Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal at UW-Madison

Earlier tonight, I had the pleasure of seeing Professor Mark Anthony Neal, writer of one of my favorite black progressive blogs, speak about hip-hop, wealth, and politics. His blog, newblackman.blogspot.com is a great site for its fascinating analysis, news updates, and links to interesting documentaries, newscasts, interviews, history, and popular culture. Moreover, as a public intellectual, scholars such as Neal and Michael Eric Dyson are an inspiration for my own blogging. Of course, I have failed to reach the same number of people they have through their use of social media, but seeing Neal was a huge burst of inspiration. Furthermore, his speaking style is very informal, relaxed, humorous, and natural, unlike my dry, pedantic attempts at lecturing. By focusing on hip-ho, and mainstream hip-hop specifically, it's also likely much easier for Neal to reach out to a much broader proportion of the population than my attempts, which tend to focus on literature of the Caribbean and African-America, too often expressed via long, sometimes too formal essays burdened with excessive verbiage.

Anywho, the two things Neal said that struck me the most are the enormous gaps in wealth that separate blacks and whites in this country, despite claims of a post-racial landscape. Indeed, I already knew of the enormous wealth gap, but he used statistics to illustrate it for the audience. As one knows, the mortage crisis played a large role in the economic collapse, but most mainstream news sources overlook how the economic disaster has hit blacks disproportionately more, reducing the black "middle-class" considerably into poverty. Another important observation Neal made was in response to a question about Immortal Technique and other 'revolutionary' rappers. These rappers are usually not the ones most inner-city blacks hear, so his focus on the subtle revolutionary messages contained in mainstream hip-hop rather than analyzing artists like Immortal Technique, whose fanbase is largely white, suburbanites. A friend of mine, who currently studies at a university in New York, once made a similar claim about Talib Kweli's listeners, surmising that the majority of his fans are probably whites, not the black ghetto denizens 'conscious' rappers attempt to reach. This is not to say that Neal said one must choose independent hip-hop or mainstream, but rather to suggest that each type of hip-hop is open to interpretation and analysis and should be heard through critical lens and accepted as valid expressions of the hip-hip ethos. His dissection of Jay-Z and Kanye's "Otis" exemplifies this approach, since the music video may appear to be another superficial, materialist rap song, but is actually about ingenuity, or turning an old, depreciated Maybach automobile into a work of art worth much more. Thus, the hidden layers beneath the veneer of materialism contain messages of artistic expression, black nationalist sentiment, and even allusions to Basquiat, whose art Jay-Z apparently admires.

After his speech, I had the opportunity to shake his hand and introduce myself, but foolishly did not share my blog or say much more than my own name and thank him for coming. It was well-used Monday evening. He also made references to Craig Werner, my professor for Soul Music and Civil Rights, and jazz bassist and UW faculty, Richard Davis, who played bass on famous jazz albums such as Black Fire and Out to Lunch. I'll keep reading his blog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoEKWtgJQAU