英语论文网

6] According to Mailer, American existenti alism, unlike its European counterpart, is based primarily on mood and feeling, rather than theory ?la Sartre and others; it finds its first major expression in the "hipster," the cool white cat who drops out of white culture--condemned as staid, boring, affectless, corporate, and conformist--in order to enter the exotic world of black culture with its mesmerizing rhythms and powerful expressions of sexuality and soul. Fleeing from the culture of "spiritual death," where the dominant norms are consumerism and careerism, the "white negro" finds passion and creativity in a far more vital black culture. From jazz to rock and roll to rap, many whites males have identified primarily with black music, language, dress, and style. Young suburban whites identify with rap because they too feel deeply alienated and rebellious, and like to identify with the "gangsta" image, such as "the wigger" subculture which appropriates the forms of black culture for oppositional white identities. As Ray Mazarek, the keyboard player for the Doors put it in a VH1 interview, without black culture, Americans "would still be dancing tippee-toe to the minuet." In fact, rap is a global popular with rap groups appearing on every continent in various languages and cultures. It is a product of the African diaspora, drawing on a wealth of African traditions and its rhythms, rhymes, and rebellions strike a responsive chord throughout the postmodern global village, suggesting the existence of a yet-to-be-organized Youth International of the disaffected. Especially "gangsta rap" flaunts disrespect for the authority, laws, and norms of white culture. As is clear in songs like Ice-T's "Mic Contract," the microphone is seen as a symbol of power, a phallic extension or gun, that enables rappers to engage in sublimated warfare. Rap reveals that the word "nigger" has been appropriated by African-Americans in various ways, either as a positive term of endearment and solidarity, as a term of hostility toward a peer, or as a political identity for a member of an oppressed class, such as when Ice-T insists in "Straight up Nigga" that "I am a nigger, not a colored man, negro, or black," terms widely accepted by white culture that euphemize the actual conditions faced by blacks, and which the word "nigger" refuses to tidy up. Much rap music attempts to communicate the plight of young blacks in the inner cities and, especially, to call attention to the problem of police violence which they confront on an everyday basis. While the police are supposed to "serve and protect," young blacks find instead that the cops are there to harass and exploit, and that these "guardians of the peace" in fact pose one of the gravest dangers to the community--as well dramatized in films like Menace II Society, or the Mark Fuhrman tapes during the O.J. Simpson trial which one African- American commentator described as an appropriate soundtrack for the Rodney King beating. In "Body Count," Ice-T satirically reflects on the white utopia of Ozzie and Harriet and the Cleavers, as a time and place where cops would help a kitten down from a tree. Nowadays, in the inner cities, Ice-T notes that "Shit ain't like that!" Every day, from L.A. to New Orleans, Philadelphia to New York, the complaints of the rappers are confirmed as white police have been caught beating and killing blacks, ordering their execution, imprisoning them on bogus charges and planted evidence,