Take it to the Stage: Hip hop, the White Enthusiast and the poetics of the mixboard

Abstract

Angry Black White Boy by Adam's Mansbach is a relentless satire of its righteous character's megalomania and of the misguided use of religious enthusiasm in the field of racial politics. Yet this does not preclude the celebration of enthusiasm as an infectious form of poetic frenzy. Angry Black White Boy deserves to be regarded as a formally ambitious novel in which a poetics of enthusiasm is articulated. The art of "going over" or "crossing out", writing graffiti over another one, is one of the paragons which the lyrical prose of the portrait constantly strives to emulate. Another paragon, as this study will argue, is the DJ's art of "sampling". In its attempts to revive the real, charismatic presence of African American artists and political leaders of the 1960s and 1970s by the sampling of their lines, the novel turns into a novelistic mixboard, half-mocking and half-celebrating the relation of hip hop artists to the powerful voices of Civil Rights leaders ghosting their own voices.