The Hip-Hop Wars: What We Talk
About When We Talk About Hip-Hop--
and Why It Matters by Tricia Rose
Much Needed Perspective And Call For Transformative Action
Hip-hop is in crisis. For the past dozen years, the most commercially
successful hip-hop has become increasingly saturated with caricatures of
black gangstas, thugs, pimps, and ’hos. The controversy surrounding hip-
hop is worth attending to and examining with a critical eye because, as
scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose argues, hip-hop has become a
primary means by which we talk about race in the United States. In The
Hip-Hop Wars, Rose explores the most crucial issues underlying the
polarized claims on each side of the debate: Does hip-hop cause violence,
or merely reflect a violent ghetto culture? Is hip-hop sexist, or are its
detractors simply anti-sex? Does the portrayal of black culture in hip-hop
undermine black advancement? A potent exploration of a divisive and
important subject, The Hip-Hop Wars concludes with a call for the
regalvanization of the progressive and creative heart of hip-hop. What

Rose calls for is not a sanitized vision of the form, but one that more
accurately reflects a much richer space of culture, politics, anger, and yes,
sex, than the current ubiquitous images in sound and video currently
provide.
Personal Review: The Hip-Hop Wars: What We Talk About When
We Talk About Hip-Hop--and Why It Matters by Tricia Rose
Having recently discussed _The Hip Hop Wars_ with numerous students
and people, it has become increasingly clear to me how necessary Rose's
arguments are to the hyperbolic and contentious context currently shaping
the national conversation on hip hop. The book's most significant
contribution is to demonstrate that hip hop is so heavily coded with implied
and symbolic meanings; and that we can no longer afford to think of hip
hop simply as "innocent music and artistry." Nor is it enough that there are
numerous underground artists doing something different than what
mainstream hip hop promotes.
If the history of this country wasn't so fraught with old and new forms of
racism, perhaps that approach to hip hop would be possible. Instead, we
have a context in which hip hop is constantly made to stand in as a
representation of all black people and to stand in for various forms of
"deviance." Rose demonstrates how representations circulated by
mainstream hip hop allow people to excuse themselves from dealing with
their own complicity in racism, sexism, homophobia and systemic
inequality. By taking both hip hop's critics and defenders to task, Rose
insists that there are very real consequences to leaving these matters
unaddressed.
Stepping into a club and seeing the ways so many men and women, boys
and girls of all races mimic what they see in mainstream hip hop
representations tells us that the 'hip hop trinity' is schooling youth to
interact in ways that often reinforce sexism/racism/homophobia while
leaving the larger forces that drive systemic inequality invisible.
One of the things I have witnessed consistently in discussing _The Hip
Hop Wars_ is how people will often fall back into the rhetoric of either the
critics or the defenders of hip hop as they talk about the book. Though
Rose takes the time to outline the mutual denials that both critics and
defenders have left intact, people's refusal to detach themselves from their
investments in the current state of mainstream hip hop often takes us back
into the same spiraling cycle. Because after all, isn't mainstream hip hop
tremendously useful for allowing numerous investments to remain intact?
One can hold onto his or her investment in racist projections of 'pathology',
because this allows them to evade the ways they are complicit in
perpetuating systemic inequality. One can hold onto their investment in
racist projections of 'sexual deviance,' because this helps one disavow the
practices and policies that perpetuate women of color's vulnerability to
violence and inequality. One can hold onto sexist projections of 'hoes,'
because this allows investments in destructive forms of masculine power

to remain intact. One can hold onto their investments in the capital and
wealth derived from mainstream hip hop by saying that performers are just
'artists', because this helps people distance themselves from the ways life
chances are systematically being stripped away from youth in devastated
communities.
And my favorite, one can claim to be THE exception to this context,
miraculously outside of the world of mainstream hip hop even as it
pervades the culture, people's interactions and assumptions everywhere
(see Drew's review above).
Rose is most powerful in her call to move beyond this spiraling cycle
toward transformative action--both in the industry, the music, in ourselves,
and in mass social action toward systemic equality. But only a few are
fearless enough to take on that call.
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