Chapter Twelve: Street Cred

Abstract

Hip hop performances present another case when opponents dissing each other attract a crowd for harnessing the energy between attendants. The slur appropriated by the artist representing a discriminated group illustrates the principle: use the energy of the simplex instead of evading it. Immunity through contagion. Far from representing an ideology, the artist lets inspiration in and sings the message which can be felt to have collective reason. The tensor of street cred de-simplicates politics. Artists claiming a ‘moral self’ in opposition to ‘immoral others’ are simplicating the situation with a unidimensional message, whereas frame-shifters, like Professa Jay, Mbembe or 50 Cent, turn the tables on themselves to temporarily impersonate the immoral. Their ironizing renders their comparison of frames viable instead of hegemonic.

Ukweli mtupu. Tanzanian hip hop artists are after ‘the naked truth’. Speaking to me in a low-pitched Swahili is a star from the Bongo Flavor scene. Stardom does not mean wealth necessarily. In this part of the world, cash and power stick to the hands of the patrons. We are both drinking Safari Lager as guests in a mansion of a young patron, an upcoming business man in the new Tanzania of then President Magufuli. He is a respectable family man, representing kizazi kipya, a ‘new generation’ seeking prosperity without corruption. The new generation radiates purity in conduct, in style of clothing, and in the church services attended together with wife and children. So, the singer and I drink our beer outside the house.

In a corner of the front yard reserved for us, I listen to the man without taking note. My mind drifts off to his songs and especially one video. It had a certain style, exploring the rural uncool, in my opinion to exaggerated extent. But his lyrics recounting life in the village enjoyed more ‘street’ credibility in the 2000s than that of urban rappers describing the ghettos. From the Tanzanian perspective, ‘farming comes first’, kulima kwanza.

The role model of educated farmers and rappers alike has long been Tanzania’s founding president Julius Nyerere.¹ ‘The teacher’, mwalimu, had designed a socialism intended to respect the African roots of the population. He did not go as far as acknowledging the cultural differences within Africa, let alone his country. On the contrary, his purpose was to disregard ethnicity, among others by educating children in the one language of Swahili, so as to keep the country together. At retirement age, Nyerere voluntarily stepped down. He remained one of his people. A snake-charmer and friend of mine in Ukiriguru told me about the prolonged drinking bout he participated in at Nyerere’s domain near Lake Victoria after catching a black mamba up in the garden’s highest tree. In the summer of 1995 just before the country’s first multiparty elections, Nyerere came to visit our roadside town to advertise for the ruling party’s candidate Mkapa. Standing on an oil drum in the center of a dusty littered market square, before there was electricity and years before there was tarmac, he impressed us as inspiring and approachable. The model was one of us, mirroring miraculously the reality of the white boy too. What he said was endowed with the power of collective reason, transcending left and right.

Too much model will lose one credit, too little as well. Rappers with street credibility, because mirroring society, know this. Yes, fans look up to rappers. The distance narrows as they in turn prove to be like them. Furthermore, the duel, the dissing, renders no one untouchable. One must keep it real. Hip hop mirrors ‘the real situation’, hali halisi. Dare to say what people think: that this country with all the natural resources imaginable remains poor, while the leaders get richer, and civil servants, medical doctors, nurses, teachers and professors abuse their position to make more money. But include yourself in the reflection, to keep it real. In the song ndiyo mzee (‘Yes sir’) by Professa Jay, a choir plays the audience who repeats on demand the false promises of the politician. Next, the rapper persuades the audience to listen to his version of the facts to subsequently indulge him with the same chorus of blind belief. The rapper takes the consistent step of placing the mirror: the corruption goes on because of the complicity between the ruler and the ruled. In his Notes, Achilles Mbembe has thus diagnosed the postcolony, and he has been criticized for it as an Afropessimist.² What he did however, much like the Bongo Flavor artist, was to safeguard his street credibility. A rapper listing reasons for optimism amidst surrounding misery may earn credit from civil society organizations. To hip-hop fans the list will sound pathetic, if not sarcastic. A show of political correctness does not serve the cause. Collective reason peters out if the truth cannot be said. The undertow swells from the specter.

Are we witnessing the rise of the masses, going by the success of populism in democratic countries? The problem is not lack of education or poverty or the Internet.³ Large segments of the population, traditionally at the political periphery yet in numbers constituting the heart of the population, have not shifted ideology. They have not changed their minds. They have begun to mind. The division of the commons by governments, industries and multinationals has left a majority of losers. At stake in their discontent is the political system itself which the powerful profit from. The promise of democracy was for all to climb the same social ladder and those on top to make the rest better. Elections would truly reflect the will of the multitude. Street cred was what the population sought and never got from their leaders, until populists managed to harness some. That is the level of political warfare rappers deal with and the highly educated have been evading to their disgrace.

Controversial Swahili songs have explicitly grazed the limits of free speech after choir songs had for two generations been supporting government policy to the glory of Nyerere and his ruling Party of the Revolution.⁴ ‘Tanga, where have you gone?’ The band Wagosi Wa Kaya sings about the once illustrious town where the simplexes fester, about sexuality in the street, ‘Arabs’ supposedly molesting children, while ‘Indians’ would look down from their multi-story apartments to fulminate their discriminating stereotypes about blacks. Bongo Flavor artists presented it raw and mimicked simplexity to prevent their audiences from snubbing them as moralists.

The challenge cannot be underestimated. Did rap music lose its political edge when entering the mainstream arena? On the contrary, its message gained political purchase. Only, the message changed. The commercialization of rap displayed the victory of a particular ideology: neoliberalism.⁵ Money is all that matters. Who can argue with a bank note? It is a philosophy hard to outsmart. “You know the secret of the US which will keep it in power for a thousand years?” a just-graduated Trinidadian engineer asked me long ago on the first day of my first visit to New York. The answer was as blunt as his intelligence was sharp: everybody here has the same God, the dollar bill.

What Bongo Flavor artists attempt is to go where philosophy has not gone before. You cannot beat neoliberals at their game without reinforcing the game. How to avoid what Adorno called the ‘realistic dissidence’ the culture industry thrives on?⁶ Glorifying inner-city crime and extravagant consumption, the dissidence of Gangsta rap keeps the status quo intact. Tanzanian hits of the early 2000s shared their disgust about commercialization, but soon their fans gave up. They saw the irony in dancing carefree on Bongo Flavor lyrics decrying ‘the blood of citizens spilt in Kilosa’, a reference to an escalated government intervention.

Not all was lost. Bongo Flavor learned from the black tradition going back to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and actually as far as the Pensée africaine of the 1930s, to explore a position between what I would call the (carefree) dancer and the (moralistic) witch. The objective is to bring moral guidance without claiming ‘moral power’ (which would leave the listeners structurally indebted, indeed bewitched). Saying the right thing rarely makes the listener do the right thing. The fixed position, poised beyond space and time, harms the rapper’s credibility in the streets. The speaker up there, the crowd down here. Modeling stardom, the artist will want to keep it real by mirroring society. About police inquiries into his past, 50 Cent replied that the real gangsters are George Bush and his posse waging a war against a country for the oil reserves it has. In the same breath, he continued: ‘When I grow up, I want to be Bush.’⁷ He did not pretend to be better than the one critiqued. A similar energy is released when he and his artistic friends claim for themselves the derogatory word invented by racists. They address each other with the n-word, a simplex whose energy they put to use through the tensor of street credibility, which can be summed up as immunity through contagion. What does not kill makes you stronger. The n-word won’t kill you. Use what seems too hot to handle. Like the Sukuma chief controlling the witchcraft in his chiefdom by going through the contamination of becoming a witch himself, the rapper seeks what might destroy him in order to grow. 50 Cent got rich because he was willing to die tryin’, courtesy of the bullet marks his body generously displays in his video-clips.⁸ Far from representing an ideology and getting mired in moralistic mud, he strips himself to the bare to let inspiration in and sing the message which can be felt to have collective reason. The tensor of street cred de-simplicates politics (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Tensor of street credibility

To fully acknowledge the advance made with this position of choosing instead of fleeing the hurt, we should see the humanity behind the local, cultural expression. Rejecting neoliberal inequality as immoral does not solve the impasse because assumes a fixed moral position, leveling one simplex against another. The rapper’s solution is to mimic in order to immunize. Artists claiming a ‘moral self’ in opposition to ‘immoral others’ are simplicating the situation with a unidimensional message, whereas frame-shifters, like Professa Jay, Mbembe or 50 Cent, turn the tables on themselves to temporarily impersonate the immoral, as schematized above in the intersecting diagonals. Of course, 50 Cent does not dream to become Bush, or Professa Jay condones corruption. Their ironizing renders their comparison of frames viable instead of hegemonic. The cross over the matrix denotes the remedy, the tensor (see Fig. 1).

Why would good/evil be a concern to retain credibility in the ghetto? To call oneself bad, immoral, is a show of strength. Is weak/strong not the actual frame in the ghetto? The star could easily have conspired with the fans to be adored as an enlightened pastor without further due, but opts for the hard way. The play with the frame the fans wanted to believe in raises their awareness about the sphere they are in. Do they belong there? The fans (inter)mediate the communication, checking the lyrics in reference to their feelings. The mediation will make the artist lose some fans but gain others, the likeminded. Porosity of spheres counters fragmentation of the social network.

The appropriation of a slur does not end the discrimination, but power is drawn from contamination, from adopting offensive content. To feel the speech’s energy is to experience the source of production. In Sukuma initiation, the cooling act after a personal sacrifice, after overcoming the ‘heat’ (busebu) by embracing its uncertain impact instead of fleeing it, empowers the participants. Against historical materialists intervening in material relations, from which change in the ideational superstructure would subsequently follow, hip hop artists believe that altering speech at the level of cultural frames affects power structures.⁹ The reason is the third dimension, the life sensing which immunity after willful contagion does. A post-Fordist knowledge economy acknowledges that language in a network releases energy.

Children of the information society know. The third dimension (energy next to event and meaning) supplies a political compass quite unlike left/right guiding the baby boomers, the members of the large cohort born just after the Second World War and raised in a time of economic recovery and cultural optimism. During the State of the Union in January 2020, the boomer viewers thought to recognize the old fight of left and right in that flash of a second when the Democrat speaker of the house ripped up the Republican president’s speech. Members of generation X, Y and Z must have seen in her reaction to his snubbing a handshake something else than ideology or good manners. The Republican’s conduct installed a virus, an infective agent that the Democrat’s reaction failed to exploit but simply reproduced. Forget about ideologies, the good and the bad. In a social network without encompassing normative system, the name of the game has changed into the use of energy, the contagion that rappers can teach us how to deal with.

How to wake up from the boomer slumber that hit an entire society convinced that the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 testified to the victory of liberal democracy?¹⁰ What makes the world tick today are one-way signals directing reactions and energizing feelings. The wrestling with energies on social media has become basics. Speaking of which: professional wrestling provides a clue about the thing that boomers simply won’t get. How could enormous arenas be filled with WWE fans and the performances be televised while they just mimic title-matches? The fighters are caricatures engaging in theatrical rivalry and over-the-top acrobatics. The outcome of these matches is always fixed so how could they entertain audiences? The logical reply echoes the nihilism of Gen X, for whom nothing is authentic (vide Baudrillard), as well as the experience of generations Y and Z who grew up as gamers (after Baudrillard: make hay of the inauthentic). Why wait for twelve rounds of boxing before a fighter gets seriously punched or knocked out, if you can watch wrestlers hit every second, hooked, held, strangled and molested in response to the public’s cheers and screams? As tempers boil over, all engage in the suspension of disbelief. That is the fun, as much as watching a movie and getting into the story, feeling the horror, without thinking about the camera. One can learn to forget the frames. As with the footballers greeting the flag, I am just arguing that there are spheres, such as public fora, where we better not forget.

Many will agree with the witty comment about the 2020 State of the Union that the speech was a theatrical display of fake-facts and half-truths to which the audience applauded, which made the parliament look like a wrestling arena wherein rivals and public suspended their disbelief.¹¹ The audience’s response normalized the speech. Might there be a deeper wisdom to the mimicry they displayed? Speech able to suspend disbelief fascinates. It highlights the contagion at work, the simplex ideas that infect with a single emotion. A simplex instantly gratifies in communication, as opposed to open-ended dialogues without clear beginning and end, possibly reversing a situation and feared by those in power and with stashed bank accounts. To see through simplication, the public must shift attention from the host to the virus. An ethnic slur or a sexist remark goes viral faster than the criticist can handle. The new situation requires more adaption from mirrorists of reality than from modelists. For example, alert a Democrat senator about sexism and he or she will respond in kind with a measure advantaging women. Sexism then breeds sexism. The contagion typical of simplexes challenges the old ways of democratic debate. The information society has made politics a whole new ball game. Professional politicians not trained to jockey this kind of horse are taken for a ride, winding up in a wrestling match with fixed outcome few intellectuals are equipped to handle.¹² The reaching hand and the torn paper after the State of Union in January 2020 tell us everything we need to know.

The empowerment after sacrifice, immunity through contagion, willing to engage in the open-ended duel, the dissing of the rapping opponent and ‘keeping it real’, is to accept the contingency of life, which we have called the real. Tanzanian hip hop artists, dissing rappers, Black intellectuals, diviners and football matches carve out an exit from simplex society. Admit the real and collective reason may emerge. Their tensor disagrees with the simplex certainty of the Quick Pull oracle, the post-truth tweet, the word-policing, remote e-warfare, double tap and Mwanga magic.

What can we learn, the next chapter explores, from the massive success of Charismatic churches in the global south? Surely, religion creates opportunities for frameshift. The believer can alternate between the rules of heaven and earth. Is the believer naïve, disregarding the facts of reality? Or are we underestimating the reflexivity involved in a contemporary religious belief?