joshua.r.jackson – The Black 90s

How the South Got Something to Say: The Origins and Impact of the Dirty South

In 2004, OutKast became the first hip hop group to win album of the year for their record-shattering and now-classic album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.

With such hits as “The Way You Move,” “Hey Ya,” and “Roses,” most mainstream audiences wouldn’t be surprised to find out the album was certified Diamond, selling over 10 million units before it could even turn 10 years old.

What mainstream audiences might be surprised to find out, is that during the timeframe that album swept the Grammies—the midst of the Crunk era, whose many artists could trace their roots to Southern hip hop, whether it be Houston, Atlanta, or Memphis—OutKast’s accomplishment was perhaps the highest peak reached by a group that could trace its roots to a sound that originated in Dirty South, a sound that started in a basement in Atlanta’s College Park and East Point neighborhoods in the 1990s.

During that same decade, radio and television airwaves were saturated with the sound of the West Coast / East West Coast rivalry that defined a generation. We can hear this sound in some of the most popular songs of Tupac and Biggie, whose heavy beats and hardcore lyrics—especially when taken along with their heavy and hardcore lifestyles—came to define the dynamic between East and West Coast sounds as a competition between socially conscious songs about serious issues being played out in real time on American radio and television.

It is phenomenal, then, that the Dirty South sound could emerge during this decade, much less become immortalized in the proverbial hop hall of fame when OutKast’s André, while up on stage to receive the award for Best New Artist at the 1995 Source Awards (after the group was boo’d by the audience no less), approached the mic and finally got a word in edgewise:

André’s words were controversial that year for many reasons, not least of which because they interrupted what the East Coast/West Coast rap scenes thought would be an answer to the question of which region was producing the best new artist. According to the critics, that region was the South.

But it was also a production company called Organized Noize, which produced not only OutKast, but Goodie Mob, the less-known group whose 1995 track “Dirty South” coined the genre term.

Like a lot of East Coast/West Coast songs of the time, “Dirty South” featured some socially conscious lyrics that called attention to some serious issues affecting their local neighborhoods, including a hyperactive police force:

One to da two da three da four
Dem dirty Red Dogs done hit the door
And they got everybody on they hands and knees
And they ain’t gonna leave until they find them keys

Not to mention some of the implications of Bill Clinton’s tough-on-crime policies at the time:

Now if dirty Bill Clinton fronted me some weight
Told me to keep two, bring him back eight
And I only brought him five and stuck his ass for three
Do you think that Clampett will sick his goons on me?

But its biggest contribution was the refrain:

What you niggas know about the Dirty South?

Along with the track’s minimalistic beat, reverb, and call outs to Atlanta neighborhoods and street names like East Point, John Freeman Way, Delowe, and Piedmont Park, the song defined the “Dirty South,” and specifically Atlanta, as a place that was just as socially conscious as Los Angeles and New York City, if not with a slightly lighter sense of humor.

This message and sound would be repeated on the title track “Soul Food” with even more melodic elements, as Goodie Mob members like Cee Lo Green both rapped and sang in a soulful way that would come to define the Dirty South sound as having brought a soulful melody to what had mostly been a back-and-forth between beats.

The southern sounds launched by Organized Noize and Goodie Mob on this critically acclaimed album would later come to define many of the sound qualities that can be said to distinguish the most popular songs of the Dirty South from some of the most popular songs coming out of the East Coast / West Coast rap scenes. These include but are not limited to:

More melodic elements that blend singing and rapping for soulful vibe
An emphasis on large group, almost family-oriented collaboration
Very socially conscious but often lighter sense of humor
Slower beats per minute (see: chopped and screwed)
Horns and other non-electronic instrumentation

Artists that benefited from the production of Organized Noize include but are not limited to:

OutKast on Southernplayalisticcadillacmuzik
TLC on “Don’t Go Chasin’ Waterfalls”
Ludacris on “Saturday (Oooh! Ooooh!) ft. Sleepy Brown”

So while Outkast may be the group to which the Dirty South sound is often attributed because they are the most mainstream group to climb all the way from that basement in South Atlanta to the world stage, it would be more accurate to say the Dirty South sound originated from the production of Organized Noize, its Dungeon Family, and Goodie Mob.

For it is mostly likely these groups’ impact on OutKast in 1995 that drove André to say “The South got somethin’ to say.”

—Joshua Ryan Jackson

Works Cited

Jones, Qunicy. The Art of Organized Noize. Starring Sleepy Brown, Raymond Murray, and Rico Wade. Netflix, 2016.

Westhoff, Ben. Dirty South: Outkast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Re-invented Hip Hop. Chicago Review P, 2011.

Why Bill Clinton Was Called “Our First Black President”: Saxophones, Black Votes, and Toni Morrison

Over fifteen years before Barack Obama was sworn into the Oval Office and became the United States’ first black President, Bill Clinton was called “our first black President.”

So how is it that the nation’s 42nd (white) president got that honorific before the first actual Black president?

The answer is a story that really spans the duration of Clinton’s presidency. Founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, Dewayne Wickham, probably tells it best in his acclaimed book, Bill Clinton and Black America (2004). In his book, Wickham accounts for “the large African-American presence in [Clinton’s] administration, his perceived legal persecutions, his personal style,” and “his lasting yet tumultuous marriage”—not to mention his relocation to NYC’s Harlem after his presidency—which help explain why the former-Arkansas-governor-turned-president appealed so well to the American black community of the 1990s.

While this post can’t pretend to have a more extensive answer than Wickham in that regard, it can seek to provide a more succinct and specific answer to why Bill Clinton was (and indeed in some circles might still be called) “our first black President.” My answer to this question boils down to the following three essential events of the Black 1990s:

The Arsenio Hall Show hosted Bill Clinton playing the saxophone in June of 1992, which helped Clinton win the hearts of Black America in a big way.
Black voters turned out to give Bill Clinton a supermajority of their votes in November of 1992.
Toni Morrison wrote Bill Clinton into Black History when she literally called him “our first black President in 1998”

Although I will touch on some of the complications and contradictions inherent to attributing Clinton this honorific, I will not be able to address those problems in deep detail, particularly as they include his complicit usage of the term “superpredators” to implicitly describe young, urban (codeword: black) criminals who purportedly preyed on America’s youth to partake in gang culture in the early 1990s. Addressing those problems in the detail they deserve would take the length of another post, if not a full-length article, to explain sufficiently.

In channeling the former president’s birthplace in my home state of Arkansas, my hope is that this post will generate interest in crafting a more careful and critical post that can balance the other side of the honor and praise that is so often allotted to Bill Clinton. At the same time, I hope it will recognize that the former president contributed more than most of the presidents that came before him in terms of representing the American black community during his administration.

The Saxophone

Directly after Bill Clinton clinched the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1992, The Arsenio Hall Show hosted the newly minted presidential candidate.

Out of this hosting opportunity, Clinton not only decided to make an appearance; he deliberately sought to show his soulful side to the American black community by kicking off the show playing Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on his tenor saxophone. Casually and with sunglasses. Almost like another member of Hall’s band. The rest became history. Hall’s amicable and subsequent interview with Clinton effectively served to endorse the Democratic candidate, on a predominantly black show with a predominantly black audience, for president in 1992.

And so, what would also turn out to be a controversial appearance on Arsenio Hall literally set the stage for Clinton to clinch a supermajority (83%) of the Black Vote in November of that same year.

The Black Vote

On November 8, 1992, Bill Clinton received a greater percentage of the black vote than any president to win a U.S. Presidential election since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Data Source: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (Cornell University)

After winning the election, Clinton also appointed a number of black American citizens to serve in his administration, including but not limited to:

Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture (1993)
Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce (1993)
Hazel R. O’ Leary, Secretary of Energy (1993)
Jesse Brown, Secretary of Veterans Affairs (1993)
Alexis Herman, Secretary of Labor (1997)
Rodney E. Slater, Secretary of Transportation (1997)
Togo D. West, Jr., Secretary of Veterans Affairs (1998)

In fact, Clinton appointed more black Cabinet Secretaries than any U.S. president in the nation’s history, including Barack Obama. Doing so gave the Clinton the appearance not only of better representing black people in the nation’s highest office, but also of rewarding black voters for turning out to vote for him with real change at the highest levels of administration.

And in 1999, towards the end of Clinton’s presidency, the Clinton White House sought to commemorate such real changes with a web page titled “Working on Behalf of African Americans.”

This page mentions over 80 initiatives that the Clinton administration advocated for and took part in during their time in office, including but not limited to (and these are line-items lifted directly from the page):

Closing the Book on A Generation of Deficits.
Real Wages Are Rising for African Americans.
Addressing HIV/AIDS in Minority Community with an Historic $130 Million Effort.
Extended Health Care to Millions of Children with the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Hosted the First-Ever White House Conference on Africa in July 1994.
Launched the President’s Partnership for Economic Opportunity in Africa Initiative.

But the ultimate event that that made Bill Clinton America’s “first black president, was the stroke of Toni Morrison’s pen in 1998 during the sex scandal that shook Clinton’s presidency to the core.

Toni Morrison Calls Clinton “our First Black President”

Noting the heightened political rhetoric of impeachment coming out of Washington in wake of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Toni Morrison wrote a short, slightly miffed column for The New Yorker that would make history in October of 1998.

In her column, Morrison called attention to the news media’s unrelenting coverage of the sex scandal, as well as its similarity to the all-too-American narrative of covering America black men with unrelenting bias and surveillance.

Over the years, and especially since Barack Obama was rightfully heralded as the United States’ first black president, Morrison has received substantial blowback for calling a white president “our first black President.” Most of this blowback, however, stems from the assumption that she was praising Clinton, when she in fact was

[D]eploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated […] like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.”

In other words, the reasons why Clinton was called “the first black President” are myriad, but they had less to do with race than they had to do with representation.

— Joshua Ryan Jackson

Works Cited

“Bill Clinton on the Arsenio Hall Show (1992).” YouTube, uploaded by The Arsenio Hall Show, 15 January 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vaj8iCCZFhM.

Morrison, Toni. “Comment.” The New Yorker. October 5 1998, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/05/comment-6543, Accessed 28 April 2018.

Wickham, Dewayne. Bill Clinton and Black America. One World, 2004.

The Black Atlantic and Its Impact: Bringing Hybridity to Black Studies

I want to develop the suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective – Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (1993)

Since publication, The Black Atlantic has left a major impression on scholars of African American Studies, cultural studies, southern studies, and countless transnational academic disciplines.

Especially in academic circles, it can be argued that the book has accomplished more than it set out to achieve in regards to inspiring cultural historians to take “the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis,” as it has set people on the path to “use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.” (15) In fact, many scholars and activists have cited The Black Atlantic in their explicit undertaking of transnational projects and intercultural perspectives that Gilroy outlines in the book. According to Google Scholar’s database, the book was cited over 1,200 times between 1993 and 2000. In the intervening years it has been cited over 13,700 times, at least at time of writing in April 2018.

Source: Google Scholar entry for Gilroy’s 1993 book with number of citations highlighted in red

Needless to say, it’s had (and continues to have) an impact on the academic community

But the question remains: what impact has the book that defined a region, a methodology, and a generation of scholars in the 1990s and early 2000s, had on interests around the world?

I offer a two-part answer here, but my conclusion is essentially that The Black Atlantic put the concept of hybridity on the map for Black Studies in a big way, which, despite being situated as a re-iteration of W.E.B Du Bois’s “double consciousness” within the older frame of “modernity,” advanced a new framework for black multi-consciousness or hybridity.

The Black Atlantic has definitely helped move scholarly interest from the national frame to the transnational frame.

While the line graph above shows that search interest (as measured by Google queries) in the term “transnationalism” and the topic “The Black Atlantic” have declined slightly since 2004—considering the current administration at time of writing, this is not surprising—it also shows that there is a relationship between the terms. As search interest has declined in “transnationalism,” so has search interest declined in “The Black Atlantic.”

This suggests that interest in Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic, is linked to interest in transnationalism, which should come as no surprise to those who’ve read The Black Atlantic. Its mission is intimately tied to the postcolonial theories and missions of scholars such as Homi K. Bhabha, who were living and writing what would eventually become the transnational turn in cultural studies of the 1990s.

Indeed, early in The Black Atlantic, we see Gilroy explaining and taking this turn away from a traditionally Anglophonic focus on national literatures:

Any satisfaction to be experienced from the recent spectacular growth of cultural studies as an academic project should not obscure its conspicuous problems with ethnocentrism and nationalism […] The question of whose cultures are being studied is therefore an important one, as is the issue of where the instruments which will make that study possible are going to come from. In these circumstances it is hard not to wonder how much of the recent international enthusiasm for cultural studies is generated by its profound associations with England and Englishness (5).

This quote is situated in a section that appears directly after Gilroy outlines the scope, problem, focus, subject, concepts, methods, intervention(s), and organization of The Black Atlantic (2-4). In discussing his organization at the end of this rundown, he writes “The final section [of the book] explores the specific counterculture to modernity produced by black intellectuals…It initiates a polemic which runs through the rest of the book against the ethnic absolutism that currently dominates black political culture” (5) This positions the book as a public address against (and undressing of) ethnic nationalism (among many, many other things).

Not long after the publication of The Black Atlantic, Gilroy brought this polemic to a mainstream audience when he went public on British television’s Channel 4 network and introduced D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation (1915) as “a film which supports and affirms white supremacy” as well as “initiates a kind of taboo around intimacy between black and whites, which is still a living and central part of the Hollywood myth.”

Indeed, in this introduction to both film’s content as white supremacist propaganda, its form as a technolgical cinematic accomplishment, and its continuing legacy today, Gilroy recommends that cognitive dissonance is necessary in order to fully comprehend the film’s impact on the history of the United States and cinema. That is to say, the skepticism that Gilroy imparts to his televisual audience enacts The Black Atlantic‘s polemic against ethnic absolutism.

In a way this cognitive dissonance—or the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind at the same time—also enacts the concept of double consciousness that Gilroy uses to help frame The Black Atlantic, a concept which the book inevitably transcends with its discussion of black diaspora and the hybridity it introduced to black identity.

This brings us to The Black Atlantic‘s other main contribution.

The Black Atlantic helped redefine and resituate black identity as a hybrid identity that should be centered rather than an exclusively American, African, or African American identity formation that is marginalized.

The word frequency graph above shows us that the words “The Black Atlantic,” “double consciousness” and “cultural hybridity” show a correlation in their appearance in books between the years of 1990 and 2008. Just looking at Gilroy’s title, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, most people would not be surprised to see the relationship between word frequencies of “double consciousness” and “The Black Atlantic.” Unless they’re specialists, however, they might not expect to see that the words “cultural hybridity” appear on the proverbial map with around the same word frequency (and emerge at about the same time) as the words “The Black Atlantic.”

What this suggests is that while The Black Atlantic makes use of W.E.B Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” it’s true contribution to conversations revolving around Du Bois’s concept—the one for which it is most closely associate per Google Ngrams and in much of the scholarship that uses it—was advancing a new framework for “cultural hybridity,” or something more akin to black multi-consciousness (rather than double consciousness).

We can start to see why Gilroy advocates for a more culturally hybrid model of black identity for The Black Atlantic when he advocates for moving and re-centering the historical compass of modernity not in Western Europe, but in the Black Atlantic and its plantation slave economy. And this is arguably the largest crux of his book:

Plantation slavery was more than just a system of labor and a distinct mode of racial domination. Whether it encapsulates the inner essence of capitalism or was a vestigial, essentially precapitalist element in a dependent relationship to capitalism proper, it provided the foundations for a distinctive network of economic, social and political relations. Above all…it has retained a central place in the historical memories of the black Atlantic (55).

Here, we’re reminded of how Gilroy characterizes plantation slavery in Chapter 1: “capitalism with its clothes off” (15). This quote builds on that sentiment, but more importantly, it centers plantation slavery as the defining topos and locus of history and memory in the Black Atlantic world. Gilroy uses this argument to build a case for centering plantation slavery as the organizing principle that defined not only the the modern political and socioeconomic world, but the entire cultural framework upon which the concept of modernity was founded.

Staking this claim for the importance of a multiplicity of black perspectives, which emanate and spread from modernity’s cultural center rather than margin, Gilroy concludes, “The time has come for the primal history of modernity to be reconstructed from the slaves’ points of view” (55).

In all of these ways, and many more, The Black Atlantic brought hybridity to Black Studies and shaped the direction that the discipline would take towards a more enriched perspective on blackness that would be able to discuss multiplicities of black identity rather than simply doubleness.

Thinking to the Future

As the bar graph below illustrates, however, much work may remain to be done to bring The Black Atlantic‘s discussion of black hybridity to more global locations than Western Europe.

It is interesting that most of the nations where Google search interest is highest in The Black Atlantic are former colonist nations, whose populations are predominantly white. Should we be thinking about bringing Black Atlantic to more global audiences, such as Africa, in ways that don’t replicate colonial intellectual thought patterns? How might we do that?

— Joshua Ryan Jackson

Work Cited

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard UP, 1993.