According to Dr. Tricia Rose, black music has shifted from offering solutions to simply reiterating common sentiments, disintegrating the cultural art form that used to be community affirming. Rose explained her thoughts in a lecture entitled, “Black Music, Social Justice, and the Strength to Love,” the keynote address for Black History Month.

“Black popular music has moved from being on the perimeter to happening in the spotlight,” Rose said. “[Before, music spoke] to marginal mainstream concerns but of things of great importance to the community. Over time, agendas have changes, but I’m concerned we have lost sight of what purpose music serves.”

Rose described the values inherent in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s book of sermons “Strength to Love.” In it, he discusses nonviolence and the role of affirmation within a community to sustain the group. He also identifies rage and alienation as all-consuming. Rose feels that this perspective is impossible to imagine in a popular music context.

“It’s a crazy, soft, weak idea to talk about building community from a loving place and to use peaceful resistance,” she said. “Music used to have both the cultural and political realms enforcing each other. It provided not only opportunities, but belief in the value of real opportunity.”

Rose believes that dangerous altruism, when someone risks what he or she wants in order to help others, is one model that has lent itself to strengthening the black community in the past.

“People who have the least have the least to give, but they have to give to support their community,” she said. “There have been extraordinary examples of this in the past, and people see dangerous altruism and want to repeat it, and pass it on.”

She thinks that one model hip hop embraces is the “pimp/ho” model, an analogy for a dominant/submissive relationship. She alluded to the limitations of this, explaining that there is no room for a third role, and that it provides no base for the construction of collective social movements.

“I’m dismayed by the genius of hip hop and the production of music as the unconscious promotion of misogyny,” she said. “They are always looking for a new way to rap about the domination of women and other people. They use the same limited language of insult. It’s not lyrically creative. The ‘N’ word, the ‘B’ word…we’ve got all of those words. They can’t seem to not say it, it’s like a knee-jerk reaction to prove you’re down. It filters into male-female relationships and the ‘pimp-ho’ model becomes a reasonable way to construct relationships.”

Rose feels that love, in the agape sense, leads to major social changes. She played for the group a series of songs that fit her idea of community building. Many of the songs contain one of three themes: the idea of protest and the struggle for freedom, the idea of music as inviting bodily freedom, and the possibilities of affirmative love and transformative love. Such songs included Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” More contemporary artists named were Anthony Hamilton, Akrobatik, and Common.

In the question and answer portion of the lecture, Rose was asked about her opinion of hip hop artist and producer Kanye West.

“He’s a self-promoter,” she said. “He has talent, but his music is not as conscious. People see him as some sort of radical savior, which is part of the problem I am talking about. If he wants to say Bush hates black people, he needs to figure out what the answer is. I know 10 academics who would help him.”

Attendees were moved by Rose’s mix of humor and eloquence in discussing a relevant cultural issue.

“For me, personally and professionally, her talk, which I think was riveting and potentially transformative, is a glaring example of what a tragedy it is that she’s not a member of the faculty here,” said Professor of African American Studies and English Ann duCille. “She was only here for a semester and she is one of the most important voices and pivotal thinkers. While her work is intellectually sound and theoretically sophisticated, she has the unique ability to speak both of and to today’s youth culture.”

Caroline White ’08 found Rose’s message resonant in her life.

“She talked a lot about generations and influences by the past and I can relate to this because my parents have talked a lot about how hip hop subjects differ between generations,” White said. “She spoke of the connection between community and music and its not only individual, but collective impact. She was very influential and she is such an intelligent woman.”

Rose is currently Professor of American Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She taught at Wesleyan during the 2000-2001 academic year. She is the author of “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America” and co-editor of “Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture.”