Words&Dirt

Summary:

Charlie D. Hankin’s Break and Flow examines the language, culture, history, and politics of hip hop in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti. Organizing his chapters around a series of themes––yearning, raplove, uprooting, scale, writing, and violence––Hankin invites the reader to consider the many ways that hip hop culture and rap music have influenced (and been influenced by) these Latin American countries. Hankin argues that rap songs are not simply sonic experiences to be aesthetically enjoyed, but also powerful cultural artifacts that “wield the force of community-building and world-making” (2). Meticulously researched and elegantly presented, Break and Flow is an impressive book that combines intellectual erudition and on-the-ground ethnography to generate nuanced and novel perspectives on the present capabilities and future possibilities of one of modernity’s most beloved musical genres.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• I should acknowledge upfront that Hankin is a dear friend of mine––someone I have known since boyhood and continue to have a close relationship with to this day. This personal relationship prevents me from approaching this book with the typical impartiality that I attempt to bring to my reviews. So this review is more of a personal celebration of my friend’s professional achievement.
• Another important note is that this book’s subject matter is way outside my academic scope of knowledge. I know essentially nothing about hip hop culture, rap music, or the three Latin American countries on which the book focuses its attention. So I simply don’t possess the necessary background and intellectual tools one would need to analyze and critique Hankin’s work on its own terms. But I do have a couple minor criticisms that I’ll share toward the end of the review.
• One feature that really makes Break and Flow stand out is the personal component. Although Hankin does not center himself, the book’s narrative is dusted with personal encounters and ethnographic insights gleaned from his travels in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti. The reader gets the feeling that Hankin has deeply explored and even participated in the music, locations, and cultures about which he is writing; this element adds authenticity and authoritative heft to his extensive academic research.
• The concepts of “break” and “flow” are well-developed and woven into Hankin’s arguments throughout the book. Hankin does a wonderful job both of explaining how break and flow operate in the mechanics of rap music, and also of developing these terms into rich metaphors that “describe the repetitions and innovations audible at the level of rap’s transnational circulation” (14).
• My favorite chapter was the one that focused on writing. Hankin’s observations about the complex relationships between rap music, literacy, history, mythology, memory, identity, colonialism, politics, and capitalism are engaging and inspired.
• When considering my overall experience of reading Break and Flow, there are a couple critiques that I am comfortable making. Both are related to Hankin’s use of language. More than a few times, I felt that the book’s descriptions were just too vague for my taste. For example, here’s how Hankin characterizes rap in one of the book’s closing paragraphs: “It is a practice that is always grounding but never on firm ground, always emplacing but never in one place, constantly uprooting, perpetually somewhere else” (168). This is an absolutely superb sentence, and there are many more like it throughout Break and Flow. But it’s also a sentence that, at least in my view, doesn’t have much discernible content. It’s like saying, “rap is everything and it’s also nothing.” I used to relish this sort of thing back when I was studying philosophy, but these days I find it frustrating, even if I can also appreciate the beauty and emotional impact of the poetic phrasing. Perhaps in these moments Hankin is seeking to mimic the “sabotage of reason” that pervades the politics of hip hop, and if this is true then I think he was successful!
• My second critique has less to do with this particular book and more to do with the conventions of academia. Simply put, I didn’t understand a lot of this text. Now, we can reasonably chalk some of that up to my unfamiliarity with the subject matter, but I do put some of the blame on how academics are encouraged––some might say required––to write for hyper-niche audiences made up almost exclusively of other academics. In my view, much of the language in Break and Flow is excessively esoteric––very ivory tower. This dynamic is less bothersome when authors write about topics that only other ivory tower inhabitants care about, but Break and Flow is about one of the most popular musical genres of all time. One would hope, therefore, that it would bend a bit to invite a broader audience, but I don’t think it does. Maybe this is something Hankin will consider when writing his next book, but I can also completely understand why he stuck to academic conventions for this first publication.

Favorite Quotes:

My aim is not to uncover meaning but to identify the conventions and “techniques that make meaning possible,” the effects that rap lyrics have on their listeners. One of my central claims is that rap songs themselves, as acoustic objects, wield the force of community-building and world-making. (2)

My notion of break and flow is meant to capture the feedback loop between repetition and innovation constitutive of rap. I also propose break and flow as a metaphor to describe the repetitions and innovations audible at the level of rap’s transnational circulation. As rap roots in new places, some version of the break inevitably returns (commonly syncretized with local rhythms). Flows, on the other hand, shift with the specificity of language, place, and an artist’s poetic decisions. If the break is the axis of repetition that connects hip hop with history and genealogy, flow is the axis of improvisation and substitution, of “history telling itself in real time.” (14)

Though the speculative alchemy of ostentation, some artists literally rap themselves rich. (25)

To express raplove is to believe in the force of rap yearning, and conversely, to yearn through rap requires the belief––even the faith––in the force of raplove. Thus rather than two opposing vectors, the topology of yearning and raplove is better represented as a Möbius strip or twisted cylinder, a shape that appears to have two sides but only has one. Raplove and yearning are perhaps another name for the poetics of break and flow: the repetition or return of a common set of rhythmic and discursive features against the continual reinvention of context through lyrical innovation…The transformative solidarity of hip hop poetics in the Americas has much to teach us about the power of words to build communities and other worlds. (70)

It is by scaling their neighborhood particularities that rappers point toward a translocal and transnational convergence of hip hop poetics in the Americas. (94)

Rap does not deliver the news but rather an injunction to listen. It is a mode of listening in community, thinking through listening, listening to the street, and making the street listen. (122)

Freestylers create structures and rhymes recursively, drawing on ideas that have been previously tested out. Freestyling requires the maintenance of a “mental bank” of rhymes and grammatical structures that fit with the break. This seemingly spontaneous exercise is performed through the masterful repetition or citation of learned formulae or “rules shared by the community”…Homeric verse (previously received as the literary product of a single poet) in fact represented a performative oral tradition based on highly formulaic verse structures designed to facilitate memorization…By listening to and mastering an analogous rap “grammar” of syntactic formulations, shared references, ritualized practices, and rhyming conventions, rappers similarly develop the oral and aural skill of writing in the mind. (129-30)

While the intertextual, intermedial, and aural achievements of rap songs deserve attention on their own aesthetic merits, it is in the capacity of these poetic features to enact community literacy that hip hop’s social and political possibilities reside. Rap is not only about transforming reality into poetry, but also about writing new realities into existence…The pronouncement of the world confronts the violence inaugurated by those who wield power against those who do not. Rappers participate in this transformative work of pronouncing the world. Through their emphasis on writing, they invoke poetry and music as forms of popular militancy and critique various forms of oppression. (140-1)

Hip hop poetics is not merely a description of the formal features of rap; poetics is what rap songs do. While I have traced three overlapping cultural histories associated with the circulation of hip hop poetics in the Americas, these are not so much cultural histories about hip hop as cultural histories in hip hop. By articulating and enacting categories of shared poetic belonging through community writing, Haitian, Brazilian, and Cuban rappers demonstrate in their flows the near-limitless potential for revision that accompanies the recursive return to the break. Rap provides a mode of being and knowing together, a way of making sense of the global in the local, the written in the aural, the (rap)love that undergirds yearning. It is a practice that is always grounding but never on firm ground, always emplacing but never in one place, constantly uprooting, perpetually somewhere else. (167-8)

Rating: 8/10