Are you voting Obama’s way? Are you as done with white people as I am? You don’t have to answer that.
I will vote for Obama, enthusiastically; I think his election is the clearest signal we can send to the rest of the world that we understand the last eight years were disastrous and we’re ready to turn the page. I think 90-plus percent of the Jews of my generation will vote for him, too, as will a big majority of our parents’ give-us-another-Kennedy-before-we-die generation. The concerns over his ability to lock down the Jewish vote seem overblown to me; a good example is the New York Times article of a few months ago in which seemingly the most racist Jews in Florida were sought out and quoted. I did an event with my friend the writer Keith Gessen in Brooklyn, and he made a good point: the older generation of Jews is drifting away from the Democratic party, while the young generation is drifting away from Judaism. They keep telling us to come back, and we should be telling them the same thing.
You grew up around some influential people: Your grandfather and grandmother played interesting roles in the march of history. Is this book a concretization of your memory and their influence, and are you pressured by their legacy, and that of their friends and colleagues?
After my grandmother died in the winter of 1999, I began spending summers with my grandfather so he would not be alone. It was no great sacrifice; since the early sixties, my grandparents had been spending the warmer months in a beach house on Martha’s Vineyard, the island to which much of their once-wide and now greatly diminished social circle repaired at the close of each academic year. My grandfather was the kind of man people had theories about, the kind his descendants formed study groups to discuss, as if he were a difficult novel. Some of his accomplishments were matters of public record, though he waved a dismissive hand at them all. He’d graduated high school by fifteen (“soon as you could read and write, off you went”), been the youngest American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials (“I got there at the end; I didn’t do anything”) traveled to Panama to mediate between the government and the builders of the Canal (“The headline read ‘Kaplan Arrives,’ but the real work was done by others”). He’d taught three future Supreme Court Justices during his quarter decade at Harvard Law School, then sat on the bench of Massachusetts’s highest court. He was ninety that summer. He would not retire for another five years.
But the facts that most fascinated me were those to which history had little access. The silence he forged into a weapon he wielded for weeks at a time when he felt wronged. The year he’d spent chopping wood in Upstate New York after graduating City College and before beginning Columbia Law School. The way his genius had exempted him from so much in life—turned him into the man in the chair atop the hora dance, passed from one protector to the next, and how that had forged and crippled him. My whole life, he’d seemed almost visibly stooped by the weight of his regrets, lamenting his decision to prioritize work over family and wishing he could do it all differently. And yet day by day, year after year, he did not. That summer, as we sat before a muted television, watching the Red Sox break our hearts again, I asked my grandfather all I could think to. During the days, I holed up in a bedroom seemingly built to avoid the sea breeze, working on a novel about grandfathers and grandsons that had yet to find a reason for existing. I knew only that the generation I was trying to understand would soon be gone, and that when it vanished the world would be stupider and less elegant, absent the force of intellect and character men like my grandfather possessed.
Why he opened up to me, I cannot say. Years before, his four grandsons had partially liberated him from the “do not disturb your father” doctrine that ruled our parents’ childhood, barging into his study and demanding his attention—and he had loved us for it. Perhaps this was an extension of that; twenty-plus years later, I still would not leave him alone. He was incredulous at my interest in Bronx stickball rules and his experience of being the first Jew admitted to a Cambridge health club, but as the months passed he reached more willingly into the recesses of his perfect memory, and I learned things no one in my family had ever known. He’d written a humor column for the City College newspaper, for instance: twice a week throughout his senior year. I made a trip to New York to find and photocopy them. We read each one together. My grandfather had believed he’d be a writer then, and with good cause: his language was marvelous. He was funny. Suddenly, his marriage to my grandmother, a poet and a legendary wit, made sense.
Little of what I learned found its way into my novel. But in some larger sense, his story was my book; his story was his generation; his story was me. As we spoke and laughed and sat together in silence, I began to understand why I was writing. I was exploring my greatest hope and fear: that my grandfather and I were exactly alike.
Finally, hip-hop: Things to be turning around. The Golden Age of hip-hop blossomed under the burning of another Bush. This rerun we’re experiencing seems to be initiating some sparks of hope that the form’s hyperconsumerist ways are changing.
I say yes and no. I just judged the National Teen Poetry Slam finals in DC, and what I saw, for two days, was kids from all over the hemisphere kicking spoken-word pieces about the true essence of hip hop, speaking passionately about the culture and the need to save and protect it. For the most part, that’s great. Usually, when I go into a classroom, I have to spend an hour explaining to high school kids that hip hop didn’t used to be, and doesn’t have to be, the materialistic, misogynistic, bullshit-fest they’d think it was if they turned on mainstream radio or mainstream TV. There’s no reason, in 2008, that a casual consumer would think hip hop was a culture rooted in resistance, so it was affirming to see kids taking up the culture as a form of response, a way to claim a voice.
At the same time, rap music has basically sucked for the entire conscious-listening life of a 20-year-old –- especially if you accept my theory that people become serious about music around the age of twelve. So it was kind of weird to see them so passionate about it. Until I realized that they’re not. They’re passionate about the music my cohort grew up listening to, in the eighties and early nineties. They’re the first hip hop generation –- a hip hop generation, in my opinion, spans about six years – to be primarily engaged with the music of the past. At first, that bugged me. It seemed kind of forced; I wondered how deeply they could possibly understand the energy of those times, and what hip hop meant then. Hip hop has always engendered a lot of nostalgia, but until now it’s been experienced mainly by people who at least remember what they’re pining for.
I thought about it more, and it occurred to me that these kids have been very well-mentored – by my cohort, my generation. The slam team I’m specifically thinking of was from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and my man Kevin Coval is their coach. They know all about his work, my work, Jeff Chang’s work, Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s work, Danny Hoch’s work, Rennie Harris’s work, Bakari Kitwana’s work, Rosa Clemente’s work. They came up in a world where organizations like Youth Speaks and Urban Word and The League of Young Voters and the Ruckus Society gave them a platform. All those organizations were founded by my generation, my cohort, in order to give them an infrastructure we never had.
And we told them to go back and check out KRS and Rakim and Kane and Public Enemy – and Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka and Gil Scott-Heron – and they did. So I ended up inspired by them, and also feeling good about what we’re beginning to be able to pass along, as cats like me and my friends sort of become elders in the hip hop arts movement.
In terms of the state of hip hop at large, with the exception of a Pharoah Monch or MF Doom, I find the most current inspiration not in the original hip hop artforms of rhyming, DJing, b-boying and graff, but in the second-generation ones. Spoken word, hip hop theater, hip hop literature, hip hop pedagogy, and hip hop political strategy are all vital and vibrant and growing fast. Institutions are starting to recognize them, and even more importantly, it’s happening on their own terms. I’m very excited about the theory, the practice, and the possibilities.