And most teens, and young people in those areas need a voice that can speak to them as well. You can't approach Thomas fro Alpharetta, Georgia who is in a 80% white school with a Baruti book or a Clarke Book off the top. However, his minister just might hand him a Dyson book and that might be his introduction into looking at Hip hop, indeed his WORLD in a very different way.

"For me, hip -hop is not simply the oral articulation of a specific moment of black cultural expression among young people. It's also a profound lesson in how verbal creativity is joined to, perhaps revealed in, the lyrical imagination that UNDERWRITES rap music. I think that lyrical imagination is a powerful form of the narrativity that is crucial to the construction of black idendies in postmodernity. Writing, as an art and artifact--and as the process of critical assertion that French intellectuals call ecriture, and you see my debt to this concept in my term, Afreciture-- becomes a bridge of articulation among and between cultures. It's also a way, of course, of reinventing the very shape and texture of life experience in the crucible of textuality, that is, in the unavoidably semiotic character of what Socrates thought of as the examined life. ...writing is both writing INTO and writing FROM." (c) Dyson.


When you look at the above statement one thing that pops out are reference to European thought and scholars, but those are mere (and perhaps unecessary) book marks in a idea that speaks to validate hip-hop to the unconvinced of it's tie to community, tradition and values.

What is implied here, I belive is the value of Afrikan intellectualism and approach to literacy. This is something that would appeal very differently to the average educated brotha from the streets, and the average educated rural brotha especially when you consider regional differences and culural mores.

I see it as if u had that community of God church in Christ brother from Peach County that listens to hip hop on the low but sees it as a quiet vice. He's been approached by some learned brothers from a more aggressive sect of Pan-Afrikan nationalism and it turns him off. He's not ready to shun the cradle of what has been his conditioning...but a statement like the one above by Dyson? That can open a whole new world where other ideas now have a measure of perspective that were once off limits, and now seem benign.

namean?

or I'm I off topic?

That's what I get from the Theo Coker's, and the Hinds, and of the West's, and the Dyson's. They are seeking to use current intellectual structures used in this society to support what could be termed as more nebulous (although that is a misnomer) AFRIKAN thoughts and ideas. extending a hand to folk who normally wouldn't get there...I know that's how I got started.

Blacks and Jews by Michael Lerner and Cornell West was my introduction into race, class, and political discourse.



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