Hip Hop Heresies - A review

The book by Dr. Shante Paradigm Smalls explores the "queering" of Hip Hop revealing pivotal and dynamic influencers of the culture.

When you hear the word Queer, what do you think? Do you think of Hip-Hop? Dr. Shante Paradigm Smalls does, and it's what she wants us all to consider when we look at the history of the culture of Hip-Hop in New York City. Her latest book, "Hip-Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City," deftly presents a counter-narrative to the accepted stories within the culture. Dr. Smalls, a native New Yorker and Hip-Hop emcee in their own right, is also an Associate Professor and Founding Co-Director of the LGBTQ+ Center at St John's University. In their book, Heresies, Dr. Smalls contends that,

"New York City's nexus of vibrant queer, Black, and hip hop worlds colliding and bonding in dance clubs, housing complexes, schools, roller rinks, art spaces, handball and basketball courts, movie houses, specific neighborhoods, the subway system, and other quotidian, subcultural and ephemeral sites uniquely positions New York as a place of experimental and original aesthetic collaboration."

Dr. Smalls looks at multiple artists, artistic scenes, and genres that contributed to the creation and culture of hip-hop from 1975 to the present. The purpose, Dr. Smalls explains, is to expand and open the story and contributors to the culture to include more than what has been traditionally accepted; that is, only straight black men. Without erasing or displacing the known and accepted pioneers, Dr. Smalls' book simply adds to the larger story of Hip Hop while unerasing early influencers, as well as important contributions that helped shape the ideas and aesthetics of Hip Hop itself. For their argument, Dr. Smalls defines queer as,

"'Queer' here is both sexual and gendered, capturing the spectrum of LGBTQIA+ and other sexual and gendered deviants, but it is also very racialized-almost always Black. That is because the Queers in Hip Hop Heresies cannot be separated from their Queer raciality.”

Going further, they frame their argument within both Black and Hip Hop aesthetics. The importance of these frames is made clear by Dr. Smalls to root the culture firmly within a wider Black aesthetic and to distinguish between what they consider the status quo (i.e., corporate/mainstream) representations that can appear similar but lack the meaning and depth (in the case of Black aesthetic the need to promote Black revolution and serve as a counter-narrative to the status quo) of the genuine representations of Hip Hop, (an aesthetic described in the book as "orientated toward the innovative, introspective, shocking, fun and carefree"). Dr. Smalls believes New York is uniquely positioned to tell this story due to several characteristics of the city. Firstly, the close proximity and overlap of various communities within its borders. While other cities have similarly diverse populations, New York City arguably has much more integration and interaction between those populations via connected neighborhoods, businesses, and transportation which is another characteristic of the expansive public transportation system. Dr. Smalls points out the ability for individuals in the city to move freely through all five boroughs via mass transit, relatively inexpensively allowing for ideas to continuously be shared and spread. Most importantly, New York City historically has been a major hub of the media and arts world, so trends, innovations, and those who were responsible for them had immediate access and vice versa to the means to broadcast, transmit and establish these creative endeavors. Dr. Smalls suggests that these aesthetics don't necessarily, exclusively live here, especially in regards to Hip Hop contributions in general, but the particular aesthetics they highlight makes the city, in their view, the best place to make this argument and exploration.

One final aspect of their argument, the "heretical" Dr. Smalls establishes in the introduction of the book,

"Heretics don't simply wrongly mean or wrongly say; they say anew and create new bodies of learning, knowledge, know-how, and ways of being in and experiencing the world."

Dr. Smalls positions both themselves, Hip Hop, and the subjects they investigate as heretics in this book. Heresies focuses on four subjects, one in each chapter. Martin Wong, a queer visual artist who arrived in New York City in 1975 and founder of the museum of American Grafitti (their inclusion also serves as a chronological starting point), The 80's cult classic film, The Last Dragon (which is a heteronormative love story with a cis-hetero Black male hero), emcee, and artistic polymath Jean Grae (also a subject who is cis-gendered as female) and lastly, an inquiry into the various contributions of numerous queer Hip Hop artists, emcees, DJs, dancer, and graffiti artists from 1982 through 2005. For their argument, Dr. Smalls states,

"I argue the work that they do to rethink and remake narratives of black female psychic subjectivity and sound; Afro-Asian articulations of race, gender, and sexuality, race, sexual, regional and class binaries are "queer"-disruptive-to heteronormative depictions and articulations of hip hop performance. These artists work with queer aesthetic methodologies to unmoor and eradicate settled public modalities of being in the world."

Through their storytelling and archival presentation of these artists, Dr. Smalls reveals several seminal figures who unarguably provided key contributions to the culture (from Wong's behind-the-scenes contributions to Charlie Ahearn's "Wild Style" in addition to the museum to Jean Grae's pioneering subjective matter and perspectives within Hip Hop verse) both directly and indirectly. Their involvement and inclusion, Dr. Smalls argues, allowed Hip Hop to reimagine and establish cross-cultural connections and ideas that reflexively influenced one another. The goal to shed light on several of these subjects is achieved with an intense and thorough examination of their contributions. Whether looking at the various sharing and appreciation of other cultural ideals (Afro-Asian, for example) to the direct contributions of particular identities in seminal moments and waypoints within the culture, "Heresies" is a meaningful and powerful look into a history of Hip Hop that further cement the belief of Hip Hop's universal appeal, power, and influence on the world at large.

Dr. Shante Paradigm Smalls reveals the queer aesthetics deeply rooted in the story of New York City Hip Hop