As students who took Sociology of Hip-Hop in the spring of 2009, we believe that Stephen Wu’s viewpoint (“Jay-Z: Not a 21st-Century Homer” The Hoya, A3, Nov.1) on Jay-Z alternates between ignorance and condescension. The author’s limited knowledge of Jay-Z, or hip-hop itself, dooms the piece from the start. His poor grasp of the culture, reduced to a problematic description of “crude and unpleasant,” immediately discounts his ability to form any sort of broad conclusion about the course or the man himself.
At the core, Wu’s piece typifies our culture and academia’s response to the work of minority artists. Wu, consciously or not, is embodying our society’s apprehension and bias in appreciating the work of seemingly “uneducated,” structurally marginalized minority voices and represents the barriers that prevent black artists from participating in critical discourse in our country. By devaluing the artistic merit of Jay-Z and the genre of hip-hop, Wu is perpetuating the trend in America of venerating white, affluent, male voices at the expense of other identity groups historically pushed to the outskirts of the intellectual sphere i.e., African Americans, Latinos, women, LGBTQ-identified Americans, etc.
In the same vein, we wonder if Wu would take issue with the philosophy department at Georgetown offering a class that studies “The Wire,” a television drama that delves deeply into the lives of Baltimore citizens. Created by David Simon, the show explores many of the same themes evident in Jay-Z’s music: the struggle to overcome one’s surroundings, the hopelessness of the ghetto and the conflicts of being a poor urban youth. Would the author discount this course and this show for the same reasons he attacks Jay-Z? After all, they both represent “an element of modern American society that many find crude and unpleasant.”
Moreover, Wu mistakenly implies that engagement with classical texts and critical analysis of hip-hop are mutually exclusive. In fact, knowledge of canonical literature arguably enhances one’s ability to glean cultural and philosophical meaning from contemporary works. We’d encourage Wu and others who identify with his opinion to apply the same scholastic rigor dedicated to dissecting the works of Homer and Sophocles to the lyrics of Jay-Z and other hip-hop poets ranging from Rakim to Eminem.
Maybe you’ll uncover the parallels in the dramatic competitions of ancient Greece and the ciphers in rap that fuel literary and poetic excellence within the genre. Or perhaps you’ll come to view Jay-Z’s transition from the streets to the board room as a modern epic narrative in the Homeric tradition of oral poetry that alludes to the struggles of being black and successful in America.
At the end of the day, Wu’s understanding of Jay-Z as a gutter-dwelling, crass musician has the same intellectual weight as believing that the aforementioned Homer married Marge and appears on Fox each Sunday.
Lauren Reese and Mike Schoppmann are seniors in the College.
