America is an idealistic nation. Dreams are realized here. Cultural plurality is celebrated here. Freedom is cherished here. But America is also a place where all those who seek to fulfill the promise of opportunity aren’t embraced equally; where prejudice has been institutionalized, codified and thereby legitimized; where the freedoms that mark a democratic society have been stripped from far too many for there not to be an outcry of injustice. This is the contradiction of America itself—what draws us to love and loathe the nation, drives us to seek refuge either within (assimilation) or at a distance (separation) and caused us to embrace the Dream or dwell on the Nightmare.
For more than a century this “either/or” dilemma has consumed black America and kept the race at odds, the more so because it has mutated time and time again. The assimilationism preached by Frederick Douglas became the gospel of accommodation under Booker T. Washington which can be traced to King’s integrationist Dream before being re-mixed in BIG’s post-integrationist hyper-materialism. Simultaneously, Alexander Crummell’s romanticist Black Nationalism inspired Du Bois’s idealistic radicalism which gave way to Garvey’s Black Zionism which sparked Malcolm’s militant Black Nationalist ministry and arose again in Tupac’s post-integrationist, post-Black Power resistance. Over time, black America’s social, cultural, aesthetic and political psyche was systematically shaped by the conflicting world views offered by the two dominant, dynamic icons. The result is what can be called the “Dyad Syndrome,” an instinctual and habitual obsession with conflict.
Tracing the evolution and transformation of the dilemma through the movements, myths and moments that shaped black America and the Hip-Hop generation in the 20th century, The Nightmare and The Dream compellingly argues that the battle between Nas and Jay-Z at the turn of the new millennium was the latest in a long line of creative conflicts between complex, oppositional black icons. An absorbing voyage through time and rhyme, Nightmare situates the ideas and imagery of two of hip-hop’s most intriguing, innovative and controversial icons alongside the most mythologized figures in African-American history. In doing so, this ground-breaking book explains how their truce should be read as the Hip-Hop generation’s response to the tradition of conflict that has heretofore defined black creative thought. Just as previous generations have rescued their heroes from worshippers and cynics alike, Nightmare liberates these two artist-icons from the manacles of mindless misinterpretation by bringing some real and well-earned rigor to an analysis of their careers.
Words of Praise
“The Nightmare and the Dream charts new ground in analyzing the impact of hip-hop on African-American political culture. By going beyond a mere inquiry into the dynamics of hip-hop in the post-Civil Right era—a limiting perspective that a majority of contemporary hip-hop works fall prey to—Ross goes back in time to the nineteenth-century and locates a recurring phenomenon that has continued into the twenty-first century. The Dyad Syndrome of dual conflicting political leaders has plagued black communities from the era of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany to the life and times of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. According to Ross, this syndrome haunts the Weltgeist, or world-spirit, of hip-hop as well, whether we talk of the tensions between Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur, East Coast and West Coast rappers, or artists such as Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown. Ross provides a moving narrative that weaves in and out of well-known black figures in addition to musicians and politicians whose lives have been disavowed in historical memory. Select figures represent archetypes of a “Dream” vision full of the Horatio Alger story in blackface, while others embrace a nihilistic conception of the “Nightmare” reflecting the realities of rampant injustices facing black agents since the founding of the American republic. So where do we go from here? With Du Bois’s ideas of double-consciousness and second sight serving a mediating role, Ross details the tensions and ultimate public reconciliation between Jay-Z and Nas as a prime example of how hip-hop, like black politics, can progress forward positively, in solidarity, despite the obstacles. Ross’s final tale is not a nihilistic one such as that of the mythical Sisyphus, bound forever to repeatedly push rocks up a hill only eventually to fall down. The Nightmare and the Dream uniquely spells out a radical existential injunction made famous recently by Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and Barack Obama: hope can result after we come to terms with the dialectics of partisan conflict. Dax-Devlon Ross’s brilliant textual achievement is a must read for anyone concerned with the future of hip-hop, African-Americas, and new directions in late modern America as a whole.”—Neil Roberts, Williams College, Co-Editor of the CAS Working Papers Series in Africana Studies
