Spectra of Singularity: Episodes of Improvisational Lyricism from Hiphop to Pragmatism.

Abstract

This project works backwards: a contemporary concern—my deep engagement with hiphop music—is used as a heuristic device through which to resound the historical trajectory of American modernism. The intention is not so much to explicate an airtight genealogy as to dwell upon the juxtaposition of two bodies of work separated by a temporal gap but nevertheless possessing significant and unexplored similarities. Such a comparison can provide a novel understanding of both terms. Pragmatism—especially as enunciated in the work of William James—is chosen as a starting point due both to its prominence in the history of American modernism and because I believe it holds a strange, but compelling, affinity with hiphop. James’s pragmatism—especially as elaborated by his students Gertrude Stein and W.E.B. Du Bois—touches deeply upon two related concerns that have arisen through my study and enjoyment of hiphop music: improvisational lyricism, on the one hand, and the interaction between personal development and artistic achievement, on the other. Pragmatism, as I use it, is an act of art as well as of thought. It is a means for enacting thinking as improvisational lyricism and thereby eliciting affective resonance from one’s audience. It is also, at the same time, a method of achieving and reflecting upon self-realization—and thereby reshaping reality—through aesthetic practice and theory. Pragmatism as improvisational lyricism infuses language with music, working with found materials to achieve the unforeseen. In this capacity, it serves as a means for working through and struggling to communicate one’s most unique and deeply felt—and by the same token most difficult to articulate—experiences. As such, it serves as a touchstone from which to begin explicating the independently invented but deeply similar philosophy that lies behind and motivates the music of hiphop.