“Mic check, one, two, one, two”: Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City

Abstract

“Mic check, one, two, one, two”: Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City Rocio Rayo (bio) Shanté Paradigm Smalls’s Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City, New York: New York University Press, 2022 Shanté Paradigm Smalls comes in hot with their recently published Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City. In the first few pages, Smalls clearly defines why NYC, why aesthetics, and why queer; then shifts deeper into defining both queer and Black aesthetics—ultimately answering the question of why hip hop. As they remind us that “hip-hop is middle-aged,” they very clearly maintain it is a genre housed squarely with young adults and teenagers. Hip hop’s mercurial nature is one that constantly changes underfoot—making it solid ground to build a queer, Black, hip hop aesthetic framework. Smalls decided to locate hip hop aesthetic in “disorganized street culture” permitting messiness. This beautiful chaos allows the reader to jump on the beat Smalls produced through their demand to disrupt “and eradicate settled public modalities” of what “authentic” hip hop meant (and means) in NYC. They state, “The book argues that New York City hip-hop artists use queer, Black, and hip-hop aesthetics to queerly—disruptively, generatively, inauthentically—articulate gender, racial, and sexual identitarian performances through specifically New York City based aesthetic and artistic practices and cues” (24). Importantly, Smalls clarifies that this is only possible due to the “creativity and expansiveness of Black genius.” Hip Hop Heresies is broken up into four chapters, with an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter, “Wild Stylin’ Martin Wong’s Queer Visuality in New York City Graffiti,” queers the narrative that there is a “lone wolf” success story in hip hop and instead focuses on the origin point, where different styles, cultures, and people intersect. While the protagonist of this chapter is Martin Wong and his contributions, the undercurrent is the liminal space that focusing on Wong carves out and defines in relationship [End Page 265] to Latinidad and Blackness within a hip hop context. Wong’s location on the lower east side of Manhattan connects him to “Nuyorico” while simultaneously erasing his connection to Blackness. Smalls does a phenomenal job of locating him within the body of a Black hip hop aesthetic history. In their second chapter, “Ni[99]a Fu: The Last Dragon, Black Masculinity, and Chinese Martial Arts,” Smalls “offers an alternative model for Black racial formation, queer heterosexual Black masculinity, and a hybrid cultural identity” (59; spelling changed by me). Focusing on “The Last Dragon” allows Smalls an opportunity to reorient heterosexual Black masculinity as queer by removing it from an embodied experience “in relation to white, patriarchal, hetero norms” to a Black masculine experience that challenged controlling images of what it meant to be both Black and masculine. Leroy’s popular performance (and the acceptance of his performance) as both masculine and Black while the actual character was “virginal awkward and ill-fitted for the mean streets of mid-1980s New York City” is itself an exercise in queering the expectations of what Black masculinity meant and means. Smalls’s third chapter, “‘Casebaskets’: Listening for the Uncanny in Jean Grae,” steers us away from “Asian American and Afro Asian connectedness and queer masculinity” and positions us within Black womanhood—using methods from Black feminist thought and psychoanalysis. Smalls uses the work of Jean Grae and psychoanalytic theory in order to implore fantasy, the uncanny, invention, intuition, and the psychic. Smalls argues that using Jean Grae’s body of work allows for the anatomy of Black femininity and psychic expression to be dissected and studied through the lenses of gender, race, and sexuality. The final chapter, “Queer Hip Hop, Queer Dissonance,” takes us on an ethnographic stroll through hip hop cultural history from 1982 to 2005. The question answered in this chapter is as follows: if back in “those days” it was impossible to be part of an NYC club scene without being “among gays, lesbians, trans, and other sexual outlaws,” why would hip hop culture be so different? Smalls posits that since white supremacy defined hip hop as only Black, masculine, and poor, it must also be...