IJ study archive

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present

source

TL;DR

DFW and Mark Costello's co-written 1989 essay-book on rap (published May 1990), drafted in the Somerville/Cambridge apartment during the Boston year that ended in DFW's breakdown — i.e., written at the front door of the biographical material (McLean, Granada House, AA) that became IJ's Ennet House world. This is a deliberately light treatment (per the pre-1996 digestion spec, option (a)): one pass, one note, scoped to three IJ-relevant threads only — race in segregated Boston (the novel's setting and its most-criticized blind spot), rap-as-entertainment-industry (the entertainment/consumption thread), and DFW's Boston years as compositional context. No per-section capsules; the book's music-criticism substance is deliberately out of scope. Sections alternate M. (Costello) and D. (Wallace); the D. sections carry the compositional-context weight, and Costello's 2013 preface explicitly ties the book's core triangle (artist / consumer / medial technology) to IJ.

Key claims

  • What the book is: an "outside sampler" of serious late-80s rap by two self-described white outsiders, structured (per the 2013 preface) as three Hegelian "sides" of alternating letter-numbered M./D. sections [preface:p26]. D. drafted his first three sections June-July 1989, importing material from a stalled porn essay (Costello: "The discussion of Synecdoche in Section 1B strikes me as an import") [preface:p18].
  • Compositional context (Costello 2013): DFW arrived in Boston April 1989 months after an October 1988 suicide attempt he concealed from Costello [preface:p9]; the porn project he brought was already "writing as compulsion, not as pleasure" [preface:p16]; and SR was "the last work he would finish before walking into Harvard student health services one cold autumn afternoon and politely disclosing dogged thoughts of suicide" [preface:p28]. The book therefore brackets the exact biographical hinge (fall 1989: Harvard, McLean, halfway house) out of which IJ's recovery half grew.
  • Costello on DFW's social mechanics: driving eased conversation because "The highway, saving eye contact, made interaction bearable when Dave’s nerves began to fray" [preface:p25] — testimony on the conversation-as-burden anxiety that IJ dramatizes everywhere (kept here as biography, not pressed into a connection block).
  • The arc of D.'s position: early D. sections are optimistic about rap as protest with real edge; by 3H (per Costello, "a sermon, really") he "had swung around to the belief that rap was not the much-needed f-u to Reaganite America but rather a Trojan horse of heart and cerebellum" [preface:p27] — the co-optation-by-entertainment-industry despair that is continuous with E Unibus Pluram's TV argument three years later.
  • Race in Boston, documented: the book opens under the Morgan v. Hennigan (1974) desegregation ruling ("the predominantly black areas are cut away from the predominantly white areas" [m-1a:p3-4]) and maps the Fitzgerald Expressway as the border between Irish South Boston and black North Dorchester [m-1a:p24]; the frame narrative (M.'s 1A and 3I) is reportage from Roxbury/Dorchester during the record murder summer of 1989 (gang war, Darlene Tiffany Moore, the WE CARE rally at Roxbury Community College) [m-1a:p52,:p84-85; m-3i:p6-7].
  • Rap as entertainment industry: the book's through-line is the loop by which an oppositional black art is captured by white-run labels, media panic, and market logic — sampling lawsuits [m-3c], the crossover / underground-replacement cycle [d-2c:p8-9], "crisis is the best salesman" [m-3f:p8], MTV's viewer as "the real exploitee" [footnotes:p10], and M.'s summary verdict on rap's claim to realness: "Rap is the bloody turtleneck" [m-3f:p43].
  • D. on rap as poetry: rhyme-and-meter constraint as generative form, "quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today" [d-3e:p9] — the strongest positive aesthetic claim in the book, offered before the 3H reversal.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: SR's section-1B triangle — artist, consumer, and the medial technology between them — is an early source of the unease at the center of Infinite Jest

  • Crux: eup-connection
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Costello (2013) states it directly: 1B "explores the history and terms, the points of “incongruity,” especially the three-way influence (later the source of so much unease in Infinite Jest) between the artist, the consumer, and the medial technology that links and separates them." [preface:p18]
    • [secondary] Costello frames D.'s endpoint (3H) as the book's real thesis: rap as "a Trojan horse of heart and cerebellum, a “protest” so beset with muddy motives and hypocrisy that it could not help but fail. It was made to fail, born to be co-opted and subsumed into the junky ferrywake of media’s caching" [preface:p27] — i.e., the entertainment-industry-absorbs-all-rebellion argument EUP generalizes to TV and IJ dramatizes as the samizdat.
    • [secondary] The porn-essay genealogy: SR partly recycles a stalled project on "the awful yet addictive anti-fantasy of porn" [preface:p16,:p18] — addictive spectation as D.'s pre-IJ subject under a third guise.
  • Notes: Costello, not Wallace, is the claimant, and the preface is a 2013 retrospective written 24 years after the fact (and after IJ), so this is attested hindsight, not contemporaneous evidence. Still the only place in the pre-1996 corpus so far where a firsthand witness names IJ's central unease and locates its seed in a specific 1989 text.

CONNECTION: The entertainment market as a closed appetite-loop — the audience has "decided what it wants to need" and the only question is how to get you to buy

  • Crux: eup-connection
  • Early text: D., justifying the book itself in the market's own voice: "The headlong pursuit of present-tense pleasure, after all, has risen to chief among American rights; no? And since a whole mainstream’s pretty much decided what it wants to need, apparently, the biggest challenge is just the new old one: how to get you to buy." [d-1c:p5] [e-text]; cf. D.'s self-portrait as a TV-addicted insomniac "coming more and more to prefer the commercials to the shows" [d-1b:p4]
  • IJ echo: the pursuit-of-pleasure USA of the Marathe/Steeply colloquies — why Americans would choose the Entertainment (scene 072, pp. 317-321) and the freedom/temple argument (scene 035, pp. 105-109; scene 088, pp. 418-430); EUP's TV-as-malignant-addiction thesis sits exactly between.
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: pleasure-pursuit named as chief among American rights is within arm's reach of Marathe's attack on the American appetite for death-by-pleasure (paraphrase; his exact wording not re-verified here); the framing (rights, buying, trained appetite) is already fully economic.

CONNECTION: On-demand, self-inserted home entertainment predicted "right around the millennium"

  • Crux: eup-connection
  • Early text: D.: "Digital editing technology, the control over byte and combination it affords the user, is going to revolutionize home entertainment right around the millennium. You’ll be able to watch a sampled Lucy show that’s set in your own hometown, for example, or with yourself as Ricky, or hell even as Lucy and Ricky, if you want" [d-3a:p10] [e-text]; cf. M.'s Kurzweil-250 fantasia — "It’s like holding music at gunpoint. You can make it do—or do to you—whatever you can think of. Whim is the only limit." [m-2b:p11]
  • IJ echo: InterLace TelEntertainment's on-demand cartridge order (Hal on the fall of broadcast and the ad industry, scene 087, pp. 410-418) — IJ's millennium is literally the moment the prediction names; and the viewer-customized lethal appeal of the Entertainment (every viewer sees his own mother) is the dark completion of "with yourself as Ricky".
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: the second IJ-echo clause (Entertainment-as-custom-mirror) is our extension, not the passage's; the InterLace/on-demand match is direct.

CONNECTION: Freedom as constraint, and US "freedom" curdling into purchasing power

  • Crux: cage-self-built
  • Early text: Side 3 opens under Eliot: "Freedom is only true freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation." [3-acquisition:p2-3] [e-text]. D. argues rap's formal constraints are what make it art [d-3d:p6], then turns the screw: "‘freedom’ becomes not qualitative but quantitative, quantifiable, a cold logical function of where you are and what you have to exercise it on. For the unfree citizen, U.S. freedom now equals the very ‘power’ it invented itself against" — pop freedom "finally resembling most closely, today, the prisoner’s COMPLETE FREEDOM to beat his head on the cell wall just as much as he likes." [d-3g:p12]
  • IJ echo: Marathe vs. Steeply on freedom-from vs. freedom-to and choosing one's temple (scene 035, pp. 105-109; scene 088, pp. 418-430); Schtitt's discipline-as-freedom pedagogy; AA's constraint (clichés, Commitments) as the working cage — the cage-self-built cluster.
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: strongest single D. prefiguration in the book: the Eliot-epigraphed constraint aesthetic and the Marathe-grade critique of American freedom appear on the same side, seven years before IJ.

CONNECTION: Irony and self-parody as the era's only safe carapace

  • Crux: eup-connection
  • Early text: D. on how the pair finally got access to the Scene: "using the only fail-safe cultural carapace of the late ’80s, reliable old self-parody" [d-2a:p11] [e-text]; and on white money-talk: whites learned "to speak openly about American Dream as financial fantasy… especially to do so with irony, where the late-’80s eye-roll and elbow-nudge can keep a screen of self-mockery between Us and any genuine expression of self" [d-3g:p8]
  • IJ echo: EUP's institutionalized-irony argument (the essay IJ executes) and IJ's hip-cynicism material — the anhedonia chapter's cynicism-as-mask, AA's ban on irony; see e-unibus-pluram.
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: the "screen of self-mockery between Us and any genuine expression of self" is EUP's sincerity-foreclosure thesis in 1989 miniature.

CONNECTION: The stardom urge and the ontologizing Stare — you exist insofar as you are watched

  • Crux: worship-attention
  • Early text: M.: "And best of luck making sense out of gangbanging, out of rap, out of anything in Reaganania or this book without admitting first that the hub of the wheel is the urge to be a star." [m-1a:p88] [e-text]. D. deepens it: the Soft rap's self-love song means "he’s saying he exists. The Soft rap’s the postmodern love song." [d-3h:p4]; and the terminus — "to be Enfaced, you must have, buy, and display." [d-3h:p7]
  • IJ echo: LaMont Chu's fame-hunger and Lyle's counsel on worship (scene 082, pp. 386-391); the attention/worship cluster (worship-attention); the terror of being unwatched that surfaces in the figurant doctrine (pp. 829-839).
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: split authorship — M. states the stardom-urge thesis, D. supplies the ontology (existence via the Stare). The D. half is the one that returns in IJ nearly verbatim as the fame/worship problem.

CONNECTION: White Boston writer voicing black experience — the Entitlement problem, theorized in the open

  • Crux: wardine-voice
  • Early text: [quote|scene] Producer Ralph Stacey corners the authors: "‘Why do you want to write about rap, anyway?’" [m-1a:p93] [e-text]; D. opens 1B by refusing to duck it: "Please know we’re very sensitive to this question: what business have two white yuppies trying to do a sampler on rap?" [d-1b:p3]; the book also prints its own harshest answer, Crouch's "Those whites who felt they were being treated to “the real thing” [in rap] had never before encountered the exotic experience of having a turd pushed into their faces through a hole in the social deck beneath them." [footnotes:p13]
  • IJ echo: the Wardine section (scene 008, pp. 37-38) and yrstruly (scene 040, pp. 128-135) — IJ's contested black-dialect ventriloquism, the novel's most-criticized moves; SR shows DFW consciously theorizing (and worrying) the cross-racial-voice problem six years earlier, from inside Boston.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: counter-voices are the source's own (Stacey's question; Crouch's attack, quoted by the authors against themselves) — SR does not resolve the problem, it performs the anxiety. No claim here that SR licenses or indicts Wardine; the connection is that the exact ethical question the Wardine criticism raises was already on DFW's desk in 1989.

CONNECTION: Segregated Boston as documented ground — the city IJ sets itself in and mostly edits out

  • Crux: none (candidate slug in apparatus)
  • Early text: [quote|scene] The book's first epigraph is Morgan v. Hennigan: "the predominantly black areas are cut away from the predominantly white areas" [m-1a:p3-4] [e-text]; M. maps the expressway border between Irish "Little Belfast" and North Dorchester [m-1a:p24], the gang-war economics ("At least two young men died as downpayments within a week of today’s recording session." [m-1a:p52]), busing's failure [m-1a:p82], and the WE CARE anti-violence rally coda [m-3i:p4-7]; D. glosses Hennigan as being "just as much about how people see as it is about where they live or learn" [d-1b:p63]
  • IJ echo: IJ's Boston — Enfield/Brighton/Allston, ETA above and Ennet House below — where black Roxbury/Dorchester appears only in flashes (Wardine, scene 008, pp. 37-38; Roy Tony; the yrstruly circuit, scene 040, pp. 128-135); SR is the missing half of IJ's map, written by the same hand in the same city.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: deliberately not overclaimed as prefiguration: IJ does not do with this material what SR does; the value is documentary (what DFW knew about Boston's racial geography, in detail, by 1989) — prime context for the race-blind-spot criticism thread.

CONNECTION: Spectation across glass — noticing-by-not-noticing, the watched Other, the gladness that the glass is there

  • Crux: figurant-design
  • Early text: D.: "in music as in living we notice by not noticing, by filtering and classifying individual lives into social ‘Problems’ and ‘Crises’ and ‘Wars-On.’" [d-1b:p86] [e-text]; "Interested whites, in fortunate or unavoidable moments, can only stare through a window whose bulletproof glass reveals what makes us glad that glass is there." [d-1b:p87]; the commuter-train gaze at the ghetto, "a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you" [d-2c:p4]; black urban America as "America’s great Alien Within, the carcinomoid Other, inside Us" [d-1b:p62]; and the inversion — at the Madison Park concert the white authors discover "we were so conspicuous we were invisible" [d-2a:p4]
  • IJ echo: the figurant doctrine (wraith to Gately, pp. 829-839): the background person present but socially erased; EUP's fiction-writers-as-oglers; Poor Tony as figurant in the T-car (scene 069, pp. 299-306).
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: the mechanics match (persons filtered into unwatchable background; the watcher's comfort depending on the glass), but IJ deploys them on class/addiction rather than race — which is itself the blind-spot datum.

CONNECTION: Entertainment escalating toward death — the predicted "snuff" record

  • Crux: entertainment-lethality
  • Early text: M.'s whole section 2D: rap publicists will hit porn's wall — every symbolic shock spent, an audience trained to need bloodier novelty; "The result: our first ‘snuff’ rap record, which, rumor will have it, an actual person died making." [m-2d:p3] [e-text]
  • IJ echo: the Entertainment as the asymptote of entertainment-appetite (entertainment-lethality's continuity reading: the samizdat as terminal-stage TV; Marathe/Steeply, scene 072, pp. 317-321) — IJ flips the fatality from performer to viewer.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: M.-authored, so weak as DFW-compositional evidence; logged because the escalation-to-death logic (audience appetite as the killing engine) is the Entertainment's exact premise.

CONNECTION: Timelessness without a future — art of the eternal present

  • Crux: none
  • Early text: D.: rap's lyrics "assert, both in message and meter, that things now can never be other than what IS." [d-2a:p14] [e-text]; "Ours is a generation (late-or post-Boom) divorced from Time" [d-3h:p12]; rap has "turned a Scene’s precise horror into precise, cutting-edge art" out of "its insularity and claustrophobia and absence of egress" [d-3h:p13]
  • IJ echo: the addict's eternal present vs. AA's one-day-at-a-time; Subsidized Time as corporate colonization of the calendar; anhedonia's flat now (Hal).
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: kept at shared-preoccupation: the temporal diagnosis recurs in IJ but no specific scene descends from these passages.

CONNECTION: The drug economy as the neighborhood's other entertainment industry

  • Crux: none
  • Early text: [quote|scene] M. runs RJam (demos, leases, loyalty) and the gangs ("retail narcotics") as parallel businesses obeying the same chamber-of-commerce precepts [m-1a:p50-53]; drugs replace segregation as "blame’s new bull’s-eye" [m-1a:p82,:p85]; D. notes rap's own street-level anti-drug disdain — chemicals decried "because they stupefy and disspirit and emasculate before they kill" [d-3a:p7] [e-text]
  • IJ echo: IJ's Boston drug economy (Ennet House intake demographics; the Antitois; yrstruly's circuit, scene 040, pp. 128-135) and the Substance logic — the same before-they-kill sequence Ennet House residents narrate.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: documentary value like the Boston block: DFW had close-up 1989 exposure to the Boston drug/gang world's texture before Granada House gave him the inside view.

Themes

Entertainment/irony (the master thread: co-optation loops, appetite training, irony as carapace — EUP's seedbed); communication/solipsism (watching through glass, the invisible observer, the Stare that confers existence); addiction (spectation-as-compulsion, the porn-essay genealogy, drug-economy reportage); race and class in Boston (the documented city IJ thins out); freedom/constraint (Eliot epigraph through the Marathe-grade freedom critique).

Cross-references

  • E Unibus Pluram — the 1993 essay this book rehearses: irony's foreclosure of sincerity, spectation as addiction, entertainment absorbing rebellion. SR is EUP three years early, with rap where TV will be.
  • McCaffery interview — the fiction-as-what-it-means-to-be-human program that 3H's despair inverts.
  • dtmax-every-love-story — biographical frame for the 1989 Boston year, the breakdown, McLean, Granada House; Costello's preface is the firsthand version.
  • gc-ep036-beutler-lattanzi-ij-boston — IJ's Boston geography; SR supplies the Roxbury/Dorchester half that IJ's map barely touches.
  • IJ anchors used above: Wardine (scene 008, pp. 37-38); yrstruly (scene 040, pp. 128-135); Marathe/Steeply (scenes 035/072/088: pp. 105-109, 317-321, 418-430); LaMont Chu & Lyle (scene 082, pp. 386-391); InterLace/ad history (scene 087, pp. 410-418); figurant doctrine (pp. 829-839).

Notable passages

  • "The headlong pursuit of present-tense pleasure, after all, has risen to chief among American rights; no?" — D. [d-1c:p5]
  • "Interested whites, in fortunate or unavoidable moments, can only stare through a window whose bulletproof glass reveals what makes us glad that glass is there." — D. [d-1b:p87]
  • "to be Enfaced, you must have, buy, and display." — D. [d-3h:p7]
  • "For the unfree citizen, U.S. freedom now equals the very ‘power’ it invented itself against." — D. [d-3g:p12]
  • "Rap is the bloody turtleneck." — M. [m-3f:p43]
  • "we were so conspicuous we were invisible." — D. [d-2a:p4]
  • "It’s like holding music at gunpoint. You can make it do—or do to you—whatever you can think of. Whim is the only limit." — M. [m-2b:p11]
  • "These pages, both as writing and as voice-and-thought collage, are the last work he would finish before walking into Harvard student health services one cold autumn afternoon and politely disclosing dogged thoughts of suicide." — Costello, 2013 preface [preface:p28]

Advances