Stories to Tell: Family and Reality in Hip-Hop Autobiographies

Abstract

Stories to Tell:Family and Reality in Hip-Hop Autobiographies John Paul Meyers (bio) "Hip hop remains a genre largely valued for its seemingly autobiographical nature." –Tricia Rose (136) Autobiography has been a crucial genre of writing for African American culture at least since the publication of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in 1789: one of the first books chronicling North American slavery from the point of view of a former slave and a book whose publication date is heavy with symbolism. Equiano's autobiography was published the same year that George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States under the newly-ratified Constitution, a document which notoriously counted Black people as only three-fifths of a person for the sake of allotting representatives in Congress. One of the Black American autobiographical tradition's earliest defining moments, therefore, coincides with the beginning of the modern United States itself, at a time when the government officially recognizes Black people as something less than fully human. Over the centuries since the publication of Equiano's text, arguably the best-selling and most influential works by Black American writers have been autobiographies, as V.P. Franklin affirmed when he claimed autobiography as "the most important literary genre in the African-American intellectual tradition" in his 1995 study of these texts (11). In the academy, the study of autobiographies has itself come to prominence over the past few decades, as scholars have been increasingly interested in the construction of self through textual and other signifying practices, a development that is related to the rise of new disciplines since the 1960s, as Ricia Anne Chansky explains: "The field of auto/biography studies developed within the space that women's studies, and then area studies (such as African American studies, Latino/a studies, and Asian studies) carved out in the academy for analyzing identity construction" (xx). Franklin's study of Black autobiographies was published at the tail end of hip-hop's so-called "golden age" usually thought to comprise the years between about 1987 and 1994.1 In part due to the legacy of aesthetic achievements and political [End Page 214] consciousness of that golden age, hip-hop is now viewed increasingly with respect and hip-hop musicians as important public figures and, even, public intellectuals—as evidenced by the creation of archives at elite institutions like Harvard and Cornell for the study of hip-hop, the newly-released 9-CD Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, and the Universal Hip-Hop Museum, to be constructed in the genre's mythical birthplace in the Bronx. Yet, at a time when much popular press hip-hop discourse is short, motivated most strongly by the desire to promote recording sales or concert tickets, and more concerned with celebrity gossip than in-depth discussion of musical and social issues, autobiographies by hip-hop musicians present a rare chance for musicians to engage in extended explanations of their upbringings, lives, and careers. In this paper, I first discuss how hip-hop autobiographies fit into the Black autobiographical tradition and hip-hop media landscape. I then provide an analysis of two important themes in these texts: the influence of family on musical development and the relationship of hip-hop to lived reality. These themes are analyzed in three contrasting autobiographies by hip-hop musicians: Ice by Ice-T and Douglas Century, Decoded by Jay-Z, and Mo' Meta Blues by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson and Ben Greenman.2 Contrary to some other celebrity autobiographies, all three of these texts move far beyond mere chronology or hagiography in the discussion of their subjects' lives. Lyrical reality has been a frequently debated source of controversy within and outside hip-hop, and Ice and Decoded give a chance for two of hip-hop's most celebrated and controversial rappers to offer their own extended, and conflicted, takes on this issue. Family, on the other hand, is an issue that has received significantly less attention in hip-hop discourse, and my analysis of all three of these autobiographies shows that family is a crucial influence in the development of hip-hop musicians.3 These two themes...