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PHOTO: THE APPLE JUICE KID
Adam Mansbach '98 Makes Waves With Hip Hop Novel
By Nina Willdorf '99
With a languid swagger, Adam Mansbach '98 assumes a makeshift
stage in the back room of Newtonville Books in Newton, Mass. With a
microphone in hand, a black suit and black undershirt as his
uniform and a three-piece band to back him, Mansbach reads from his
debut novel, Shackling Water (Doubleday, 2002).
Truth be told, reading isn't quite the right way to put
it. The performance mixes rhymed verse, rapping, and, at moments,
singing. Stepping out in front of a podium, Mansbach uses his words
as musical notes; they rise and fall over strains of improvised
jazz. His consonants are jarring punctuation, his vowels are
crowing notes, and his bobbing head provides emphasis.
Mansbach is reading from the beginning of his novel, which
describes the life story of Latif, a black boy from Boston's inner
city who experiences a harsh coming of age through music. In
Mansbach's fictional world, America, he writes, is "not melting pot
but mixing board, wedged between two turntables and a microphone,
amalgamating tortured newness from the scraps of dying sonic
dynasties."
Is that Latif speaking? Or Mansbach? On a 15-city tour of the
United States, Mansbach, 25, has been making waves with his unusual
way of fusing literary readings with musical shows that infuse a
jaunty, beat-conscious hip hop vibe with more standard literary
fare. He juxtaposes jazz influences, hip hop beats and rhymes and
shoutouts to his literary luminaries with the cross-genre rapid
flow of Cornel West.
The audience at Newtonville Books, composed equally of
middle-aged folks and twenty-somethings, watches him; some appear
bemused, others nod their heads in time politely, getting into the
rhythm. All clap enthusiastically at the end of the performance cum
reading cum concert.
Spending equal time in bookstores and clubs as program
coordinator for Columbia's Center for Jazz Studies and improvisational
hip hop artist, and now touring with Shackling Water, often
called "a hip hop novel," Mansbach straddles many artistic
worlds.
"Adam brings the aesthetic and the intellectual together in a
powerful fusion," says Michael Eric Dyson, author of Holler If
You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (Basic Books, 2001) and
professor of religious studies and African-American studies at the
University of Pennsylvania. Dyson taught Mansbach at Columbia in
1998 when he was visiting professor of African American
Studies.
Early on, Mansbach, a native of Newton, a wealthy, predominantly
Jewish suburb of Boston, found himself drawn to the heady and
heated world of hip hop, where artists such as Public Enemy and
Run-D.M.C., he found, were saying something politically important.
"I got a sense that the community that I was living in had a
hypocrisy to it, particularly around things like race," he explains
via phone from his apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. "I felt like
people weren't grappling with race on its most profound levels. I
had a sense of that injustice from a young age."
At 12, Mansbach started listening to Public Enemy, Jungle
Brothers and N.W.A., early hip hop artists who broadcasted
progressive political awareness. "I became radicalized at a young
age," Mansbach says. "Rap then was aggressive in what it was trying
to do. I had a little kernel of indignity and outrage and I started
trying to do something about it." Mansbach started making his own
art, performing at spoken word nights in Boston. He made waves
wherever he could in his community, protesting, for example, to
have the Black Panthers included in his seventh-grade history class
curriculum.
But it wasn't until years later, as a sophomore at the College,
that the politically minded, artistically inclined youth was to
finally channel that enthusiasm, indignity and artistic eye into
his first piece of work.
Mansbach studied English at Columbia under Ann Douglas, George
Stade and Kenneth Koch, among others. He also audited a class on
hip hop at NYU with Tricia Rose. "The class made me see how hip hop
could be critiqued from a place of understanding and respect for
it," Mansbach recounts. "I decided I needed to put that dialogue in
writing."
Mansbach took the discussion uptown, launching a magazine called
Elementary: A Journal of Hip Hop Culture, which
Columbia wrote about in its Winter 1996 issue. Douglas acted
as a faculty sponsor for the project, which Mansbach developed as
an independent study under her direction. "He's a fabulously
talented, unbelievably energetic, interesting, brilliant young
man," Douglas raves. "Frankly, anything Adam wanted to do
was fine by me."
Supported in part by grants from the University,
Elementary included an intelligent mix of essays on the
genre from graffiti art to dance to music. With a full-time staff
of four students, Mansbach was able to woo contributors including
Chuck D, Greg Tate, Delfeayo Marsalis (Wynton's brother) and
Professor Robert O'Meally, who has continued to work closely with
Mansbach as his adviser in his part-time position consulting with
the Center for Jazz Studies. "We set out to create dialogue and
give it the space to flourish," Mansbach explains. "We were
interested in talking about where hip hop had gone." In particular,
the journal addressed "the missteps that hip hop had taken since
its peak political awareness from 1989-91."
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