The American Century: Literature since 1945 647rejecting conventional distinctions between “high” and “popular” culture. So the
four-man group known as The Last Poets (both the originals and the subsequent
groups of that name) have exploited ghetto culture, rapping, and hip-hop to get the
message across to their Harlem neighbors. And some of the recordings of David
Nelson, Nikki Giovanni, and more recently Gil Scott-Heron (1949–2011) have
become popular hits on a national scale. The 1970 recorded poem of Scott-Heron,
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” for instance, shows just how much black
poetry of the last thirty years or so stands at the crossroads between different African-
American musical and rhetorical forms. Using percussive rhythm, repetition, a
driving beat, and an urgent streetwise idiom to make its point that “The revolution
will be no re-run, brothers. / The revolution will be LIVE,” it recollects and reinvents
such otherwise different African-American forms as jump-rope rhymes and game
chants, sermons and scat singing, rhythm and blues and gospel.
Although not rap music as such, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” vitally
influenced the themes and forms of rap: a form that is characterized by deft rhymes
and an insistently percussive verse performed against a background of sounds
“sampled” from snatches of previously recorded music. The sampling, together with
the element of performance, even self-mockery often to be found in rap, gives it a
distinctly postmodernist edge. Then, again, that element of wry self-mockery, verbal
strutting, is as old as the trickster toasts and badman boasts of folk heroes like
Stackolee and Brer Rabbit. And in its verbal fire and ice, its thundering drumlines
and rapid firings of chanted sound, it takes up a black heritage of sound and song
that goes back to before the day Africans saw the first slave ship. Some rap preaches
the same revolutionary message as the poetry and prose of Baraka. Some, less open
in their message of revolt, rehearse with grim humor the moral and social hell of
the ghetto: “It’s like a jungle sometimes,” “The Message” (1982) begins, “it makes me
wonder / How I keep from going under.” And then there is “gangsta rap,” which
simply offers raw and raucous testimony to the life of the streets: a life, it seems, with
no exits, grim, violent, even vicious. Like the badmen boasting and trickster toasting
in early black folktales, the gangsta rappers use sharp talk and shock: making no
apologies for their obsession with what they see as the basic necessities of life –
money and sex – as they struggle to survive in the black underclass. From the poetry
of the Black Arts movement through the recorded work of Giovanni and Scott-
Heron to rap and gangsta rap, there is a sustained emphasis on dance, voice, and
fight. Moving, strutting your stuff to keep from falling over the edge, speaking,
chanting, singing to make your presence known, squaring up to the common enemy
and making the folks around you square up too. Some of this work, especially
gangsta rap, is not only subversive but offensive, but it always throws up the same
serious issues about black disempowerment and drift, and the urgent, booming
need for change.
The women among more recent African-American poets have also urged the need
for another kind of change: the need to combat not just the racism of white culture
but the latent sexism of the black. Even revolutionary poets like Baraka have tended
to talk in generic terms about “the black man” and to identify black women with theGGray_c05.indd 647ray_c 05 .indd 647 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM