Part of DIALOGUE: Artists at the White House
Published: Issue 1, Summer 2009
Interview by JASMINE MAHMOUD

JEFF CHANG is a journalist and cultural critic noted for his perspectives on hip-hop music and culture. In 2007, he interviewed then-Senator Barack Obama for VIBE magazine. This year, he wrote “The Creativity Stimulus,” a cover essay for The Nation, about the role of artists and community organizers in the national recovery and economy.

You have chronicled the birth and growth of hip-hop as part of American cultural and social change history. Yet the story of hip-hop is often missing from mainstream American history accounts. What do you think accounts for the omission of hip-hop from the historical transcript? To paraphrase Bob Marley, culture and music tell the half of the stories that haven’t been told. Some of these stories do become mainstream. Millions know the lyrics and music to “Get Up Stand Up” or “Dear Mama.” This is a popular form of knowledge that doesn’t need legitimization by the academy, because it functions and is retransmitted just fine, thanks. So I’d flip your question on its head a bit. I think the lack of hip-hop in mainstream accounts of history is more of a problem for the mainstream than it is for hip-hop.

Having said that, I do want to hasten to add that I think that the lack is changing. There are hundreds of courses now taught in hip-hop studies in colleges and universities around the world. As those of us who came up with hip-hop get older, the body of knowledge that we bring with us diffuses more into the mainstream. And that body of knowledge changes, too. I think the study of hip-hop in the academy and in community organizations and institutions has reignited and sharpened needed debates around gender and sexuality in the hip-hop movement.

It’s May 2009 and Jeff Chang, a journalist who writes about hip-hop, and Davey D, a hip-hop historian, are invited to the White House for a discussion with government officials about arts activism. The inclusion of you and Davey D, among other arts activists, seems to be a big step forward from the 1990s when political wars waged on hip-hop, and culture wars waged on the arts. Would you call this progress? What do you think accounts for the shift in cultural perception: from the arts as spectacle and cause for concern, to the arts as a means for social change. What misconceptions do policymakers continue to have about hip-hop, and about the arts? Yes, I do think this is progress. At certain points in history, change seems to accelerate and I think we’re in the flux of that kind of moment right now. We witnessed an outpouring of art, culture, and creativity around last year’s elections. People like Tom Brokaw compared it to the Velvet Revolution. In other words, politics and creativity seemed to converge to bring about a societal leap. Into what, I’m still not sure. But we all have a hand in guiding where we will land.

I work among artists and community organizers daily, and the thing we’ve all noticed is that we have a great urge to convene, to share, to talk, to try to puzzle out the moment. Liz Lerman likes to joke that “artists aren’t afraid of living in Depression-like conditions because that’s our lived reality.” Right now, there’s a sense among everyone that there isn’t much to lose, and that’s liberating. What I think many of us are coming around to understand is that creativity is at the heart of community sustainability and renewal. Hip-hop is the perfect example—here’s the picture of forgotten, abandoned kids hard at work defining how to play amidst chaos. Out of nothing, they literally forge the conditions for their own breakthroughs. They created a new language for a new global generation.

In this country, the debates over the arts are still haunted by questions of individual freedom raised in the culture wars. These are rooted in President Kennedy’s founding Cold War-era charge for the NEA in which artists were positioned as the social outsiders an enlightened U.S. democracy was happy to bring into the fold. Communists in Russia and China, by comparison, were oppressing dissident artists. (This logic ran its course by the end of the 1980s, when anti-arts neocons took up—quite seriously—the role of Kennedy’s cartoon communists. The irony escaped them, apparently.)

But what if we looked at arts and creativity as society’s key to collective survival? In this re-imagining, artists and creatives—like community organizers—are not outsiders, so much as those who experiment and test and prod, but within the heart of the community. Their risk is indispensable not because it comes from the fringe, but from the center. When they succeed, they strengthen community and move it forward.

There are signs that we are moving toward this new conception of the role of creativity. Artists were recognized as workers in the stimulus package and will be in the coming health-care discussions. But we haven’t come around fully yet to an understanding of artists and creatives that puts them in the thick of the fray where they actually live and work.

Part of this has to do with the other major reality of what’s happened to the arts and culture over the past two decades. We’ve privatized our imagination. In some ways, it’s impossible now to think of artists and creatives as anything but entertainers, or even less, as brands. I think this is the inevitable result of the massive push toward consolidation in the culture industry. That’s not to say there haven’t been amazing examples of creativity coming out of the marketplace. It’s to simply point out how difficult it is for us now to conceive of creativity that isn’t somehow attached to the marketplace. That’s a very long way to fall from Kennedy’s formation of the NEA.

In “The Creativity Stimulus,” your article in The Nation, you envision a robust national arts policy, a cultural policy that could foster economic recovery. How many of your ideas were expressed during the May 12th meeting, and how receptive were government officials to your ideas? The first thing I want to say is that we were all impressed by the change in the wind. The Obama administration is clearly the most arts-friendly one in over a generation. The meeting in fact was a briefing—so our talkback was fairly limited. Those of us invited, though, weren’t shy about making the case for the importance of the arts and the role that government could play in high-lighting examples of creativity’s central role in national recovery. We expect to pursue these discussions for as long as the White House has its door open, and we were assured that they are going to remain very open.

This meeting—uniting artists and government officials—was arranged by the Office of Public Engagement, an office that has the broad task of “dealing most closely with the American people.” It is not a centralized office for the arts. Was there a discussion as to why the meeting wasn’t organized by the NEA? Was there any discussion about a Department of Art and Cultural Affairs or an Arts Czar? What was the Office’s response to that discussion? There were representatives of the NEA in attendance and speaking with us in the meeting. However, because the meeting occurred before they officially announced the appointment of Mr. Rocco Landesman, we were not able to meet the new NEA Chair. We did not hear any discussion about the notion to appoint an Arts Czar. The only thing we did hear was that there was an effort afoot to have arts-related bodies across the federal government, from say the Department of Education to the State Department to the NEA to the Office of the First Lady to begin to have discussions about how they might better be able to coordinate their work.

White House officials from the Office of Public Engagement spoke about Obama Administration initiatives that might be advanced through the engagement of artists. What was most memorable about their talk? What do you believe was missing from the dialogue? Are there any talking points you wished could have been raised? White House officials are eager to court artists in their coming work around national service, green jobs, health care, and other issues, and that interest will certainly be reciprocated. These efforts are already in motion. We are also very hopeful that there will be deepening discussions about arts and cultural policy.

I personally would love to see a discussion occur in the White House and among leading officials from the NEA and NEH on what the outlines of a 21st -century arts policy could look like, one that takes account of the domestic and global landscape. A great arts and culture policy has a lot to do with levels of happiness and, let’s be blunt, political satisfaction. Brazil’s Lula, whose former culture minister Gilberto Gil had one of the most powerful tenures of any in recent memory, has off-the-chart ratings. It’s clear that Brazil sees its cultural diversity as both an economic and a social asset. I still have trouble understanding why we don’t.

I spoke with another attendee of the May 12th meeting: Dudley Cocke, director of Roadside Theater. He said that Obama’s current arts team lacks someone with a grassroots arts background. Do you agree with Dudley? How do you envision arts activists being involved with the government, and with the national recovery efforts? Dudley’s exactly right. The people represented in the room came from a broad swath of community arts and community-oriented backgrounds—non-profit, for-profit, business, and never-ever-gonna-profit. I think that’s where a really interesting conversation can begin. I hesitate to outline what I think will come of it both because I don’t know and because the areas of potential work extend beyond my grasp at the moment.

Arlene Goldbard makes a great point about the positioning of your cover story, “The Creativity Stimulus,” in The Nation. She wrote, “One thing that especially tickles me is that ‘The Creativity Stimulus’ headlines this issue’s cover. The Nation, that venerable journal of progressive politics, has long been known for relegating culture to the back of the book.” What do you believe accounts for the split between arts and politics, such that the arts haven’t been substantively included in much political thinking and problem solving? That’s a fantastic question. There’s certainly a long-running genealogy to this split, which is practically Descartian in some ways. We even talk about ‘hard’ power as that using force and economics, and ‘soft’ power as using arts and culture. The dichotomy is encoded into our higher educational systems, which divide the humanities from the social sciences from the ‘practical majors’ of engineering, architecture, or law. Then there’s also the marketplace, right? Culture is something you consume. It’s not something that enables, activates, or changes things. It’s a basket of goods that defines your ‘lifestyle.’ Arts [are] merely a subset of the bourgeoisie end of culture. Politics is outside of that matrix: it’s something they—a distant, unreachable they—do. I do see a little less of a split between arts and politics with the generations who have come of age after the 1980s. To us, art is no longer simply instrumental to social change, it’s core to the way we understand [how] that change happens.

This split seems to be everywhere. I read your 2007 interview in VIBE with then-Senator Obama. In the interview, culture—hip-hop, TV and literature—was discussed. Mr. Obama said “we have to acknowledge the power of culture in affecting how our kids see themselves and the decisions they make.” Online, the interview is tagged, “Hip Hop Activism.” But culture wasn’t addressed as a means to create social change. Why do you think there was little talk about cultural activism? It’s because I only had 20 minutes with the dude!

Why do you think the pairing of arts and activism has worked particularly well in stimulating social change in the United States? Well, it’s not just the [United States]. Jamaica’s roots rebels in the 70s, China’s rockers in the late 80s, and the Zapatistas are all profound examples. And there are so many more. The thing I say about hip-hop arts and activism is that it all comes from the same well of experience. Why should a kid who spends their Monday night in a rap cipher wake up the next morning and not be mad about the fact that they’re trying to build a toxic incinerator next door? Why wouldn’t that kid want to spit a rhyme about that? Why wouldn’t the kids who heard that rhyme be inspired to feel the same way? Why wouldn’t they think about getting together and trying to change things?

What do you think about President Obama’s choice to head the NEA: Rocco Landesman? I’m also curious about your thoughts on the NEA given the robust cultural policy you envision? What role does/should the NEA have in creating an American cultural policy? I confess I don’t know much about Mr. Landesman. I’m hopeful he might be able to take a high profile in advocating for a stronger cultural policy. I don’t think that the NEA should be the only place that this kind of discussion is taking place, however. If we are to be talking about demonopolization and re-regulation, the same discussion has to be happening at the FCC. If we are serious about arts education and the Artist Corps notion of putting artists to work in the schools, then the Department of Education needs to be involved, not to mention state departments of education. The NEA chair can use his position as a bully pulpit, but we need the conversation to happen across a number of sectors at the same time.

The first issue of The Arts Politic is themed “The Economy Issue.”   You’ve led a career as a successful writer. Has, and if so, how has the economic downturn changed your approach to writing? I’ve been blessed in my so-called career, being able to largely write and speak for a living. I’m also blessed to have a wonderful family and a partner who supports my work and has a great job and health benefits plan. The economy has affected us as it has everyone else. We’re scrutinizing finances in the short-term and thinking about the long-term now, more than ever.

But as I said before, the other thing about the economic crisis is that it has been liberating for me personally, and in terms of my craft. Bad times often bring out the best in people. I feel like there’s a human compulsion to seek out and find other artists and organizers and like-minded souls during times of hardship. And I’ve found myself more inspired than ever by the new groups of people I have found over the past two years. A great poet once said that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” I’m blessed to be aware of how much freedom I have these days, and how much of that depends upon and is activated by the fellow travelers I meet and with whom I get a chance to build my communities.

What are your upcoming projects? I’m working on two books. The first is called Who We Be: The Colorization of America, a look at the controversies of the post-civil rights era. The book tracks the cultural transformation of the U.S. across the last three decades—from the arts to politics, from multiculturalism to the Obama moment. It’s about the cultural implications of a new American majority. I have also been contracted to pen a book of essays as part of the Picador Books’ special Big Ideas/Small Books series. TAP