Say it loud
I'm black and I'm proud
Say it loud
I'm black and I'm proud!

Except that halfway through the infectious funk, the crew-cuts realize what they're saying: Jesus christ, 'I'm proud to be black' fer chrissakes, like when you're in the porno store, you know, and you get lost or something and you find yourself in the men's part, you know? not the part for men the part about men, Jesus, and you get the hell outta there. And so they hum/mumble the suppressed parts

Say it loud
I'm mmm hum proud
Say it loud
Mum hum hum proud!

[...] In Gary's neighborhood, property values are actually falling.

In another sense, of course, the streets surrounding RJam's soundproof studio are the costliest real estate in Boston. At least two young men died as downpayments within a week of today's recording session. [...]

[...] 'Education,' Chief Justice Warren wrote in Brown

... is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is the principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him adjust to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. . . . To separate Negro children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.

No one's a yuppie because everyone's a yuppie, a consummate consumer, for U.S. purposes, today. Even—you will not leave this sampler unconvinced—that unlikeliest of markets, black recording artists on the leading edge of the pop explosion called rap: yuppiness right out their dactylic assonance, shouting at the tops of their trochee'd rhymes across an impenetrable emptiness that they are there, here, here-and-now: like Us in their self-conscious difference, their congregation at the altar of electronic Self; with Us in their alien hate; at the deepest level one with the yuppie U.S.

Serious rap's a musical movement that seems to revile whites as a group of Establishment and simply to ignore their possibility as distinct individuals—the Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy. The music's paranoia, together with its hermetic racial context, maybe helps explain why it appears just as vibrant and impassioned as it does alien and scary, to us, from outside.

[...] how sex and violence and yuppie toys represent perfectly the urban black lifedrive to late-80s American glory. (This latter many older blacks despise as less dull than just a disgusting recidivism to a pre-King/Malcolm vision, like your kid pawning your Purple Heart to buy rubbers and gin.)

[...] Rap's highly self- and history-conscious unfamiliarity, its image of inaccessbility to established markets or truly teeming-mass appeal, is often reduced by critics to the kind of 'surly musical hostility' that, like Punk's, quickly loses its novelty for those outside, can become for Us like little more than looking at something poisonous in a tightly closed jar.

Except who exactly sealed the lid, this time? The mainstream record reviewer? He's but Market's bitchy mistress. The Market itself--Us? But everything the white rock listener pays to enjoy is black-begotten. [...]

[...] A stereotype [...] is just a false synecdoche, a token of the conceptualizer's ignorance or laziness, not of some certain distorted features' representative power. [...]

[...] It's way too easy for the pale to hurry across the deck, past the thick, light-wobbling window, and not once hear rap as anything but the weird anthemic march of one Other'd nation, marginalized and yet trapped in our own metropolitan center, a nation that cannot secede and may not assimilate and is thus driven still deeper inside, evincing all the brute anger and resentment we'd legitimate as political were it not anger with nothing visible else to it, no positive diode, none of the King-like 'vision' we've come to expect from any change that does not yield rubble. As an ever more conservative body politic and media audience, We are being conditioned, in an equation both sides of which may be unconscious, to see today's urban black world not as a demimonde shadowing but more and more as a cancer metastasizing inside our own, our few glimpses of anything like a 'real black world' coming just in statistics and mix radio and political shibboleths [...]

... Well except most of it turned out to be lame hype, these shivered images we'd all formed reading about rap and posses, listening to Ice T's war raps, Public Enemy's prolegomena to any future uprising. [...]