"You sell your soul like you sell a piece of ass": rhythms of black female sexuality and subjectivity in MeShell Ndegeocello's cookie: the Anthropological Mixtape.(The Music of African-American Women: Secular and Sacred, Uplift and Self-Assertion)

"I want y'all to repeat after me! There's no such thing as alternative hip-hop. There's no such thing as alternative hip-hop!" So proclaimed MeShell Ndegeocello at a concert to promote the release of her debut album, Plantation Lullabies (1993), the first album on Madonna's Maverick label, which featured the chart-topping hits "I'm Diggin' You (Like an Old Soul Record)" and "If That's Your Boyfriend (He Wasn't Last Night)." In his review of the concert for Village Voice, Greg Tate (1994) interprets Ndegeocello's claim as an unambiguous manifestation of her identification with the core of hip-hop, the musical style that by the early 1990s, demonstrated that its mass appeal was not the fleeting phenomenon critics dismissed it as throughout the 1980s but a sign of hip-hop's undeniable, if controversial, cultural merit. Today, among critical and popular audiences alike, hip-hop encompasses both the specific musical arrangements and delivery that emerged from the Bronx in the late 1970s and the cultural practices in dance, art, and fashion that as a result of American capitalism, are strongly identified with youth culture in the United States and abroad (Queeley 2003, 14-4; Kelley 1998). (1) Among critical and popular audiences alike, Ndegeocello, with six albums, nine Grammy nominations, and collaborations with Chaka Khan, Ben Harper, Bootsy Collins, Prince, Mick Jagger, Madonna, John Mellencamp, Alanis Morissette, Lenny Kravitz, Sarah McLachlan, Dolly Parton, Talib Kweli, and Missy Elliott to her credit, remains, as Tate and other critics have opined throughout her twelve-year career, a "multithreat performer," whose signature capacity to interpret the interflows of rhythms typically associated with black music renders her a marvel unto herself in the realm of hip-hop (Tate 1994, 22).

Consideration of Ndegeocello's relationship with hip-hop provides a means for identifying and analyzing the distinctive contributions she has made to American music as a black female artist. In this relationship, we witness not only vital elements of the discursive power of Ndegeocello's music but also how her proposed (re)appropriation of the symbols of black female sexuality and subjectivity hip-hop vests can substantively change the valuation of black women in the larger cultural context hip-hop informs and shapes. To probe these claims, I focus here on Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, the fourth of Ndegeocello's six albums, which critics aptly ranked among the foremost "conscious" hip-hop albums ever recorded when it was released in 2002 (see, for example, George 2002; Frazier 2002). Against an assessment of hip-hop music's transformation from a "hidden transcript," as Tricia Rose (1994, 100-101) characterized it, "engaged in symbolic and ideological warfare with institutions and groups that symbolically, ideologically, and materially oppress African Americans," to a lead player in the globalization of American popular culture, I examine Cookie's register of the contradiction in hip-hop's continued reliance on flat projections of black female sexuality alongside its image-rich projections of black male self-determination in a capitalist and still largely racist society. I provide an extended reading of Cookie's aesthetic politics and progressive visions of black female subjectivity, underscoring the challenge Ndegeocello presents to hip-hop consumers and producers alike to invest in representations of black women that correspond with the historical reality of their experiences as objects and agents of culture.

"Keeping It Real," According to Cookie

In dedicating Cookie to "all the prophets whose essence survives despite human motives and distortions," Ndegeocello, at the outset, tacitly calls for a moratorium on the partial and false truths about black women's lives and histories that hip-hop currently dispenses. Penetrating to the core of hip-hop's mechanism and method, she professes, "[T]his album pays homage to the power of the word, written and spoken." The album contains fourteen tracks, two of which are remixed, plus two interludes, symbolic pauses that remind listeners that they are participants in the Cookie "set." Textured with excerpts from Dick Gregory's and Angela Davis's political speeches, as well as the spoken words of Countee Cullen, Gil Scott Heron, and Etheridge Knight, Cookie sets up the gender biases of the hip-hop aesthetics for emotionally and philosophically rigorous scrutiny.

The album surveys the roughly thirty years that constitute black women's subjugation within, and corresponding contributions to, the hip-hop music industry's frequently sordid, perennially complex, racial, gender, and sexual politics. It compels listeners to come to terms with projections of black women as sexually available, exploited, and complicit in their exploitation that current trends in the mass marketing and consumption of hip-hop music promote.

Recent advertising campaigns for Old Navy, Dr. Scholl's, Chevrolet Impala, and Heineken, among others, would have us believe that the principal goal and accomplishment of the mainstreaming of hip-hop has been to blur boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexuality, particularly among white suburban and minority urban youth. An ad for Old Navy, for example, features a trio of racially diverse women, asking us, in harmony with MC Lyte, and sampling Young MC's "Bust a Move" (1998), to "Bust a Tunic." Dr. Scholl's features a chorus of men who ask and affirm of one another, in a kind of jive lingo: "Are you gellin'?" A Chevy Impala ad features two models of the vehicle, one older, driven by a posse of young black men, one recent, driven by a thirty-something white female. Rap music blares as the two vehicles idle at a stoplight. When the light turns green, the white female drives away, leaving viewers to hear the news broadcast the young black men are listening to. The commercial ends with the voice-over hook: "Whatever your groove, we'll be there." Heineken's ad features a young, sensual female flipping through channels and grooving to a familiar hip-hop tune, as her boyfriend sits on the sofa. In this case, the hook is the woman's apparent racial identity--black--and boyfriend, hip-hop mogul Jay-Z. Each of these commercials has aired during prime viewing hours on every major cable network, offering a sense of hip-hop's growth in marketability in its relatively short cultural history.

Despite its expanding influence, the sexual tensions in hip-hop music remain as they were in the early days of its performances and radio airplay. The woman fighting for the love of "Imp the dimp the ladies' pimp" in The Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 "Rapper's Delight," the first hip-hop song to break into Billboard's Top 40, is the same woman who, in 1986, predatorily warned her female counterparts, "If you mess with me I'll take your man" (Salt-n-Pepa, "I'll Take Your Man"). Of this woman, N.W.A. rapped in 1988, "U need a nigga with money / so you got a dope man to juice as much as u can" ("The Dopeman"). In 1994, this same woman helped the Notorious B.I.G., or Biggie, "bag up [his] nickels," while he "tricked a little" (Notorious B.I.G., "Me and My Bitch"). And in 2001, JayZ reminded her, in remixing Missy Elliott's "1 Min. Man":