While West Coast ‘gangsta rap’ (N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg) was on the rise and taking hold in mainstream popular culture in the mid-1990s, there existed other less visible rap communities and styles within Los Angeles. In The Real Hiphop, Professor Marcyliena Morgan informs us of one such community: a weekly Thursday night open-mic freestyle competition known as ‘Project Blowed’, held since 1994 at a venue called the KAOS Network in Leimert Park Village. The book focuses on this venue as a ‘countercultural space’ and a location where youths express and negotiate complex discourses and rap techniques.
Morgan's ethnographic study balances critical theory, narrative, observation, linguistic analysis, and interviews with founders, participants and audience members. She argues convincingly that a study of underground hiphop can tell us about ‘discourses of power and how language manipulation works’ (p. 20). The freestyle rapper (more commonly referred to as the MC) lives in a particular social world and Morgan investigates this world on its own terms. Elements of ‘flow’ (the delivery of rap lyrics) such as language ideology, speech community and shared local knowledge demonstrate attitudes on politics, gender, sexuality, power, control, spirituality and other issues.
Multiple aspects of the freestyle sessions are shown to be metaphors for hiphop culture in general. For example, audience members will shout ‘please pass the mic’ when they have heard a poor performance, which speaks to the role of critique and education in the culture. This gesture highlights the role of the audience and Morgan importantly emphasises the differences between critique from those outside the culture and those inside it. The competition is often referred to as a ‘workshop’, a place to hone and judge lyrical creativity and skill. In addition to performing on stage, the importance of the cipher to freestyle culture (which ‘usually consists of rhyming MCs and onlookers who form a circle and elevate the overall lyrical skill of participants’, p. 59) cannot be overstated, and really requires its own full study.
In the first chapter, Morgan discusses Los Angeles and the founding of Project Blowed. Chapter two provides social and cultural background to the Hiphop Nation. The third chapter recounts a particular night at Project Blowed, complete with transcribed, line-by-line, freestyle raps with intermittent academic commentary. Chapters four and five scrutinise gender and politics respectively, and regarding the latter, use an incident when the police shut the session down to frame larger issues of power and generational conflict.
The heart of the subject is addressed in the third chapter by providing details of a night when a rival crew decides to battle more long-term members. This close reading of lyrics is effective in a number of ways, presenting the exchange between battling rappers and showing the wealth of references an MC will use. Morgan compares styles through descriptive features such as syllables per second. The differences in styles of flow from different crews is worthy of more investigation, and Morgan could have taken this much further by looking at more parameters. She does, however, balance close linguistic analysis and commentary well, leaving the reader enthusiastically wanting to visit one of these sessions rather than feeling too bogged down in theory and jargon.
Morgan, at times, provides her own academic freestyle on a number of topics, including the rise of hiphop studies in the 1990s, Japanese hiphop, Rastafarianism, Five Percenter Culture, comedian Dave Chapelle, Foucault's writings on Bentham's panopticon (relevant to the ‘ghetto bird’ helicopters that fly over LA ghettos), and lyrics from more mainstream artists such as Nas, Black Sheep, and a A Tribe Called Quest. Though these references risk being too tangential to more central matters, they seem fitting in a book on freestyle rap; the writing style is fluid overall, and jumps from ethnographic observations to references outside of Project Blowed and to larger themes. Particularly enlightening is the comparison of Nina Simone's ‘Four Women’ (1966) with Talib Kweli's Signifyin(g) on the song for his track ‘For Women’ (2000). These types of comparisons show the importance of re-appropriation and lineage in African American cultures, but also highlight the differences between African American generations and the complexities involved in being a woman of colour.
Although the book's focus is neatly confined within the spaces of Project Blowed and their Thursday night sessions, what goes unstated is how the ideologies and aesthetics of groups such as the Freestyle Fellowship (of which long-term members of Project Blowed belong) translate into music industry structures, for example, the marketing and character of their commercial releases. What is the sense of and attitudes toward mobility (social, geographical, economic, etc.) amongst participants? Ten to 15 years on, have they ‘moved on’ to other hiphop spaces? And if speech conveys a political and ideological stance, are these underground aesthetics too insular to become politically effective on a larger scale? I do not doubt that Project Blowed is ‘LA's most influential hiphop freestyle competition’ (p. 30), but I am left wondering what those direct influences are exactly. Additionally, the role of the DJ (apart from a few mentions) and the interaction between the DJ's ‘beats’ and MC's ‘flow’ remains neglected, and more interviews with DJs would have helped to provide a more comprehensive account. Nevertheless, The Real Hiphop leaves me wanting to know more, which is undoubtedly a good sign.
An excellent companion book to this, published in the same year, is Anthony Kwame Harrison's Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (Philadelphia, Temple University Press). Harrison also takes an ethnographic approach, but his role is one of participant as MC ‘Mad Squirrel’ and tells of his own experience in the San Francisco Bay Area hiphop underground scene. Morgan and Harrison both delve into important detail about the demographics and history of their respective California regions, which is fundamental to the character of MC interaction and their artistic output. Furthermore, Harrison's writing on race is some of the most complex and nuanced I have read in the hiphop context, and his narratives and theory are seamlessly interwoven. For those interested in freestyle rap or in two distinct ‘underground’ California hiphop scenes, these books are required reading.
