Ali Crap

I need to articulate why this Ali Rap bullshit bothers me so much. For the past few weeks people have been saying to me, “you have to get this Ali Rap book” and I have bristled inwardly without quite being able to explain myself TO myself. Now I think I’m ready.

First of all, I’ve worked at ESPN and I know that it is the lily-whitest environment you’d ever want to be in, stultifyingly bourgeois and ratings-driven at every turn. To put it mildly, these are not risk-takers. Every borderline socio-cultural decision at ESPN is made with exceeding concern for the family values of Joe and Mary Six-Pack, lest they get offended and not tune in for the next NFL/Rolling Stones concert. A show like Ali Rap gets green-lighted because the network sees an opportunity to cash in on the lucrative universe of hip hop without any of the potentially offensive offshoots of courting that universe. Someone says something at a meeting like, “you know when it comes right down to it, Ali actually INVENTED rap,” and some bigwig says, “you know, this rap music is VERY popular these days,” and everyone in the room starts hearing the cosmic ka-ching. The next thing you know you have a big coffee table book and concomitant documentary, highly stylized and wrought with pomp and circumstance and otherwise almost entirely devoid of substance, because the whole enterprise is rooted in a highly dubious premise, the true premise being, simply, “hey, it’s Christmas time, give us your money.”

But back to the stated premise – Ali invented rap. What the FUCK does that actually MEAN? Who on earth would ever give credence, let alone devote a coffee-table book, to such a flimsy idea? Bobby Seale was a defiant black man who spoke rhythmically in euphonious prose – why didn’t he “invent” rap? Why not Louis Armstrong for that matter? Look, I’m no ethno-musicologist, but I know a few things. Hip hop, like all music, is the result of a long evolution, one that clearly began in this country with work chants and the blues, the first American music to limit the chordal range of a song so as to emphasize the rhythmic freedom of the speaker. Was Ali’s jive influenced by that tradition? Yes. But he was far down along the line. To my mind, to say that he invented rap is like saying that Marlon Brando invented rock and roll. Which is definitely the kind of thing that I could imagine some smarmy pesudo-intellectual pop-cultural theorist churning out to make a few bucks, if only Brando had the cultural currency of Ali.

And that, I guess, is what really bothers me about this whole thing – Ali as brand name, Ali as leftist icon, Ali as Righteous Black Man We Can All Agree On. Ali as the white man’s black man. It makes me sick. All you have to do is watch that one episode of Wide World of Sports where Cosell and Ali watch the Ernie Terrell fight together and Cosell is basically insisting that Ali apologize, ostensibly for "acting out" in the ring, for the whole "what's my name?" incident, but really just for being an uppity black motherfucker who doesn't know his place, Cosell who we now laud as having been one of the few media supporters of Ali… check that out and tell me that the ESPN co-equivalent of the 60’s didn’t hate Ali’s black ass and wish him no good. To indulge in this Ali/Kumbaya singlaong, particularly as a white person, seems too easy to me somehow, seems to willfully miss a huge part of the story - that the reason this man is such an important figure is because of the opposition he faced every day and his refusal to kowtow to the mainstream American "values" of white people JUST LIKE US.

But that point is not exactly tailor-made to stuff stockings. "Ali invented rap" on the other hand... ah whatever. Fuck it. Trust me, I dig the Ali story as much as the next guy, probably more, but I’m telling you, this thing that we have made of him… it doesn’t feel like progress to me. It feels like the worst kind of cultural revisionism and imperialism. It feels callow and cynical and soft-minded. It almost feels like racism.