Staple Crops founder, artist, designer, culture jammer, Tahir Hemphill, is nothing if not irreverent. His latest project, the Hip-Hop Word Count, is one of those insidiously smart comments on culture that leaves you-ironically-speechless. What can you say when you find out that the reading level needed to comprehend Lil’ Wayne’s “I’m Me” is that of a 9th grader. Not that this is a huge suprise, but it is a cold reminder that the very stuff that we claim so vehemently as culture (as if to throw it in the face of those who would question it) can not be separated from the sociological trends that have come to define the tricky overlapping identities of the hip-hop generation. [An aside: I'm not sure how the ___ to spell "hip-hop." Sometimes I use a hyphen, sometimes I run it together] This generation is hard to define: youth dominated, commercialized, mediatized, black and sometimes brown or white, sometimes poor, but emulated and repackaged by the rich. We suspect that we are getting dumber every time we find our head nodding to the Soldier Boy, but Hemphill is sick enough to demand proof and hold it in our faces.
I bet if you ask him, he would not admit to taking pleasure in this act of iconoclasm. Hemphill is much more interested in the aesthetics usually. He resists the reactionary critique, the Dead Prez style rhetorical slam. Instead, like a good child of the post-modern era, he engages his reality with all of its overlapping economic, social, and artistic systems. The word count brings out this overlapping-system-view of the world by forcing two far flung systems together that are usually housed in separate buildings on any college campus. In this case, the cold, technical rigor of linguistic analysis is wrapped tightly around the bold, improvisatory fire of hip-hop’s super MC’s. The combination makes a fool of both. The only one left standing with a Cheshire cat grin is Hemphill.
To drive home the point that nothing is sacred, Hemphill has unleashed the word count on energy policy speeches by the two presidential candidates. This move does a lot of things at once. First of all, by roping the candidates into the hip-hop word count, we are reminded how much MC’s and candidates have in common. They all want to convince us of their street cred. Meanwhile, they want to remain larger than life. From XXL to CNN we are being sold on a cult of personality. Secondly, we are forced to think analytically about words. Words, even though they are so damn cheap, still matter. The speech writers and ghost writers know this. But its easy to forget in the midst of scarfing down your daily media diet. Thirdly, we notice that the two political speeches score only slightly higher than the average rap lyrics on the word count. This fact brings the necessary balance to a project that might seem opportunistically snide at first. It also made me think that it won’t be long before we start seeing rappers running for office.
