But I think through the advances that Black folk have made politically, we lost a lot of that kind of intentional pushback against the United States. And we kind of see that in the formation of hip-hop. I think that’s what made me think about the beauty of what the Harlem Renaissance was about - let’s use our jazz, poetry, and politics as a way of screaming. And it makes you think about what it means to be de-voiced or what it means not to have a microphone. And no matter what, you can almost hear the scream in the visual. But it’s clear anxiety, it’s clear frustration. Well, in that piece, it forces us to think about sound, right? Because there’s no sound in that picture. You use the painting “The Scream” by Edvard Munch to better understand hip-hop as a genre. But at its best, what it attempts to do is create some reconciliation of bad faith by trying to keep it real, and by trying to understand what realness is, and authenticity, and be an example of what that can be through voice and music. I try to use the example of hip-hop to show that it does have its problems, challenges, and conflicts. But I won’t let the blues consume me.” It’s this idea of flipping the script of turning the table on itself. Resisting this idea that “I must be recognized.” In this war of recognition, hip-hop says, “I’m not gonna forget where I came from, which is blues tradition. I wanted to see, how does hip-hop deal with this? So I said, hip-hop has always been a resistance movement. The United States itself, to continue to be seen as the city on the hill, the greatest country in the world, has to somehow deny aspects of itself - the ugly part of itself. And so I wanted to talk that out a little bit using the American political system. It’s this constant interplay of self-creation and others’ acceptance to a point where you get into this conflict of the self-being for others. His concept of bad faith had to do with the fact that individuals seem to be forced to deny themselves to be accepted and recognized by others. My context for bad faith comes from the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a French existentialist in the early 20th century. This was achieved through my goal today of speaking about the question of bad faith. I talk about the United States and democracy by fusing a conversation of my hip-hop work with my political work. The classroom was reading my book Philosophy and Hip-Hop: Ruminations on Postmodern Cultural Form. The lecture today is based on the classroom talk I had earlier in the afternoon. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Ĭan you talk about what you discussed in your lecture? Bailey, a cultural critic and theorist, presented his lecture, “Hip Hop and Bad Faith Democracy, Where A Music and Resistance Conjoins” to Oberlin students Nov. Julius Bailey is chair of the department of Philosophy and Religion at Wittenberg University, as well as director of both the African & Diaspora Studies and the Justice, Law & Public Policy programs.
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