Callaloo

“Let the world listen right!” This is a stock phrase used by Mississippi Delta freestyle rapper TopNotch the Villain (Jerome Williams). TopNotch wants the world to acknowledge and appreciate his voice and, by extension, the rich tradition of expressive culture [End Page 555] in the Mississippi Delta. His statement suggests that there are right and wrong ways to listen. Listening “right” is active, affective, and dialogical; musical sounds, voices, and gestures are contextualized. Listening “wrong” is nothing more than hearing. It is passive, detached, and monological; musical sounds, voices, and gestures are subjected to what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “the force of the preconstructed” (251–52). But as Paul Carter writes, “Listening becomes cultural work where the ground rules are not established” (44). Thus, listening is both a technique and disposition essential to ethical ethnographic work. In her study, Let the World Listen Right, ethnomusicologist Ali Colleen Nelson proves to be an ideal auditor and author.

Let the World Listen Right is part of a series of recent ethnographic approaches to hip-hop that includes Greg Dimitriadis’s Performing Identity / Performing Culture: Hip-Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice (2009, revised edition), Marcyliena Morgan’s The Real Hip-Hop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the L.A. Underground (2009), and Joseph Schloss’s Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York (2009). Neff focuses on the aforementioned TopNotch, a 26-year old telemetry technician from Clarksdale, Mississippi. TopNotch performs as a solo MC and as part of a group named DA F.A.M. Neff grounds TopNotch’s language (diction, imagery, and metaphor), formal skills (elocutionary style, prosody, and rhyme patterns), and aesthetic sensibility in social and historical contexts, including TopNotch’s early performances in church choir, Clarksdale’s club scene, and the Delta blues tradition. In addition, Neff reflexively surveys previous ethnographies about the Delta. She challenges commonplace notions generated by earlier ethnographers—in particular, the Delta’s provincialism and the blues as an exclusively male domain.

Ralph Ellison often quoted Heraclitis’s axiom “Geography is fate” (198). In chapter one “This Game Is for Life!” Neff introduces Clarksdale’s real and imaginary geographies: they are the source of the blues’ ambivalent fate. First, Neff provides a guided-tour of the Clarksdale’s juke joint and club circuit, including venues like Red’s Juke Joint, Adel’s Delta Blues Room, Messenger’s, Big D’s Blues Club, Underground, Annie Bell’s, and Papachasa. Her descriptions are rich: she attends to clientele (Adel’s caters to Clarksdale’s professional class; Underground is home to white Ole’ Miss students), space and décor (“The management [at Red’s] prefers to use colored light bulbs, mostly red, that peek out from bends in the walls to give the room a surreal, warm glow” 15); and musical style (e.g. Papachasa is a hip-hop club). In these juke joints and clubs, the “entire aesthetic experience matters: taste, talk, music, temperature, color, light, interaction” (21). However, complicating the aesthetic and social values of the local performance circuit is the imaginary Clarksdale, home of the fabled Crossroads where musician Robert Johnson reportedly sold his soul to the devil. Neff explains that predominantly white blues tourists travel to the Crossroads in search of an authentic blues experience; however, their relation to the region and its music is sentimental, based exclusively on consumption of a culturally-consecrated, corporate-backed commodity. They are, with some exception, uninterested in “the new blues” of hip-hop or interacting with locals.

In chapters two and three, Neff focuses on TopNotch the Villain and DA F.A.M., respectively. TopNotch is a recognized freestyle rapper in the region. Neff outlines the freestyle genre. Freestyle is an improvised verbal art; it happens any time and any place. Rappers mix stock phrases and images with site-specific linguistic invention. Performances are inflected by situational exigencies. Neff explains that these improvised performances [End Page 556] provide Clarksdale residents like TopNotch “a free...