Cancelled KRS-ONE talk reflects Oxford snobbery
At 9:30pm on Monday in Christ Church JCR, a great big black man was transforming things. He was transforming himself out of a black man. He was making the cigarette machine a ladder, he was offering us up a record of our meeting in a shoe. True Hip-Hop, he said, is a transformation of the subject-object relationship through a powerfully changed, and changing consciousness. It was an uncomfortably incongruous sounding thing to be saying.
It was uncomfortable because he should have been saying it with the respect and support of the institution at which he was a guest. It was incongruous because he was not speaking like a man who might bring in his entourage ‘people from outside’, intent on picking fights with the venerable bricks; the man the Dean of New College, Michael Burden, obviously thought he was. In fact, he was a man bringing the ‘Hip-Hop Declaration of Peace."
KRS-ONE is one of the most successful Hip-Hop artists of the last twenty-five years. As a representative for Oxford Contemporary Arts Society, I had invited him to give a lecture at New College on Monday night.
At around about 2pm on Monday, I was informed that the Dean had cancelled the talk, with no negotiations, due to the threat from that dangerous minority of people who don’t attend Oxford University, but have the temerity to log onto the OCAS website, or glance at a poster, and turn up to a lecture. KRS did grow up in the Bronx listening, as he told us, to beats played on illegally tapped electricity from street lamps.
He was, as he told us without any aggrandising pride, located in a network which, in some complex way, placed value in violence and drugs, notably cocaine; things not uncommon in these fair spires. In this context, he talked a little about the beginnings of what he called ‘Hip-Hop consciousness’.
It is a context that might, in the listening, become an aesthetic brutality, a sparky poverty that unthinkers might be tempted to see as attractive, unthinkers who cannot, like Oxford students, negotiate worlds for themselves. Even after an impassioned and articulate speech about self-creation and transformation of received ideas from a massively famous Hip-Hopper, people might still be attracted to the culturally associated rapideal of a gun toting, coke-smoking, egotistical (college-smasher).
Stupid replication certainly does happen. But an act likelier to consolidate such stupidity, is of the type of which Michael Burden has become the unhappy representative: the reactionary, the closed, the rude; an uninformed presumption of ignorance for everyone else and blind to his own. It is exactly in mistakenly assuming the prevalence of stupid replication that engenders and entrenches shades of reactionary actions, the relationship is symbiotic.
I am not suggesting that the Dean of New College was scared that his students would turn into gun-crazed coke fiends if they saw KRS, but the assumption is that somebody has. What makes that assumption so ludicrous is that it not only shows a total inability to differentiate between context and individual, but a disrespect for the very work that the individual in question is doing.
Clearly the ways in which KRS presented himself were strange and different from the majority of the institution in which he was speaking; when he got into Christ Church he erupted into a fizz of exaltation that wouldn’t dull up until the (extremely helpful and forgiving) porters of Christ Church sheepishly asked him to leave at ten. Sometimes he appeared to contradict himself.
The notion that one should ‘unlearn’, in order to re-create the world according to one’s own ‘basic nature’ presents perhaps some unassailable difficulties, if one is going to try and reconcile it with acknowledging the implied corresponding ‘truth’ of somebody, or something, else’s ‘basic nature’. But inherent in the notion is its own critique.
He asserted, in no uncertain terms, the strength of a definite set of principles couched joyously in the bumf of his personal experience while at the same time picking us up in his own bear arms almost, told never to accept without question what people assert over us. The event in its incongruity was important, persuasive, and, unfortunately, saddening.
9th Jun 2005