Abstract
This chapter introduces the book’s central thesis: that Hip Hop’s early history unfolds in a manner remarkably similar to the evolution of artistic creation in general in Hegel’s Aesthetics. It explicates art’s “highest vocation” as the most fundamental mechanism by which a people initially and collectively raises itself from a state of radical alienation into the self-determining, higher spheres of actualized freedom, in the absence of other determinate state structures upon which to draw. Challenges from the infamous thesis that art “remains a thing of the past” are answered through Hegel’s account of the unjust social conditions that may force art to return, and Vernon argues that Hip Hop’s emergence as broad-based and varied aesthetic culture can be understood as just such a resurgence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I’m not alone in “biting” the title. Paul Butler, Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice (New York: The New Press, 2009), does the same, although his book is less a theory of justice, in the philosophical sense, than a (lucid and warmly recommended) critique of the American war on drugs, and the carceral state it feeds.
- 2.
Throughout, I will use this spelling in deference to the arguments of KRS-One, The Gospel of Hip Hop: First Instrument (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2009), 63ff. Spellings diverge across texts on the topic (including those of KRS-One, himself), occasionally reflecting a change in meaning. I consistently use this spelling to indicate the broader aesthetic culture, defined below, while many use it to refer more narrowly to certain forms what I will call “rap music” (“conscious rap”, “underground rap”, or even all rap, etc.). Even in quoted material, I generally refrain from using the term, in any spelling, to indicate the musical poetry alone, and when I do it is usually either noted or clear from context.
- 3.
G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I & II, trans. T.M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)/Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, I, II, II in Werke 13, 14, 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970); pagination in the former is consecutive across the two volumes, but not in the latter, so references in running text will be first to the English version by page number, followed by the volume and page number in the German, in the form (1/I, 13). I limit my analysis, here, to the standard edition compiled by Heinrich Hotho. There has long been debate regarding the validity of Hotho’s edition, and much recent scholarship focuses either on the students’ transcripts available from the different years Hegel gave the course (e.g. David James, Art, Myth and Society in Hegel’s Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2009)) or supplements analysis of the standard edition with consideration of them (e.g. many of the contributions to Stephen Houlgate, ed. Hegel and The Arts (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007)). As yet, however, there is no single scholarly edition drawn from, or scholarly consensus regarding the relative merits of, the various available sources. Because most work on Hegel’s philosophy of art—particularly outside of Hegel studies—is grounded in Hotho’s edition, which remains the most complete source available in English, I limit my analysis to the standard German text and translation.
- 4.
As Jack Kaminsky notes, because “[m]odern philosophers […] have generally repudiated his political as well as his metaphysical doctrines”, for many decades, Hegel’s “aesthetics [was] treated most shabbily [for u]nlike other parts of his work, it [was] not even […] subjected to the kind of strict analysis which should precede the act of rejection” (Hegel on Art: An Interpretation of Hegel’s Aesthetics (SUNY Press, 1962), vii–viii). While there has recently been a resurgence of interest in Hegel’s theory of art, many of these texts seek to “disengage his aesthetics […] from any metaphysical claims concerning the Absolute” (James, 2). As I aim to show in this text, however, the most enduring of these “metaphysical” claims concern human freedom, from which no aspect of Hegel’s work can be disconnected; his theory of art, perhaps, least of all.
- 5.
Scholars like William Desmond have long wondered why “Hegel’s views on art seem to have suffered a certain neglect”, despite the fact that his “Lectures on Aesthetics have a wide accessibility with an appeal not limited to the professional philosopher” (Art and The Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany, SUNY Press, 1986), xi). As Brian K. Etter notes, however, the fact that Hegel’s Aesthetics “has not received the attention it deserves is largely due to its having so little in common with modern preoccupations” (Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 16). More on this in the conclusion.
- 6.
The gold standard for overall histories of Hip Hop culture and rap music, in my opinion, remains Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005), but the best single resource on the culture’s first decade—the time period which will be my primary focus—is Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, Yes Yes Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2002). Other accounts of Hip Hop’s general trajectory include Marcus Reeves, Somebody Scream: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power (New York: Faber and Faber, 2008), and Nelson George, hip hop america (New York: Viking, 1998), but they, like most, tilt their focus to rap music, at the expense of the original Bronx, and then broader, culture. Written during the years of its formation, Steven Hager’s Hip Hop (self-published, material copyright 1984) is also an essential volume, collecting Hager’s pioneering journalism, which (in an early article in the Village Voice) offered not only one of the first usages of the term in print, but perhaps the first effort to “make explicit [to a broader audience] that the subcultures of b-boying, rap and graffiti were related” (Chang, Can’t Stop, 193); it is an expanded edition of the long out of print and extremely difficult to obtain Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984). As it is more readily available, citations from Hager will be to the self-published version; because it is un-paginated, and it isn’t clear if it will always have the same page numbers by count, I will cite it by chapter number. Joseph C. Ewoodzie, Jr.’s Break Beats in the Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop’s Early Years (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is perhaps the first sustained academic analysis strictly dedicated to the rise of the culture in the 1970s and raises many of the same questions I do, here; however, Ewoodzie firmly rejects an essentially aesthetic answer to them. Rather, the model through which he theorizes the culture’s early history primarily concerns how boundaries are drawn around cultural forms, and thus the framework he develops “is not really about hip-hop. It help[s] to explain hip-hop, [but] it can help to explain other new social and cultural entities, like food trucks” (191).
- 7.
There are those, such as James , who quite correctly focus on art’s “cultural and historical function within the ethical life of a people” (4), rather than gallery objects. But unlike, for example, those studying rival Continental aestheticians like Gilles Deleuze, there has been little interest among Hegelians to relate his work to more recent, popular forms of aesthetic expression.
- 8.
A case of the exception proving the rule is Alison Stone’s The Value of Popular Music: An Approach From Post-Kantian Aesthetics (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). In “challenging the Western tradition of ranking reason and intellect above all things corporeal” (xv), Stone seeks to depart from the path of “[m]ost academic philosophers [who] continue to focus on classical music, that is, the broad tradition of Western art music” (xxv), and defends popular music as aesthetically valuable on its own terms; curiously, she does so on both Hegelian and anti-Hegelian grounds. With Hegel, from whom she claims much of the dominant aesthetic tradition’s offending “presupposition descends”, Stone affirms the intimate “connect[ion of] art with truth” (xxiv); against Hegel, she denies that art “must have serious metaphysical and religious content” which are presumed to have a “rational structure”, and argues that popular art reveals that there are “truths to be presented instead [that are] concerned [with] the importance of materiality”, and which are thus best presented by works that “entertain, arouse and please the body” (37–8). While she treats some early rap music through this lens in interesting ways, the most revealing difference between our respective takes on both art and Hegel is that “freedom” doesn’t merit an index entry in her book; this, perhaps, explains her focus on popular artworks, as distinct from my concern with a populist aesthetic culture.
- 9.
Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 22. In the conclusion, I will consider whether Potter, himself, escapes this charge.
- 10.
Bakari Kitwana, Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America (New York: Basic Civitas, 2005), 105.
- 11.
Potter, 22. I replace “rap music” with “Hip Hop” as this reflects the identification of the terms in Potter’s text. While agreeing with most scholars that “it is crucial to locate the music (as well as the other elements of hip-hop culture such as graffiti […]) in the specific cultural histories within which it […] emerged” (26), Potter nevertheless argues that “there would be little point in constructing a linear ‘history’ of hip-hop” (28), perhaps because that would challenge the centrality of rap. In part to contest the centring of rap in Hip Hop scholarship, it is precisely such a linear account that I aim to both detail and justify, here. I return to Potter’s concerns regarding the “ubiquitous academic ‘we’” in the conclusion.
- 12.
In my view, the finest work on Hegel’s writings on African peoples and their harmful legacy has been done by Robert Bernasconi, for example, “Hegel at the Court of Ashanti”, in Stuart Barnett, ed. Hegel After Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1998), 41–63 and “Hegel’s Racism: A Reply to McCarney”, Radical Philosophy, 119 (May/June 2003), 35–37. For an excellent discussion of the presence of anti-Blackness in Hegel’s account of art, see Sander L. Gilman, On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany (Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1982), 93–102.
- 13.
In a rare exception, John P. Pittman, “‘Y’all Niggaz Better Recognize’: Hip Hop’s Dialectical Struggle for Recognition”, in Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason, ed. Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby, foreword by Cornel West (Chicago and la Salle: Open Court, 2005), 41–53), uses Hegel’s infamous account of the struggle for recognition to explain the role of battles and “beef” in the music; a comparison also briefly suggested by Michael Eric Dyson, Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip Hop (Philadelphia: Basic Civitas Books, 2007), 24. Like much recent literature, however, these texts conflate Hip Hop with only one of its elements (rap music, and a narrow slice of rap at that), at the expense of the wider culture. They also, in my view, both misconstrue the nature and exaggerate the importance of this legendary passage in Hegel’s thought. I challenge the prevalent, “struggle”-based reading of Hegel as a theorist of inter-subjective recognition in “Why We Fight: Hegel’s Struggle For Recognition Revisited”, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 9:2 (2013), 178–197, and “Siding with Freedom: Towards a Prescriptive Hegelianism”, Critical Horizons 12:1 (2011), 49–69.
- 14.
Robert Pippin, After The Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 35.
- 15.
The most compelling examples, to my mind, are Pippin, Etter , and Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- 16.
hip hop America, ix.
- 17.
Given the diverse audiences for which this book was written, and the counterintuitive nature of the thesis, I have elected to both limit my engagement with the secondary literature on Hegel’s theory of art and to reserve it largely for the endnotes. While I engage more deeply with Hip Hop studies scholarship, given the complexity of the texts and history at issue, my consideration of it will be similarly incomplete. I briefly discuss the book’s potential import for general trends in both academic discourses more robustly in the conclusion.
- 18.
Thus, I take my work to be an example of what Jane Anna Gordon calls “creolizing theory”, cf. Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau Through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
- 19.
Stephen Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 71–5, provides a good survey of some debates surrounding the origin of this claim (i.e. whether it comes from Hegel, Hotho, or the student records of Hegel’s lectures that Hotho collected); however, as Rutter notes, in any iteration “no reader of the lectures can remain insensitive to their air of loss or to the skepticism with which Hegel treats the art of his day” (26).
- 20.
Stephen Houlgate, “The ‘End’ of Art”, Owl of Minerva, 29 (1997), 1–21, provides a good corrective to some of the more crude readings of this passage, grounded in this qualification.
- 21.
After The Beautiful, 53.
- 22.
This connection has often been downplayed in the literature due to an emphasis on the transcendent divine in Hegel’s thought (see, e.g. Desmond, Etter and Kaminsky ). Increasingly, readers of Hegel have come to recognize that what is at stake in his work is the seemingly more immanent “realization of human freedom, [or] the effort to become the collective subject we take ourselves […] to be”; however, they also tend to hold that, philosophically and socially, such “ambition requires a flight at a far, far higher speculative atmosphere than anyone would dare to fly at today [even if] there are elements of Hegel’s account that remain valuable ” (Pippin, 17).
- 23.
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), §197–207.
- 24.
While noting that Hegel calls art “a need of Spirit”, Bungay nevertheless cautions that we “must not be tempted to […] equate Spirit with real, thinking human subjects”, and should more properly understand it as more general “concept in terms of which anthropological and psychological phenomena can be understood” (27–28). The abstraction of this concept has led some, like Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (New York: Cambridge University Press), 1979, to invoke a kind of transcendent “cosmic reason or spirit” in Hegel, of which humanity is the mere “vehicle” (158ff). In what follows, I defend a more robustly living, human form of Spirit, which lies closer to Houlgate’s view that “for Hegel, there is no cosmic consciousness or ‘world spirit’ apart from or outside human existence. It is in human beings alone […] that being attains consciousness of itself. We are the being-that-has-become-spiritual” (“Introduction: An Overview of Hegel’s Aesthetics”, in Hegel and the Arts, xi–xxviii (xiii)).
- 25.
Cf., Etter , “the Idea found in art pertains to human freedom, so […] the [aesthetic] Ideal becomes that of human freedom in its focus as well […] the ideal is not simply an intellectual construct, but rather the artistic representation of the concept of human freedom” (44). As he notes, it may be precisely the idea that “humanity [has] a given nature, out of which emerges certain definite needs [such that] the need for sensuous recognition of our nature is what gives birth to art in the first place” (17), implying that “the traditional value of art […] lies in its ethical substance and function” (6), that explains the disinterest in and/or condemnation of Hegel’s Aesthetics; for, in large measure, “the connection between art and ethical content has been rejected by the twentieth century” (39). More on this in the conclusion.
- 26.
On the development of this concept, see Rüdiger Bubner, “The ‘Religion of Art’”, in Hegel and the Arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate, 296–309.
- 27.
This is distinct, I should note, from the claim that art recedes to the past because it has been effectively replaced by the more adequate discourse of philosophy; cf., e.g. Dieter Henrich, “The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel’s Aesthetics”, in Michael J. Inwood, ed., Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 199–207. This isn’t to say such a reading is inconsistent with Hegel’s text; indeed we will discuss the transition to more adequate forms of spirit’s expression in Chap. 6. But, the adequacy of this discourse to art’s content is less relevant when grasping art’s declining role in collective social life than the fact that, as Rutter puts it, “Hegel bears witness in his lectures on aesthetics not to a cessation of artistic activity but to a decline in its significance for human self-understanding” (Hegel on the Modern Arts, 6).
- 28.
Martin Donogho, “Art and History: Hegel on the End, the Beginning, and the Future of Art”, in Hegel and the Arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate, 179–215 (186).
- 29.
Ibid., 181.
- 30.
Bungay, 6.
- 31.
James, 37.
- 32.
Kaminsky, 172.
- 33.
KRS-One, Gospel, 192.
- 34.
Quoted in Ivor R. Miller, Aerosol Kingdom: Subway Painters of New York City (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2002), 164.
- 35.
For the views of some pioneers who claim it may be too late to save the original term, see I. Miller , 162–167. While it is increasingly common to treat Hip Hop and (at least certain forms of) rap music interchangeably, there remain those who, even when focusing on Hip Hop’s poetic element, draw a distinction between the music and the culture; see, e.g. Cheryl Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), esp. 1–15, the varied essays collected in William Eric Perkins, ed. Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), or any recent public statement regarding the terms by Killer Mike from the brilliant rap duo Run the Jewels.
- 36.
Graffiti’s place in Hip Hop culture has been denied both by pioneering painters (e.g. early writers like FARGO: “I don’t see the correlation […] between hip-hop and graffiti […] one has nothing to do with the other” and BLADE “[Hip Hop] has nothing to do with the original stuff, when [graffiti] writing came along in 1970”, both speaking in the film Just To Get A Rep (2004; directed by Peter Gerard)) and by, founding musicians like Grandmaster Flash (“You know what bugs me, they put hip-hop with graffiti. How do they intertwine? Graffiti is one thing that is art, and music is another”, Nelson George, “Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak The Truth”, in That’s the Joint: The Hip Hop Studies Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2012), ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 44–54 (45)). It is worth noting that this attitude is never found among self-identified breakers .
- 37.
Monica R. Miller, Religion and Hip Hop (New York: Routledge, 2013), 16.
- 38.
For example, less than a quarter of the 44 essays collected in Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, ed. That’s the Joint explicitly treat graffiti or breaking, and even DJing is infrequently thematized therein; despite its title, Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) concentrates almost exclusively on rap lyrics, barely mentioning breaking and graffiti.
- 39.
Alonzo Westbrook, Hip Hoptionary: The Dictionary of Hip Hop Terminology (New York: Harlem Moon, 2002), 64.
- 40.
M.K. Asante, Jr., It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 9.
- 41.
Paul Edwards, The Concise Guide to Hip-Hop Music: A Fresh Look at the Art of Hip-Hop from Old-School Beats to Freestyle Rap (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015), 47.
- 42.
Julius Bailey, Philosophy and Hip-Hop: Ruminations on Postmodern Cultural Form (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 6; 9; 34.
- 43.
Mark Katz, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 36.
- 44.
Mickey Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead?: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Most Wanted Music (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007), 4.
- 45.
Katz , 40. D.ST is perhaps the most-heard Hip Hop DJ in the world, having provided the scratch element to Herbie Hancock’s landmark single, “Rockit”. Throughout, I use the chosen names of Hip Hop artists, rather than adding their merely given names; the reasons for this should become clear in Chaps. 3 and 4.
- 46.
Carlton A. Usher, A Rhyme is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Hip Hop and the Creation of a Political Philosophy (Trenton: Africa Wold Press, 2006), 67.
- 47.
David Toop, Rap Attack 2 (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1991), 196.
- 48.
KRS-One, Ruminations (New York: Welcome Rain, 2003), 197.
- 49.
KRS-One, Gospel, 61.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vernon, J. (2018). Introduction. In: Hip Hop, Hegel, and the Art of Emancipation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91304-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91304-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91303-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91304-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)