Yesterday I asked Zadie Smith a question.
From the sixth row, I put my hand up to receive the roving mic.
Did she, as someone who has written incisively about the literary merit of hip-hop, ever find herself having to make the argument in the opposite direction?
That is, had she ever had to convince sceptical, younger hip-hop fans about the value of novels? And if so, what did she use as proof?
My reason for asking was entirely selfish. I admitted as much. I have two teenage boys whose burgeoning interest in hip-hop has exploded this year. It’s affirming and exciting, their growing discernment is inspiring to behold. They’re borrowing my vinyl - Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Mobb Deep - but also buying their own. They love Kanye, MF Doom, Childish Gambino, and Tyler, The Creator. They’ve each gone back in time, buying the Wu-Tang and Lauryn Hill. Both love Kendrick Lamar.
But they don’t read. For all the usual reasons that don’t need rehearsing here.
I think they should. For all the usual reasons that don’t need rehearsing here.
And so I asked Zadie.
She knows, I thought. She knows about the transporting magic of Mrs Dalloway and the literary genius of To Pimp A Butterfly. The episodic mastery of Middlemarch and the rhapsodic thrill of The Blueprint. She knows too, I reckoned - must know - where the joins are. The secret portals where the two art forms intersect. The access points, the places where flow meets structure, where my boys might find on the page the kind of charisma and storytelling they are used to in their ears. Prose deserving of props.
In short, I asked, what writers should I put in front of them? What books?
She said, James Baldwin.
She also, a few moments later, thinking about teenagers and reading more generally, cited the novels that had clicked for her: The Buddha Of Suburbia, A Clockwork Orange, The Catcher In The Rye, and talked about their intensity, the heightened emotion in those books, the way they’re not written for young people but they - and their protagonists, of course - carry something of the moral certainty that careens us through the teenage years, and how intoxicating it is to read them at that age.
She also suggested books about hip-hop.
She said all that.
But she also said, James Baldwin.
James Baldwin, who wrote that “people evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”
James Baldwin, who wrote that “language is a political instrument, means, and proof of power.” He called it “the most vivid and crucial key to identity”; said it’s necessary if we are to “confront life.”
James Baldwin, who wrote these ideas in an essay about Black English, in which he argued that the specificities of language were the point of them. That if Black English diverged from the English spoken and learned by white Americans, it was because their experience diverged too. Which is why it was so strange to deny its status as language, and call it merely a dialect - a denial that was hypocritical, given the cultural appropriation of Black English by the establishment. They bled it of all meaning, of course, drained the life from its words. But still, they used words like jazz and funk and cool and continued to diminish Black identity anyway. How rich it was, wrote Baldwin, to “penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality.”
James Baldwin’s prose was and is still fire. He is as fierce and eloquent as anyone I’ve ever read. He is also right, and Zadie was right to say his name. Read those quotes again. It’s not only his style that makes him fodder for a hip-hop fan, it’s his ideas. A language created to describe circumstances and not to be submerged by reality, he says. Language as a political instrument, political means, proof of power, he says. This, if it is anything, is hip-hop. He even foreshadowed its cultural appropriation and the hypocritical withholding of respect. Hip-hop is the world’s most popular genre, yet its practitioners are still treated with suspicion.
Hip-hop is 50 years old this year. It contains multitudes. Kendrick Lamar has won the Pulitzer prize. It shouldn’t need anybody to spell out its literary merit. What’s more, it shouldn’t need pointing out to a middle-aged father who loves James Baldwin and loves hip-hop that the answer he’s looking for from Zadie Smith is already there in his question.
Zadie did indeed make the argument in the opposite direction, just not in the way I meant.
They’re probably fine with Kendrick, she said. “Once you’ve heard someone get sixteen syllables to a line, you’re not likely to be wowed anything that any of us [ie novelists] can do.”
Hip-hop is literary enough.
It’s language that’s important, not the medium. The words writers use and the world they build with them. The fight they choose. The pain, the questioning, the fury, the joy. The connection. Who needs that in books if you’ve already got it on vinyl.
At the end of the Q&A, there was one last question. Zadie, about the school curriculum in England - it’s too white and too male - there are too few non-white authors being read by teenagers - what can we do?
At the end of James Baldwin’s essay, there’s something approaching an answer.
“And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets--it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little.”
The child’s attention is already somewhere else. And with damn good reason.
But the kids gonna be Alright.
“Once you’ve heard someone get sixteen syllables to a line, you’re not likely to be wowed anything that any of us [ie novelists] can do.” A warm reminder that I don't need to worry, too much, that my eldest son doesn't read. Thanks James. This is another belter!