This year, everyone gets "trick."

I have to confess that I don't feel fully qualified to write about The Life of Gustavus Vassa until I finish it, but if I have to write the words "Doctor Impossible" ever again, I'm going to go crazy. So here goes.

Paul Youngquist's essay on Gustavus Vassa's (interesting) narrative raises a good point, namely that most of us take for granted that we assess the truth of things—or at least their claims to genre—based on European protocols. But Youngquist pitches this as an ideological battle between Western imperialism and its casualties, in this case the (black) Atlantic laborer. As far as I know, where you're from (as in where you were born) is an even more important determinant of identity in other cultures. No matter how far you've come, or how little time you spent in your hometown, people will judge you by what they know of it. America has the greatest possible mobility, the greatest possible hybridity (bonus points for using the "h" word?) in the world in this respect. If you want to renounce your birthplace because of a spiritual connection to your ancestral homeland, that's OK. But regardless of your spiritual connection to a place, if you weren't born there then you weren't born there.

It's tempting to take Youngquist to task for the awkward juxtaposition of an art form defined by its vernacular roots and a writing style defined by its remoteness from the vernacular, but that would be missing the point. Youngquist definitely tries in this essay, but I'm still not convinced of his argument's validity. His hip hop references aren't especially surefooted and most of them feel a bit contrived. A case in point: Kool Keith, who allegedly "acknowledges identity to be an effect of practices like hip hop rather than their origin." Actually, he's just a really creative surrealistic rapper who likes themed albums. I don't deny KK his intellectual chops, but I don't think it's quite honest of Youngquist to conflate the idea of the heteronym with Vassa's biographic liberties. Kool Keith doesn't mix identities; he's either Black Elvis or Dr. Octagon (or one of his dozen or so other mic personalities), but never both. And at the end of the day he admits that he's Keith Thornton from New York. In other words, pretending to be Dr. Dooom or Black Elvis (and thereby forming an openly fictional heteronym) isn't the same thing as claiming to be from Africa. Youngquist wants to let Vassa have it both ways, which is fine as long as Vassa's narrative is no longer categorized as biography or, gasp, nonfiction, because it clearly isn't.

And let's define our terms. Hip hop isn't just mixing and remixing—it's not only an art form that recombines (to use Youngquist's favorite verb) existing elements to make new ones. Youngquist cites rappers when he should be talking about DJs—the two split years ago and have since pursued radically different paths. Rappers have taken over the mainstream because mainstream tastes need a catchy chorus (think 50 or Kanye or anyone popular) and can't deal with the challenging, not-quite-musical sounds of modern turntablism (as practiced by Cut Chemist and Prefuse 73, to name two).

Remixed music is a useful metaphor to have at hand when discussing identity production, but let's please not take it too far, or worse, strip it of its own complexities and subdivisions to make an academic argument. Hip hop—either rapping or scratching—is not primarily concerned with subverting the Western protocols of Western identity-production. Regardless of its diasporic origins, it's basically a Western genre and, as Youngquist admits, subject to Western values, particularly capitalism. Rappers want to make money so badly that most of their songs are about making money (Lumbajack, anybody?) and DJs want to make people dance. Hip hop's global reach can't and shouldn't be disassociated from the global reach of the American empire where hip hop emerged. Hip hop is an American export and it's bigger and more important than the European Romantic Review. Fact.

I hope he can at least smile at the irony of writing about "recombinant mixology" and "the counter-esthetics of hip hop" in the European Romantic Review, sure to be read by exactly 0 people engaged in said counter-esthetics. That's academia for you... (No offense intended, Talissa.)

P.S. Happy Halloween everyone!
P.P.S. KitKats are like crack.