Hustle & Flow review by C.L.R. Odell

“Every man has the god damn right to contribute a verse,” says Hustle and Flow character Shelby. And [R.E.B.E.L.] is right this quote characterizes the entire film. First off let me be clear, Shelby is not talking about man as in men. He’s talking about man as in mankind, human beings, the species man.

The (hu)man whose right it is in the film is Djay, whom [R.E.B.E.L.] correctly labels the wretched of the earth. Djay has been reduced to pushing flesh, to being a sex peddler. And why? Because of all the money he makes? Because of the fancy cars? Because it gets him respect? Even a cursory viewing of the film reveals that none of these are the motivation compelling Djay to pimp twenty-dollar hoes out of the back of his car. He pushes a busted-ass hoopty with a radio that makes you wonder at first if the movie is set in the present or some time in the ‘70’s (though the rims are clean). While his business seems steady, his lights and phone are in constant threat of being shut off. We are made aware that he is no kingpin on the block when he must supplicate himself to one of his neighbors in order to get some quiet for a recording session. This life is killing him, this life is killing all of us.

SOCIETY WILL PERISH

Karl Marx once said that capitalism compels society under penalty of death to recognize the need for human beings to realize their full potentialities. Under penalty of death. In other words, society will crumble, degenerate, fall to pieces, unless it is recognized that every man has the right to contribute a verse. This doesn’t mean that society will just up and vanish, it will break down, it will not look like any society we know of. It will look more and more like barbarism every day, until one day nuclear bombs or bio-terrorism or bird flu settle the whole thing for us.

Hustle and Flow shows us that this breakdown is occurring. The opening sequence is of a pimp and his ho driving through a run-down Memphis ghetto. Stores that once were are no more, schools are closed, it’s near apocalyptic. Djay cannot live here, he cannot live in this world of destruction and decay and whore mongering. We cannot live here. This life, this decay, this prostitution are utter repudiations of the traditional values of civilization (yes I know prostitution, war, poverty and destruction have existed for centuries but given the level of civilization that we have reached the contrast here is much more stark). These characters say we cannot do with what you have given us, your values don’t fit our reality and so we turn to what we have, which is nothing. They do what they can to survive. But as Skinny Black says in the film everybody’s got to have a dream. For with dreams come vision, come creativity.



Djay has a dream, a way out of this life that is ripping him and those he loves apart at the seams. His only way out is to express his creativity, to give play to his natural and historical potentialities and possibilities, it is only at this point that he can see a way out of his grim situation.

INDIVIDUALITY FOR ALL

I’m sure you’ll say, “Well that’s all well and good for Djay but this is one man and we can’t all be platinum recording artists, so what’s the point?” But the symbolism here is exponentially larger than just one man and his dreams of hip-hop success. Djay represents us all, he represents society at its breaking point, under penalty of death he must create, he must express, this is the same for us, for the world. We are faced in this era with monumental problems that seem insoluble, and it seems there is no way out, as if we are just marking time until some cataclysmic event wipes the slate clean for somebody else to give it a shot. This is the sad truth. We are just marking time ‘til that day when we are all wiped off the face of the earth. Unless… unless we unleash the most creative, productive and progressive force known to mankind, the creativity of human beings as a whole. That is the only force capable of pulling us back from the brink. As [R.E.B.E.L.] says we must find our individuality and express it (this is not some bourgeois notion of abstract individuality, but rather a collective individuality, one based on the potential of all individuals to create and produce), for it is suppressed by the circumstances we find ourselves in. It is crushed and distorted by the weight of reality.

We must replace the man who is “crippled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation… [with] the fully developed individual… to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.” We must get busy living or get busy dying. We must express or perish. We must contribute a verse, after all its every (hu)man’s right.

A Review of C.L.R. James' American Civilization

Okay, you opened this link, I imagine, because you relate with hip-hop as music and culture, but you don’t know who the hell C.L.R. James was and what his relation to hip-hop is and you want an immediately satisfactory answer. If you bear with me, just for a minute, maybe I can make this relation understandable, concrete, valid, and relevant.

I’ll attempt to keep your interest by stating an absolute. If it weren’t for the West Indies, hip-hop would never have been. How could this be, you ask? Because of the mobile DJ movement which began in Jamaica in the 1940s with personalities like Coxsonne Dodd and Prince Buster. These DJs would drive around Kingston and other parts of Jamaica blasting native Ska music from their sound systems. It began as a viable means for folks to socialize and hear new music.

When many West Indians, Jamaicans included, began to migrate to the States, many settled in New York City. These newly arrived foreigners assimilated into their new lives, and American blacks and Latinos assimilated to theirs. (If you want to dig further, you should read Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop.)

James was a native of Trinidad in the West Indies were this culture started and he spent a great deal of his mature years in the States. This was approximately between the years 1938-1953, right along the same time as the DJ movement is developing in Jamaica.

Cool. Now we have a partial relation established. Are you still with me? Aight, let’s continue beyond loose association.

James, during the last few years of his stint here, spent some time writing a manuscript which he then called NOTES ON AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. In this manuscript he outlays his ideas on the American struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the mantra all Americans are familiar with from primary school forward. I'll attempt a summation of his contribution and, hopefully, it will become concretely relevant to all hip-hop heads and exactly why they should read the book AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.

The struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a struggle which is not complete or motionless, but always in conflict. Throughout history, and America is no exception in this case, we develop art and culture which relate to the degree and level of struggle of the corresponding period. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, our unique, American fashion, reaches higher stages in relation to the particular struggles of American people. Whether these struggles take the form of women’s suffrage, eight-hour workdays, civil rights, emancipation, reconstruction, etc., a form of culture develops which gives expression to these seemingly disparate internal struggles within various sections of the working class, for they are all class struggles.

For example, the struggle for emancipation among black slaves beget a culture and music which reflects that particular struggle. The struggles of industrial workers in the 1930s beget a respective art which gave it context and relevancy. The Black Power movement developed a language, culture, and art unlike any other time in history.

The struggle of our period is as diverse as ever in history. The working class of the 21st century is in a struggle with itself to eliminate homophobia, socially and institutionally, to grant amnesty to our Latino immigrant brothers and sisters coming to our country to lend their culture of struggle and so we may lend our forms to them, to redefine the meaning of class in a deproletarianized, that is deindustrialized, non-factory worker society where service workers and cube slaves are developing a culture of resistance of their very own, to engage in struggle with the various sections of the Right who are largely winning the hearts and mind of American people, etc., etc., etc.

What medium of expression more clearly reflects this struggle than hip-hop? Where in the country does racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, politics, and class life more acutely find context than our hip-hop culture? This is it, dear readers. This is why James is relevant. If you have made it this far, my hope is that you have made the leaps in consciousness I have recently went through when reading this book.

Think you can hang for an added dose? Dope! I knew I could count on you! Hang on readers, this might get a bit abstract.

James writes in AMERICAN CIVILIZATION about the “universality” of culture in modern society; about the potentials modern society sets in motion for an integration of work life and cultural life. Up to our time, there was such a separation between production; the aspects of life which satisfies human needs, and artistic life; the way people express their particular form and level of production.

He saw the limitations of film; while they satisfied the mass desire for individuality and a break of the “mechanization”, the routinization, if you will, and sameness of life in factories—which up til the past twenty years or so, was the main form of American production—they did not fulfill the degree of universality that, he says, the drama of ancient Greece fulfilled for its age.

However, he acknowledges that while the drama of ancient Greece had a larger degree of universality, that the American film, radio, comic strip, television of the mid-20th century is creating the possibility for a medium which more intensely amalgamates, mixes, and integrates, work and cultural life in a much more democratic and accessible fashion and which does not limit itself to the most elementary of desires of human beings today. Hip-hop more accurately conveys the level of humankind’s “dislocation” in society, their disgust with the mundane routine of Monday-Friday or whatever shift they work, their boring sex life, and lack of excitement in general, etc.

Because of his expulsion from the country in 1953 due to McCarthyism, he was not able to write the book. His manuscript was finally released in 1993, nearly five years after his death in 1989.

James never wrote about hip-hop, partially because when he died hip-hop had not reached the level of development we have 17 years later. Not to say that hip-hop had not reached a beautiful summit in the late 80s, but maybe he was just too old then to continue writing, or maybe he just didn’t know about it. Hell, I don’t know, but I do know had he had the time, he would have seen, quite possibly, that hip-hop was the fulfillment of all his work. And, since I write from the perspective of hip-hop, I write on C.L.R. James and his relation to it. Congratulations, you made it, dog. Now go buy that shit.

I welcome any historical, bibliographical, etc. corrections and of course any and all criticisms. Peace.