Don’t trust any movement over 30

Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at USC’s film school and one of the writers of the lighthearted coming-of-age flick “The Wood,” knows he doesn’t have much competition in the academy when it comes to discoursing on hip-hop. Practically all of the scholarly literature on rap music is dry and woefully out of touch and, on the other end, most successful trade books on the subject do little beyond regurgitating popular history.

Like blues, jazz and rock before it, hip-hop is screaming for writers to do it proud, to capture its secret histories or, to cop a phrase from the music itself, to represent. Boyd bills himself as a prime candidate for the job: “an educated, articulate, book writin’, filmmakin’, media appearin’, Jaguar drivin’, well-dressed nigga.... There are a lot of professors, writers and cultural critics who simply talk about it. I live it!” “The New H.N.I.C.” (the title is Boyd’s way of flipping a popular phrase -- “head niggas in charge” -- onto a new generation) is Boyd’s second book, a pseudo-critical tome that purports to deliver highfalutin ideas drizzled with the slang of the day. Boyd’s main observation is simple and mostly true: “Hip-hop has rejected and now replaced the pious, sanctimonious nature of civil rights as the defining moment of Blackness.”

What happens behind the music, of course, is another issue entirely, and it’s this distinction that trips Boyd up. In “H.N.I.C.,” Boyd is looking to defend hip-hop from the moralists of an earlier generation who see the music as having robbed the black community of dignity, but hip-hop doesn’t need defending like it once did. Instead, it could benefit from internal oversight: As artists struggle with a level of financial success that permanently uproots them from the communities that nurtured them, for better and worse.

Rather than tackle that battle head-on, Boyd argues that hip-hop has refused to dilute itself for the mainstream, thus preserving both its dignity and its fundamental ability to enact change. Moreover, he suggests that any crossover success it has enjoyed -- apart from the particularly glaring examples of M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice -- has been staunchly on the music’s own terms as an unmediated expression of black cultural identity. To further his point, Boyd quotes Jay-Z: “I ain’t crossover / I brought the suburbs to the hood / Made ‘em relate to your struggle.” It’s a powerful idea in song, but rhyme isn’t biography; it’s fiction, and if any contemporary rap artist represents compromise, it’s Jay. While he is still a technician of the highest order, his relationship to his roots is complicated by his ascendance to the world of summering in the Hamptons, celebrity liaisons and, worst of all, music that celebrates the nouveau riche instead of the old-school hustle. Using him as an example of the music’s unwillingness to mold itself to popular tastes is like suggesting patronage had no influence on the artists of the Renaissance: absurd. (Next time, perhaps, a line from the less-successful but highly regarded Queens, N.Y., group Mobb Deep would be in order: “No matter how much loot I get, I’m staying in the projects.”)

Boyd also sets up a crude binary between those artists who use the music for spiritual and political uplift and those who are only looking to get rich. Such a split is both elementary and anachronistic. If there’s such a fierce divide, why did boho neo-hippie revivalists De La Soul tour with L.A.’s arch-gangsters N.W.A. in the early ‘90s? Why did the Roots, a Philadelphia hip-hop band with leftist inclinations, back Jay-Z of the Hamptons on a recent MTV performance?

Boyd is a cheerleader, and when it comes to his home team’s exerting an ever greater influence in American society and scoring ever greater victories, he is fulsome with his praise. He neatly elides the contradictions of gangster rap (because its success opens the playing field to the music’s more progressive strains), lets DMX off the hook for leading a call-and-response chant of “my niggas” with the predominantly white Woodstock ’99 crowd and, finally, embraces Eminem as being “potentially more black than many of the middle-class and wealthy black people who live in mainstream white society today.” For someone who insists upon hip-hop’s adherence to its own principles, these are preposterous positions.

For all Boyd’s off-the-cuff pontificating on hip-hop’s usurpation of civil rights as the dominant cultural trope of black America, there’s surprisingly little analysis of why hip-hop -- as a social movement, as a politics, even as a musical form -- works. Boyd’s incomplete narrative rehashes the movement’s early years through his own eyes but hardly links it to the politics of the era. Even more revealing, Boyd takes the popular success of hip-hop as received wisdom without really stopping to ponder why, 25 years after the genre’s birth, it’s become such a cultural force. The structures of power, almost exclusively white-owned, behind the music that Boyd describes as a “real” representation of contemporary black America, if not a “literal” one, are left unperturbed and generally uncritiqued. Boyd’s so busy planting his flag and putting up dukes for the maligned genre that he never stops to consider that perhaps it’s deserving of some rebuke itself. When Boyd argues that “hip-hop sees compromise as false, fake and bogus, and, as the untimely deaths of many rappers have clearly indicated, they are willing to die for these beliefs,” one wonders just how slippery the slope between enthusiasm and zealotry is.

If Boyd suffers from tunnel vision, though, it’s because he’s not interested in living in, or for, the past: “I think the 1960s was a high point for a lot of people and they do not want to leave it behind.... But am I beholden to it forever? If so, that is pretty oppressive.” In his epilogue, Boyd argues that any true understanding of the civil rights movement has been supplanted by the visual residue of the era -- “dogs and waterhoses” -- that have served “to define black people exclusively.” But while civil rights may be a sociopolitical movement reduced to images, Boyd never fully argues that hip-hop has successfully gone in the opposite direction. Writing in Public Culture in 1994, Boyd asked, “Where can there be a sustained movement that examines this historical self-hatred, while linking both politics and culture in a way that truly empowers all who subscribe to a liberated notion of existence in an otherwise oppressive society?”

Sadly, Boyd does little to answer his own query. He has no positive theory of hip-hop politics, no inclination to see how it might be a seismic tool in its own right, whether through the words themselves or through those activists and community leaders who use it as a key to open up the minds of young listeners and expand them.

Boyd doesn’t want to analyze; he wants to riff. He intersperses his ramblings on Bill Clinton’s black identity crisis, an overlong discussion of Chris Rock’s mainstreaming of private black conversations (a strategic move, Boyd fails to note) and a preoccupation with pimping with quotable gems that aim to set him apart from his fellow profs and give him winking access to the world he so clearly values. When he puts aside the how-can-I-be-down rhetoric, Boyd makes a few wise, and needed, arguments, at one point bemoaning the “sacred cow” status of the black church and later wondering why white participation in black movements confers legitimacy whereas the reverse implies weakness. At best, though, he conjures up a few provocative sound bites. At worst, Boyd makes circular arguments that are sloppy in concept and execution. (At least he’s equal opportunity when it comes to misspelling the names of such popular figures as conservative academic John Hoberman, rapper Bubba Sparxxx and director Steven Soderbergh, along with a dozen others.)

Rap music today teems with possibility, thanks both to its financial successes and its stylistic evolutions. A first wave of hip-hop-influenced politicians -- such as Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla and Newark Deputy Mayor Ras Baraka (son of Amiri) -- is already finding its way into elected office. Artists like Talib Kweli and Dead Prez make a pro-black agenda an integral part of their artistic and extra-artistic lives. Unlike 15 years ago, when groups like Public Enemy and X-Clan were just beginning to explore rap’s political potential, the idea of a hip-hop agenda that works with, not against, civil rights is becoming a reality. It’s too bad Boyd’s still gazing in the rearview, trying to shake off history.