You Might Be A Rapper: Susan Sontag
(I didn’t want to leave Moe just hanging out there. every rapper needs a crew.)
She might not have seen it this way, but Susan Sontag tapped into her inner Dead Prez with her, “the white race is the cancer of the earth” line. Her essay “Against Interpretation” and the general spirit of that whole collection is in ideological sync with songs like “They Schools” and “Mind Sex”. Sontag was an intellectual but often hostile and resentful of it in the same way that hip hop is smart, but anti-intellectual (i have a lyric to the effect of “hip hop: smart n’s without a BA”). She was trapped, a soldier with nothing to fight for due to socioethnocultural circumstance.
Sontag would have benefited from having a serious cause (she sought challenges out off American turf). And hip hop would have benefited from having such a powerful alpha-feminine force to invalidate the rampant sexism and homophobia. Sontag was in possession of enough disdain for The Establishment, and sufficiently freespirited. that she might have tried the staccato-styley out even before rapping became a popular American form. Just to mess with people. And to make herself known/heard. Hip hop is an art of ego, and that fits snugly here as well.
Also, also: most good rap songs are closer in form to creative/thoughtful essays, as opposed to novels. I haven’t read her fiction, but i get a sense of consensus that more folks value the essays from her overall catalog.
The album art for those mixtapes would have been hot.
