In On Beauty, hip-hop symbolizes Black identity. On the one hand, it represents how Black culture can be vibrant and poetic. But it also shows how popular ideas about urban Black culture can fail to portray the full complexity of Black identity. Out of all the characters in the novel, Levi identifies most closely with hip-hop, taking inspiration from rappers for his clothes and even his way of speaking. Over the course of the novel, Levi learns how his idealized opinions about hip-hop both are and aren’t true. On the one hand, Levi learns that Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet is just as moving to him as it is to Chouchou, an impoverished Haitian immigrant who comes from a very different circumstances than Levi. But Chouchou’s background teaching French literature also surprises Levi, and when Chouchou speaks, his formal language is very different from Levi’s own hip-hop-inspired way of speaking. Levi learns that while there’s truth in hip-hop, it also fails to capture the full range of Black identity.
Some Black characters, like Carl, deliberately avoid identifying with hip-hop and the culture it represents. Carl is a boy Levi’s age who calls his performances “spoken word” even though they strongly resemble hip-hop. Carl wants to subvert stereotypes about Blackness. But despite his reluctance to call his own work hip-hop, others still dismiss him as not being “a poet poet” (like the white poet Claire, who is the epitome of a “poet poet”). And so, despite his attempts to brand himself as “spoken word,” Carl ends up as the archivist of hip-hop at Wellington anyway, showing how other people project their own expectations onto him. In On Beauty, hip-hop represents how Black art can capture universal truths, but it also represents how even such a vibrant artform can fail to capture the diversity of the Black experience and create unwanted expectations about a person’s identity.
Hip-hop Quotes in On Beauty
The young man stepped forward cautiously, with one hand up as if to show he meant no harm. He turned the Discman over in her hand and showed her the sticky patch. He lifted his hoodie and the T-shirt beneath it to reveal a well-defined pelvic bone and drew a second Discman from his waistband. ‘This one’s yours.’
‘They’re exactly the same.’
‘Tell them to calm themselves. It’s only hip-hop. It won’t kill them.’
‘I don’t think that’s how things go down now,’ Levi said at last, gently, not wanting to disappoint his father, but needing to catch the bus. It was a nice enough story, but it was making him late for work.
‘Are you interested in refining what you have?’
‘What’s your deal, man? Don’t take this strange, but . . . you don’t seem like the type of guy who would be doing this kind of thing. You know?’
‘How about this?’ said Choo quietly, again alarming Levi with his easy use of American idioms, albeit dipped in that exotic accent. ‘You leave me alone and I do my very best to leave you alone. You sell your movies. I sell these handbags. How would that be?’
Choo had been on his conscience. Because . . . because Choo wasn’t like the other guys in the team. He didn’t travel with the pack, didn’t screw around or go dancing, and he seemed, by contrast, lonely, isolated. Basically, Levi figured that Choo was just plain smarter than all the people around him, and Levi, who lived with people similarly cursed, felt that his own experience in this area (as a carer of smart folk) made him especially qualified to help Choo out.
Hip-hop Symbol Timeline in On Beauty
