Out Day festivities included a sparsely attended same-sex kiss-in. I realized very few people here would scribble profane graffiti on a dorm wall, but just as few would dare participate in a kiss-in that might expose them to the realization that homosexuality (and all the graffiti that goes with it) might be only a kiss away from real life.
My friend Jason Knight remembers coming out publicly last year, at the
vigil following Shepard’s murder. “When we came together for that vigil,”
he says, “that was me bearing witness to myself, looking in the mirror and liking what I saw. Finally I was happy for who I was.”
I await, with little patience, the day when all of us are just as happy for who he is.
Humorist Calvin Trillin recounts a story of returning to Yale in 1970,
13 years after his graduation, and asking a group of seniors if anyone
in their class would become president.
The students looked befuddled. One asked, “President of what?”
Trillin’s visit missed George W. Bush by
a couple of years — the GOP hopeful graduated from Yale in 1968 — but the point is a good one: What makes this man presidential material? By all accounts, Bush’s Yale career
included as little public service as one could imagine, though he did
volunteer his time as president of the notorious Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Garry Trudeau, Yale class of 1970 and “Doonesbury” author, recently
reported that DKE’s notable accomplishment under Bush’s leadership
was branding its pledges with the fraternity symbol.
Ouch.
I wanted to be president once. I stuffed my bookshelf with tomes like “A
Young American’s Guide to Politics” and “Young Abe Lincoln,” went to work
in the Senate when I was 14 and, yes, bought “Doonesbury” collections to brush up on recent political history.
Then Bill Clinton happened — and I don’t mean the Monica affair. I
remember saving the 1992 election special of Time magazine, the one
featuring Bill biting his lower lip beside the headline “A Man From Hope.” I
also remember throwing it out, after the campaign finance scandals and the
innumerable political betrayals, after everyone but Bill himself realized
that eight years in office would leave him no legacy worth remembering. I
remember thinking to myself: Is this what it takes to be president? Why would anyone bother?
If Trillin visited Yale with his question today, I don’t know where I’d look for an answer.
But maybe I’d start in the DKE house. Like George W. Bush, the fraternity has
matured. They no longer brand their pledges. Rumpus, the campus tabloid,
reported last year that the “Buttholes” — as the frat brothers are delicately known — now only have to endure minor tortures, like pouring honey and salsa into each other’s rectums.
I think of these activities as a sort of White House warm-up. Following George W. Bush’s example, future presidential candidates needn’t come from the prize-winners, the Phi Beta Kappas or the Political Union secretaries. No, the future president will more likely emerge from the ranks of the sodden, the wild, the on-academic-probation masses yearning to do coke.
At Yale, those already vying for political office are called “hacks” and “tools” — labels that reflect a general American disdain for politicians. Given this disdain, why would
the best and brightest ever want to run the country? And as Bush’s popularity shows, who really wants them to?
I’ve been surprised by the level of support for Bush among my generally
critical-minded fellow Yalies. In the dining hall, I ask my friends why
they’d vote for him, and after the fuzzy glances wear off — you mean
we’re supposed to have reasons? — I do get a few answers. He’s the
$36 million man! He sort of cares about education! He doesn’t say
mean things about Hispanics or waste his time learning what to call the
people who live in Kosovo! He uses words like “compassionate” and
“conservatism” in the same sentence!
But maybe the real reason is that he renews our confidence. A few D’s on
our transcripts, a few run-ins with the campus police — we can still make
our hometowns proud. This is the real civics
lesson, no matter what professors preach: that the game of politics is one even the politicians
don’t have to take seriously.
After all, as Bush told a New Hampshire fifth-grader, “Some people say
that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life.”
And how, following Clinton, could people not turn to Bush? I was 13 years
old when Clinton was elected, and regardless of ideology, it was hard not
to feel that a bright new era was upon us. The Kennedy parallels didn’t
seem too far off: Here was a man who spoke in millennial language, a
charismatic young leader who believed that politics could uplift a nation.
My pre-adolescent idealism found an object, until my adolescence became
the era of national farce.
The 1990s have been a peaceful and wealthy time for much of America. But can you
imagine a worse time for idealism about politics? I still believe in the possibility of a better world, but it’s tough to believe that running for office will do anything but bolster our citizens’ cynicism.
So Bush refreshes us. Unlike Clinton, he doesn’t pretend to
care about all points of view, so we don’t feel betrayed when he doesn’t
care about any. He isn’t in it for the power, because it’s pretty clear he
wouldn’t actually do anything. His only reason to be president, or
governor, for that matter, parallels the explanation of his involvement
with the Texas Rangers: Wouldn’t that be fun? And wouldn’t it be funny if
he pulled it off?
I would draw some conclusions here, but following Bush’s example, I think I’d rather go have a few beers and dance naked on a bar.
During my last long conversation with my mother, I asked her whether,
after she died, I should leave Yale and come home to live with my father
and sister. It was far past bedtime for both of us, but her body clock had
given up under the influence of insulin injections, chemotherapy and the
steroid pills she downed by the handful every morning. I was kept awake by
the adrenaline rush of responsibility and fear, and the searing pain of love.
The American way decrees that chicks should flee the nest, and baby boomers
can’t deny their own babies the privilege of flying solo. “Dad isn’t going
to be happy unless you’re happy,” my mother told me. “And he can’t be
happy if you give up these incredible opportunities for him.” The
syllogism seemed simple.
So here I am, on another late night 18 months later, back at Yale
for my senior year. But though I have no wish to neglect my mother’s last
instructions, I am unable to escape the gravity of my family. My sister
just went off to college as well, but my old anxiety about leaving my
father alone has only shifted focus to the complexities around his
impending remarriage. I still call him almost every day and check in with
my grandmother every week. And as my friends discuss overseas fellowships
and fun post-graduation vacations, I find myself unable to imagine being anywhere but back home with what’s left of my family.
This isn’t the way college is supposed to be. Our deans act in loco
parentis, but nobody mistakes administrators for the real thing.
We’re free of bedtimes, chores and curfews, free of expectations and
history, living in a world consisting entirely of other 20-year-olds.
College is for navel-gazing and self-actualization. Family? Who even
remembers it exists? Few of my friends have seen the place I grew up or
met my parents, and few mention anything about their folks back home.
College is for now and for the future — when we’ll graduate and move to San
Francisco, Seattle or New York, or take off to teach English in Guatemala
or France and self-actualize some more.
In a society where extended families scatter across a continent and
nuclear units move without regard to who is left behind, is it any
surprise that the model maturation process involves cutting ties to the
people who raised you? Age stratification is the social, political and
even geographic norm, accepted — contrary to many thousand years’
experience — as natural. Generation X has no faith in Social Security and
the elderly vote down school budgets, while television programmers know
that any given sitcom can only be pitched to a 10-year-wide demographic.
American Self-Reliance! Growing up means striking out for distant shores and a virgin
prairie, unencumbered by Grandma or Aunt Tillie or any obligation to anything
but your own ambition.
Here in the dorms, we have a mild expectation of spouses and children
somewhere in the future, but any current requirement of family is buried
deep and undisclosed. It’s awkward to mention my friend who loved Yale but
graduated early to save her parents another year’s tuition, or my former
roommate who now lives at home and wasn’t excused from class to attend his
grandmother’s funeral. Another friend never explains why he doesn’t talk
to his parents during the semester and never goes home for vacations. I
was blessed with a loving family and a happy childhood, so I can’t
criticize the escapist needs of my friends whose homes hold only pain; my
family lives in New York, so I don’t have to choose between them and all
the peculiarly urban opportunities. But then again, I know a lot of people with loving
families who seldom find the time to call home. We leave it all behind,
or at least we pretend to.
But by denying the connection to the people closest to us, we
sometimes lose our connection to the world. Sure, demands of the
clan can induce provincialism and xenophobia, but families also teach us that we
are neither alone nor entirely our own. They make us remember that there are a few people who will always care about us. Without this understanding, it’s hard to avoid the instability and self-doubt of college life, much less the anomie of the “real world.” But in return for this comfort, we must acknowledge what we owe — a lesson families teach best, and one both American and dorm culture could stand to learn.
The very idea of going away to college assumes that we grow best through independence,
through cutting ties with our homes and forging new connections, new friends, a
“family” of people our own age who happen to end up living down the hall.
It’s brilliant, mind-expanding, joyous. But I’m not sure it works. That
night with my mother, I learned that the crucial question about college is
the one we hope never to have to ask: For whom am I doing this? In a
free-market world, any answer but “myself” is hard to come by. As I decide
what to do and where to be after graduation, I’m trying to come up with something better.
The last time I saw my mother, she came out of her painkiller haze to wish
me a good trip back to school. I sat on the train unable to study, unable
even to think, gazing out the window through my tears at an empty
landscape. I knew she was gone. When the call came the next morning, I was
not surprised; in the company of friends, I put my suit in a bag for
the funeral and got back on the train.
I will not leave my family.
After 11 albums, a stint sleeping in a VW van and a failed Senate campaign, Utah Phillips embodies the rough-and-ready folk singer legend, even if he’s not much of a folk singer. You can count on one hand the number of times a guitar appears on his new album, “The Moscow Hold,” and any semblance of a melody is even tougher to find.
If folk humorist is a job description, though, it fits Phillips. He fills the album with Old West tall tales and hardscrabble anecdotes, delivered with a deep twang that needles under your skin and twists just as you’re getting comfortable. The improbable and the outrageously true are hard to distinguish. Take Phillips’ brief career in the wrestling ring. It ended — he claims — after he bit himself in the balls to give himself the boost of energy needed to escape from an opponent’s particularly deadly grip, “the Moscow hold” of the album’s title.
In the populist tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, Phillips’ comedy is half ribald and half common sense, full of lighthearted love of the People and a biting scorn for all upper-class absurdities. He is neither singer nor storyteller but that late 20th century equivalent: creator of funny lines. His jokes are the kind that people hear and repeat until they become national property.
“I got myself a Zen acupuncturist,” he says. “Wears a blindfold, uses darts.”
Phillips infuses several of his stories with swipes at political parties and religious dogma: “Conservatives think that the solution to every problem is punishment: ‘bigger prisons, more prisons.’ Well, I can understand why the conservative mind would be drawn to penal enlargement …” And whether he’s targeting old-time or newfangled religion, his darts always sting: “Our little Catholic church there, the only Catholic church I know of that has high-fiber, low-calorie communion wafers. They’re called ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Jesus.’”
Phillips has been a professional folkster for 20 years, and on the road for 20 more as a Utah state archivist, Industrial Workers of the World organizer and perennial losing candidate for
public office. The breadth of experience has given him the ability to keep his stories moving through the one-liners, to pause for autobiographical snippets or to swerve off on a tangent about the reason the crack in your butt is vertical instead of horizontal (so when you go down playground slides you don’t make a “thbpthbpthbpthbp” sound).
Most of the punch lines wouldn’t work without Phillips’ radical politics. Like all tall tales, the stories on “The Moscow Hold” have deeper meanings connected to the unspoken link between the everyday and the heroic. Phillips’ waiter — who protests management speed-ups by cleaning soup spoons with his used handkerchief — is a direct descendent of track-layer John Henry and his symbolic victory over the train. On “Fellow Workers,” Phillips’ recent collaboration with folk singer Ani DiFranco, every song was a union song. But on “The Moscow Hold,” capital takes a back seat to the wonders of the folk. “In a mass-market economy,” he says, “a revolutionary song is any song you choose to sing yourself.”
The Yale Club of New York, which literally overshadows Grand Central
Station with 18 floors of hotel rooms, restaurants and a spa, hosts a happy hour every
Thursday night of summer for current students and recent alumni. Half the women wear black for work and the other half for going
out after happy hour ends. They greet dimly remembered graduates and
former roommates, circle the room three times and never quite sit down.
They flush with exultation at the sense that the ruling class exists and they are it.
In three weeks, when my senior year at Yale begins, I will sit across from some of these women in the dining hall as we push fried scrod around our plates and wipe our fingers on our jeans, and nothing will ever be the same.
The Yale Club uses these nights as a come-on for prospective members, a meet-and-greet teach-in on looking comfortable in a suit and tie. The
happy hours are a good place to see a lot of people and a bad place to have a conversation with one. They frighten me: I see intimations everywhere of the divides that college so successfully hides and the real world so inexorably instills.
You can tell summer salaries by the relative levels of bravado in the clot by the entrance. The track star working in information technology for J.P.
Morgan pulls rank over the intern at Bloomberg News, while the silent girl
from my environmental studies section now pronounces the name of her law
firm with emphasis. You can watch who drinks water and fills up on the free chicken wings and who buys a round, who makes arrangements to meet for lunch in midtown and who sits in the corner with her friend from high school and leaves two hours before last call. You can watch money, power
and prestige begin to work their magic.
You can’t see any of this at school, where distinguishing the executives’ sons and university brats from the legal secretary’s daughter is just as difficult as predicting which of the English majors will go on to a Ph.D. and which will end up with an M.B.A. With few exceptions, we wear the same clothes, go to the same parties, eat the same dining-hall food and live down the hall in the same dorms. Those who have money don’t have a lot of
opportunity to spend it, and those who don’t can hide their want. The members of Student
Coalition for Diversity are just as likely to be poor, middle-income or rich as those enrolled in the upper-level economics seminar.
The cloaking of class serves a purpose; though you won’t find any
trust-fund babies among the student dish-washers, it’s no accident that
Yale no longer charges different prices for different-sized rooms. For
four years, we’re told, your parents’ salary doesn’t impress us and your
Internet start-up won’t make you popular. Do the work, edit a newspaper,
spend 10 hours a week teaching math to third graders; just don’t let
dollars intrude on the erudition. The self-congratulation is for plays,
papers, holding your own on a Saturday night and opening the library on
Sunday morning. You’re at home here, and none of your roommates knows how
you pay the rent.
All that changed for me this summer. Suddenly I began thinking about my
fellow students and their money. The issue was no longer our parents’
salaries, but our own earning potential. The theater major working at
Performance Space 122 is a no-show at the Yale Club. One friend is
planning a museum exhibit, another raises money for a nonprofit housing
center. How would their occupations hold up in the
my-company-bought-out-your-company pissing contest?
The divisions masked by dorms and dining halls come out in choice of
internships, in the restaurants we suggest and the names we drop, in our
work uniforms and our after-work entertainment. The language of job titles
and hierarchy, housing costs and corner offices — the conversation that
supersedes major and sorority and extracurricular to demarcate adult
tribes — now buzzes around every gathering. When I see my high school
classmates who didn’t go to Yale, the variation in career goals, from
accounting to animal rights, is far more problematic than the various
college destinations were. Suddenly we have set out on paths away from
college and many of them lead to different worlds.
Somehow I never thought that some of my friends would buy in and others
would drop out, or if I did, it never hit me that I would have to choose
between them. I worked this summer for a union-oriented public policy
group, and I would go from writing screeds against the avarice of global
finance to having drinks with global financiers in training. One way or
another, I was faking it.
Yale was, too, in the implicit promise that old egalitarian school spirit
would keep its hold outside the gates. I don’t want to know that, once we
graduate, half of my intramural football team won’t be able to talk to the other half about
what they do all day. I don’t want to hear self-definitions change from “a
cappella singer” to “corporate lawyer,” to watch the boys who preferred
kegs to books become big shots through fraternity connections. I don’t
want to divide my corporate from my non-corporate friends and only call
the ones who make the cut. But as we meet after work to compare days and
lifestyles and worldviews — or to talk around the differences — I can’t
help noticing the gulf growing.
Back on campus, conversation will turn to classes and hook-ups, the
commonalities that hide the differences in where we come from. I fear
that they will no longer hide the differences in where we’re going. Whose
dining hall food will turn into expense-account dinners, and who will
hot-plate rice and beans four nights a week? Who will own a closet full of
business suits, and who will still wear the same T-shirts two years from
now? The Yale Club costs thousands of dollars a year to join, and once we
leave the dining hall, the artists, activists, traders and lawyers won’t
sit at the same table anymore.
I’ve stopped going to the Thursday night happy hours. A year from now,
I’ll no longer go to college. And what I will miss most is the grand
illusion that we are all in this together.
