Harvard's Rapper: Cornel West Hits Bottom

There are only 17 University Professors among the 2,000-plus faculty members at Harvard, the greatest and richest university in the most powerful nation the world has ever known. They are the elite of the elites, and were awarded the extremely rare University Professor distinction in recognition of their talent and influence.

It's easy to see why these scholars rate. Economist Robert C. Merton won the Nobel Prize. Literary critic Helen Vendler and Chinese-literature scholar Stephen Owen established themselves as among the leading experts in their highly demanding fields. Political scientist Samuel Huntington has written, among other volumes, The Clash of Civilizations and the New World Order, a book given new life after September 11. This is what you expect from America's most brilliant intellects.

You do not expect what Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., University Professor Cornel West did last fall. West, acclaimed by many as America's leading black intellectual — and who once complained that "academicist forms of expression have a monopoly on intellectual life" — in November released "Sketches of My Culture" (Artemis), a rap CD.

The disc got West in trouble with the new Harvard president, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who made the mistake of asking the professor what the hell he was thinking when he agreed to that project, among others (heading racist demagogue Al Sharpton's presidential-advisory committee, for instance). In high dudgeon, West threatened to leave for Princeton and take the leading lights of the Afro-American Studies Department with him. Jesse Jackson swooped in to mediate, with Sharpton close on his heels.

It seems to have worked. On Friday, the New York Times reported that the rift had been smoothed over. Few details were given, but Summers appears to have assuaged the black professors without having to issue a public apology to West. After listening to "Sketches of My Culture," however, you might wonder how Summers can keep a disgraceful boob like Cornel West on his faculty without apologizing to all the parents who pay Harvard's $34,500 tuition.

From the disc's opening lines, you know you're in the presence of something unusually bad, but it takes a minute or two for the full scope of its Shatnerian shlockiness to make itself known. If you're like me, then by track four, sticky gobbets of schadenfreude will be coming out your nose and dribbling down your chin. And you're only halfway done!

In case you had any doubts that "Sketches of My Culture" was a vanity project, the first sentence on the disc's promotional website clarifies matters: "In all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history." We are subsequently informed that West and his musical collaborator, Derek "D.O.A." Allen, are "geniuses."

Lyrically, the disc is a plonkingly simple mish-mash of black nationalism, moral posturing, victimization politics, and sentimental uplift. As such, it's a useful guide to West's philosophy — shorn of the impenetrable postmodernist cant that permeates his writing. West deploys his vocabulary much as a 13-year-old girl deploys Kleenex in her training bra: to obscure the embarrassing fact that there's not much there.

The first cut, "The Journey," serves as a thematic overture. "Let the word go forth here and now that the struggle for freedom is still alive and the story of that struggle is still being told," the preacherly West bellows, like Moses from the mountaintop. "We begin with guttural cries and wrenching moans and visceral groans and weary lament and silent ears."

With that line, West might have been foretelling the state of his listeners by the end of the disc, but he's really talking about slavery. It should be noted that as mockable as West's orations are, the things he attempts to discuss are not. It's just that West's sensibility is so thoroughly kitschy (and West himself so thoroughly unaware of the fact) that he trivializes everything he touches. What kind of music do we hear in the background when he alludes to Mother Africa? A "Hakuna Matata" knockoff from The Lion King.

West tells us that black music "soo-thez our bruises," but the second cut, "Stolen King," wallows in black victimization. In the annihilating 1995 review essay in which he declared West's books "worthless," Leon Wielseltier called the professor "a hero in a culture of morbidity, in which wounds are jewels." Perhaps West is merely in love with the sound of his own voice, but there's something bizarrely masochistic about the relish with which he recites lines like: "From the heights of rich African humanity, to the depth of sick American barbarity, in the whirlwinds of white supremacy, black people preserved their sanity and dignity." And: "No other people in the modern world have had such unprecedented levels of unregulated violence against them." This — after Auschwitz, after Cambodia, after Rwanda.

Imagine these sentiments set to music that might have been used to promote the ghetto libation "Thunderbird," and you grasp how cringe-worthy this album is.

The dull, karaoke-machine groove continues on "Elevate Your View," in which a guest rapper named Waynee Wayne joins "Brother West" in preaching reform to a gang-banger. Don't despair, counsels Brother West, stay on the "caravan of struggle," the "train of justice," the "ship of freedom." Carrying on aboard this rickshaw of malarkey, we roll "3Ms," a pro-forma tribute to Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., to whom he refers as a "grand titan of love, drum major for justice." Block those metaphors! Says West, to the three dead worthies: "They and us will never forget you." No, I'm sure us won't.

It's hard to find the bottom in this pit of pathos. It might be West's description of the 1970s as a decade of "deep sharing and caring and loving and hugging." Or you might say it's his final benediction to listeners, in which he exhorts them to carry on the grand march through history, and "Never let us forget Earth, Wind, and Fire encouraging us to keep our heads to the sky."

Though personally, I reached it in "N-Word," West's protest against blacks using the word "nigger." The song is presented as a radio call-in show, in which West telephones to show two previous callers the error of their ways. One of them, a sexy-voiced woman, phones to say, "I love the word 'nigger,' but I only use it in my lovemaking. When I call my man 'nigger,' he works hard."

It is to this cri de coeur that the Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., University Professor, Cornel West, hearkens his intellect. Harvard must be so proud.

Officially, they have to be. Its president having caved, Harvard is stuck with this clownish minstrel — and his whopping six-figure salary — and now has to work harder to pretend that a department with such a buffoon as its star is something to be taken seriously. Now the Latino Studies Department, having seen Cornel West, Jesse Jackson, and their gang turn the famously ferocious Larry Summers into the Ivy League equivalent of a prison bride, has begun agitating for special treatment. The only discernible good news for people who despair over the trashing of academic standards in the face of minority mau-mauing is that Tom Wolfe, who is working on a novel about academia, suddenly has a wealth of fresh material.

The Economist weighs in as well:

Larry Summers v Cornel West

Seeing crimson

Jan 3rd 2002 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

The folly of making famous professors write learned books

THESE days university presidents are a hopelessly anodyne bunch. They mouth politically-correct platitudes, make nice comments to potential benefactors and, in general, do their utmost to avoid saying anything that might be misconstrued as either interesting or original.

How refreshing then to deal with Larry Summers. Bill Clinton's erstwhile treasury secretary has always found it hard to suffer nonsense gladly. In Washington, DC, he was muzzled, at least in public. But since being named president of Harvard University six months ago he has reverted to type.

First, Mr Summers called for something to be done about grade inflation. This year more than half of all grades given at Harvard were As. Yet before Mr Summers appeared, most of the 2,000 strong faculty apparently regarded this as a testimony to their brilliant teaching, rather than anything to do with collapsing standards.

Then he praised patriotism, telling a meeting at the Kennedy School that “patriotism” is a word “used too infrequently in communities such as this”, and lamented that the Vietnam War had led to a disaffection “toward people who wear uniforms”. This too seems to have gone down badly.

Now he is at war with the university's Afro-American studies department. According to the Boston Globe, last October Mr Summers rebuked Cornel West, who holds one of Harvard's coveted university professorships. Mr West's alleged sins included recording a rap CD, leading a political committee for Al Sharpton's possible presidential campaign, writing books more likely to be reviewed in The New York Times than in academic journals and allowing grade inflation.

Since then the incident has spiralled into a full-blown academic tempest. The insulted Mr West is considering a rival offer from Princeton, his former employer. Henry Louis Gates, the department head, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, are thinking of going with him. Mr West has also announced that he intends to take a leave of absence.

It will get worse. Jesse Jackson, that well-known crusader for academic standards, has arranged a meeting with Mr Summers. “The tension at Harvard is having an impact across the country,” says Mr Jackson, whose last venture into politics was to try to broker a deal with the Taliban. Mr Sharpton also wants to meet Mr Summers. He is considering filing a lawsuit against Harvard as “an aggrieved party”.

If every professor who backed a lunatic politician were to be sacked, half the interesting minds in academia would be lost. Nobody denies that Mr West is talented. But is his work any good? He is the author of more than a dozen books, some of them serious contributions to his field. But lately he seems closer to becoming a performance artist—and a poor one at that.

His rap album (sample lyric: “No other people in the modern world have had such unprecedented levels of unregulated violence against them”) indicates that the medium is best left to the likes of Snoop Doggy Dogg rather than Harvard professors. His website is shot through with embarrassing boasts and grammatical errors. The section devoted to the rap album begins by stating that “In all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history” (what on earth would the immodest version be?). It describes Mr West as “one of the most preeminent minds of our time” and refers to somebody called “Nietzche”.

So Mr Summers clearly has a point. But that does not mean he will win. Minority groups are very powerful in academia, and Mr Gates has transformed Harvard's Afro-American studies department into one of the most successful in the country. In 1991, when he took over, it was a backwater consisting of one white professor and a handful of students. It now boasts some of the most distinguished black academics in the country, notably William Julius Wilson. Mr West's introductory course on Afro-American studies attracted more than 600 students this semester.

This week Mr Summers apologetically announced how proud he was of all the members of the department, and pledged to create an “attractive environment” for them (usually campus-speak for “more money for less work”). But before he records his next “watershed moment”, the talented Mr West might ponder whether Mr Summers had a point. Meanwhile, Tom Wolfe may just have found the subject of his next novel.

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