Revisiting Rap’s Groundbreaking Book, Black Noise

It’s the first book that I suggest students read when they express any interest in Hip-hop studies. Here’s why

It took generations for Jazz, one of America’s classic art forms, to be taken seriously in music schools and conservatories. Hip-Hop, shared many of the challenges that Jazz faced in its early days, namely that it was thought to not hold any value culturally or socially. That both genres emerged from the lives and experiences of the Black working class, only heightened the academic disdain directed to them. Ultimately it was a generation of writers and scholars, A.B. Spellman, Eileen Southern and Amiri Baraka included among them, that help make claims on the significance of Jazz music. If there was one figure who had a similar impact for Hip-Hop, it is Tricia Rose, whose groundbreaking book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America which was published in 1994.

To be sure, there were many journalists who were important chroniclers of early Hip-Hop culture. Indeed, journalists Nelson George and Greg Tate were singular figures in the 1980s, as well as British journalist David Toop, whose Rap Attack (1984) is generally regarded as the first book-length academic study of Hip-Hop. By the early 1990s, with the launch of magazines like The Source and Vibe there was a generation of journalists like Joan Morgan, Scott Poulson-Bryant, dream hampton, Kevin Powell and Bakari Kitwana, to name just a few, who were offering serious commentary about Hip-Hop culture in print.

I can’t recall exactly when I first heard the name Tricia Rose, but I knew enough of her in December of 1992 — this in the years before email, the internet and social media — to reach out to her (I probably called) for a meeting at the 1992 MLA meeting in New York City. It was already known in the academic underground that Rose was writing the “first” Hip-Hop dissertation. Rose was presenting at that MLA, the first that I attended, which remains memorable to me as Houston Baker, Jr. gave the Presidential address, and my future Duke colleagues Fred Jameson and Wahneema Lubiano were on a panel together.

Though this MLA meeting was held literally a train ride from my parents’ apartment in the Bronx, I remember feeling out of place as a Black kid with enough of an imposter’s syndrome to line those #6-line tracks back to the Bronx. I was in my second year as an MA student at a small liberal arts school — SUNY Fredonia — and there was no real reason for Professor Rose to have agreed to meet with me. But Rose did meet with me, for almost an hour, offering advice on my pursuit of a Ph.D.; I’ve never forgotten that, and have tried to pay it forward every chance that I could.

I do recall walking into Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo, NY two years later, and one year into the Ph.D. program in American Studies at the University of Buffalo, and greeting the late Greg Dimitriadis, as we were both, literally, waiting for the staff to crack open the box with copies of Black Noise.

Trained in American literature and creative writing, I had tired, even in the early 1990s, at strained attempts to read Hip-Hop lyrics through some framing of great American literature. I had been looking for something else, something that spoke more palpably to the intellectual excitement that Hip-Hop stirred in me; I was looking for language. Black Noise provided that language: incisive, critical, theoretical and accessible.

When I was a teen in college, I walked around with a copy of Haki Madubuti’s Enemies the Clash of Races, until it was so tattered that I had to replace it. In graduate school Madhubuti’s book was replaced by bell hooks and Cornel West’s Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life and Rose’s Black Noise; I still have my tattered copy of the latter, with the pink and blue highlights throughout. I’ve used that tattered copy not only in my own research, but in every iteration of the History of Hip-Hop class that I co-taught for a decade with Grammy-award winning producer 9th Wonder. It is always one of the first books that I suggest students read when they express any interest in Hip-hop studies.

I am of an age to remember a time when writing and teaching so-called Hip-Hop studies meant tracking down obscure articles in the Village Voice, Billboard Magazine and copies of The Journal of Black Sacred Music — shout-out to the former Jon Michael Spencer (Yahya Jongintaba) — or parsing ideas with folk in The Source (at a time when it mattered) and Vibe Magazine.

It was this on-going archival desire to compile articles to teach courses in Hip-Hop studies that led Murray Forman and I to co-edit the first edition of That’s the Joint: the Hip-Hop Studies Reader, which is now in its third edition (Regina Bradley joining the editorial team). Professor Rose’s essay “Never Trust a Big Butt and a Smile”, originally published in Camera Obscura (1990), was — easily — the first article we wanted included.

“Never Trust a Big Butt and Smile” is the Holy Grail of Hip-Hop Studies; it is Hip-Hop Studies’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, as in ground zero for an emerging Black feminist critique, not only in Hip-Hop Studies, but the similarly emerging field of Black Popular Culture Studies.

Yet, I find myself always going back to Professor Rose’s discussion of the disruptive potential of Hip-Hop, as she writes

“Developing a style nobody can deal with — a style that cannot be easily understood or erased, a style that has the reflexivity to create counter-dominant narratives against a mobile and shifting enemy — may be one of the most effective ways to fortify communities of resistance and simultaneously reserve the right to communal pleasure.”

Rose’s insights here, remain some of the most important theoretical contributions to our understanding of Black Popular Culture during the past fifty years, and well as a portal into this moment of Black digital culture. In that first meeting at MLA in 1992, Professor Rose joked — I think — that she hoped that she wouldn’t still be talking about Hip-Hop twenty years later. Thirty years after the publication of Black Noise, I can’t imagine talking about Hip-Hop at all without talking about Black Noise.

Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Meditations on Black Masculinity and Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.

This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author’s permission. Read more of Mark Anthony Neal’s work on Medium.