Hip Hop America by Nelson George Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Hip Hop America
Book Review: It's Time to End Ghetto Scholarship
Summary: 3 Stars
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Truth of God Institute and the End of Ghetto Scholarship
What distinguishes TGI scholarship? In a word: sources. In a phrase: access to top-notch academic sources. The quality of scholarship is largely determined by the quality of the sources upon which a work relies. Researchers who have access to the most and the best source-material have the potential to produce the best scholarship. This is why language training is important to scholarship: because it gives one access to a wider range of relevant primary and scholarly secondary source-materials. This is also why spoken fluency in a language has minimal scholarly value, at least in terms of historical-critical scholarship. It is LITERACY in the relevant languages that is of paramount importance here. Just as there are articulate yet illiterate English speakers, there are fluent, even native, Arabic speakers (for example) who cannot read a Classical Arabic text. Such a person, while able to converse about modern trends and events, can offer very little to the critical discourse about Islamic Theology.
TGI scholarship is based on access to the best sources. The bottom line is this: books acquired from Borders, Barnes & Noble, or our local Black bookstores can at best produce only mediocre scholarship. These stores don't service the most important scholarly presses (such as BRILL, for example). These scholarly sources are only available in academic libraries, at academic conferences, or from the publishers. Also, a good deal of the best scholarship is not available as books at all: it is published in scholarly peer-reviewed journals that are largely inaccessible to non-academicians. Students and affiliates of TGI will have access to a lot of this source material through the TGI Online Library. I have already scanned hundreds of pages of this material, which will be made available as PDF files through the Library. The Library will continuously grow. This Library alone gives TGI affiliates an advantage over most researchers in the Black community, in particular the current leadership of the Ghetto Metaphysics movement (i.e. Walter Williams, Bobby Hemmitt, Phil Valentine, etc. More of this below). TGI affiliates will be in a much better position to speak critically and authoritatively on relevant issues because they will have access to the more critical, authoritative source-materials.
TGI intends to expose and affect the demise of the low-quality, `ghetto scholarship' that is currently popular in the intellectual circles of the Black community. This ghetto scholarship is represented by such persons as the above mentioned (Walter Williams, Bobby Hemmit, Phil Valentine, etc.). This intellectualism, based on profoundly poor scholarship and much imagination, is a tragic hijacking of the legacy of our great Black Scholars: Dr. Ben, Dr. Clark, etc. A parade example of this poor ghetto scholarship is Walter Williams' book, `The Historical Origin of Islam'. Walter Williams' claims in this book are, from a critical-scholarly perspective, so outlandish it is embarrassing. He uses more imagination than good source material to reach his conclusions. I have sent Brother Walter a letter inviting him to a public discussion about the claims of his book. He has not yet responded.
I must qualify further what I mean by `Ghetto scholarship', whose demise I seek: I do not mean `Black Scholarship'. Even though I am critical of aspects of their scholarship, I have great respect for Cheik Anta Diop, Dr. Clark, Dr. Ben, Dr. Leonard Jefferies, Dr. Charles Finch, Wade Nobles, and the rest of our great Black scholars of the past generation. Even though I feel some of their scholarship had inherent shortcomings which this generation must correct and move beyond, I also feel that they did their best with what they had to work with and did a good job. Most importantly, they sincerely tried to live up to the high standards of scholarship recognized by the academy. The Ghetto Scholars and their ghetto scholarship is much different.
The Hon. Bro. Min. Louis Farrakhan once spoke of intellectual pigs and intellectual cows. The pig is monogastric - it has one stomach and must eat the more easily digestible feed - grain. Cattle, on the other hand, are polygastric - one stomach but with four compartments that provide for better discrimination of the intake, absorption of the nutrients, and allows for the consumption of hay and pasture which is more difficult to digest than grain.
Intellecual pigs are those who intake poor quality material and arent able to properly 'discriminate' between credible and incredible informatiom/claims. These people feel that simply because something is in a book, it is quotable. They do not interrogate their sources. Intellectual cows are very discrimating with what they read. They are able to read the difficult material and interrogate the sources, thus absorbing only what is good and healthy - i.e. credible. Thus, 'ghetto scholarship' as I use the term has nothing to do with degrees or education. It has everything to do with one's 'method' of doing scholarship.
Let me give you an illustrative example of the ghetto scholarship of which I speak. I used to live with Bobby Hemmit in Atlanta GA for a short time in 1991. He knows me well and I know him well. The last time I spoke to him was about two years ago. In fact, if you get some of his early Atlanta videos - 1993/94 - you will not infrequently hear him defer to `Wise' or refer his audience to something `Wise' has said, for example dealing with the Mother Ship. Well, that `Wise' is me - Wise was my first Attribute when I got KOS and it stuck even when I changed my Attribute to True Islam. Well, one day during my last or maybe my junior year at Morehouse, while I was on campus, Bobby comes running up to me all excited: "Wise! Wise!..." So we built as we frequently did and he tells me about a book he recently read claiming the biblical Ark of the Covenant was located in Ethiopia. He said he is now going to start lecturing on the Ark. I looked at Bobby and thought to myself (maybe even out loud - I don't remember): this brother just finished reading a single book about a subject he has no expertise in, AND HE'S GOING TO START LECTURING ON IT! Get otta here. He has not scrutinized the author, checked his sources, weighed his conclusions against those sources, etc. Most importantly, NO ONE BOOK makes anybody an expert on ANYTHING. This is why one of the signature features of all of my recent works is thick, discursive footnotes with 4 to 10 checkable, high quality sources for each point I am trying to make. But this man read a book, then started lecturing on the subject. This is ghetto scholarship.
This type of pseudo-scholarship does not advance the intellectual and civilizational cause of the Black community. If no one outside of the `hood' believes our claims then what purpose does it serve to even make such claims? And no one outside of the profoundly gullible hood today can respect claims based on this type of pseudo-scholarship. We have to produce scholarship that intelligent, objective readers from all walks of life can respect. We, the Black Man and Woman of America, are to be the WORLD TEACHERS. But in order for this to happen our scholarship must be true and must command the respect of the world. For this to happen, this new ghetto scholarship must be exposed for it is. TGI is committed to providing sound, critical, top-notch scholarship.
I am a Muslim in the Nation of Islam under the leadership of the Hon. Min. Louis Farrakhan. I hold a doctorate in Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan. I am founder of the Truth of God Institute ([...]) and publisher of [...]. I currently have two books in circulation: The Truth of God: The Bible, the Qur?an, and the Secret of the Black God; and The Book of God: An Encyclopedia of Proof that the Black Man is God.
Please think it over dear brother and give me a call so we can discuss this further and work out together the details of such an event.
Your Brother
Wesley Muhammad
(678) XXX-XXXX
truislam@yahoo.com
Book Review: Music For the Masses in America Hit It Big.
Summary: 3 Stars
The musical scene in the Sixties and the Eighties was hip-hop for all races and religions in the USA. The Seventies was devoted mostly to folk music. In the Ninties it was more rap and contemporary and also country music hit it big in the whole country and not just Nashville, Tennessee.
Who Takes The Blame?, August 13, 2006
Reviewer: Betty Burks (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviews
In February, 1969, a study titled "Black-White Contact in Schools: Its Social and Academic Effects" was published by Purdue University sociologist Martin Patchen. In it, he concludes "Available evidence indicates that interracial contact in schools does not have consistent positive effects on students' racial attitudes and behavior or on the academic prformance of minority students." In March, it was declared that the AIDS virus started in Africa and on the Caribbean island, Haita and spread to the United States via tourists. Get this! Susan Sontag decided in 1988 that "the virus was sent to Africa from the U.S. as an act of bacteriological warfare" as a conspiracy.
July, 1985, a survey conducted in New York City using the HIV antibody test finds that of frequent drug users, 87 percent carried the infection. The majority of the addicts were black and Hispanic. In August 1988, on Zachary's birthday, Jean-Michael Basquiat died in New York village of a heroin overdose at the age of 27 (Zach was 26 then). He was a graffiti artist whose pieces sold for $50,000 at the time of his death. There was a lot of debate about his artistic worth.
This book traverses the years 1979 to 1989 in America and is mostly about the singers and groups in the entertainment area but also writers which proliferated during that time. It is the time of affirmative action and Clarence Thomas who was married to a Causcasian woman but courted the office girls and almost lost his nomination. I watched it all on t.v. The girl took all the blame, and she was honest and above-board, blameless. The results of overcompensation has caused much turmoil for us all in America and some are deceitful by trying to pull the wool ober the eyes of political figures to the detriment of everybody.
Book Review: excellent overview & inclusion of broader culteral impact but don't expect exhaustive material on all the big players
Summary: 5 Stars
I am currently writing an entry about Grandmaster Flash for the forthcoming Icons of Hip-Hop (Greenwood Press). First of all, Nelson George is one of the most experienced, respected and eloquent hip-hop journalists alive, and he maintains his reputation in this book. He grew up in the middle of the birth of this artistic-come-cultural phenomenon, and tells the story as both insider and critic. Though there wasn't much specific material about Flash (which I didn't expect), George paints a genuine, if disarming or infuriating, portrait of the rise and continued influence of hip-hop through elegant and sometimes even poetic language and virtually unsurpassed insight. The latter observation comes, in part, from his willingness to explore the broader picture that this culture informs and is controlled by. He raises political and socioeconomic questions, takes on the task of discussing the record industry and how its desire for hit records over individual talent promotes a homogeneous selection of 'rap artists', and is unafraid to question the roles society has played to transform hip-hop almost completely from what it was in its nascent form. Some people complain, with regard to hip-hop reference books, that the author obviously has no real authority. No one can make that claim about George. After all, he is respected enough to be able to interview GM Flash, Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa (considered the 'Holy Trinity'/founding fathers of hip-hop) in the same place at the same time. [For those of you who don't understand the significance here, no one has ever been able to get these three guys together, because of past rivalry among other things, and Kool Herc had not discussed hip-hop publicly for about thirty years prior to this interview.] So, George gives an authoritative, articulate, thoughtful and insightful account of the rise of hip-hop and the consequences of its appearance in mainstream society (which basically transformed it completely, so that the only true-to-its-roots subculture is underground hip-hop). Buy this book - but don't expect an in-depth discussion of the major players because that isn't what the book is supposed to be anyway.