Sirc on hip hop

The other TETYC piece on which I'm vibing (forgive me if this is scattered)...

It's rather difficult to nail down just what Geoffrey Sirc's "Proust, Hip-Hop, and Death in First-Year Composition" is about. Sirc, whose work interesting, hard-to-classify work prompted a previous post, reflects on how his students' (and his own) interest in local hip hop reveals something about when writing is art. Sirc works to legitimate hip hop by underlining its emphasis on the local, its emphasis on death, its emphasis on something real, and even its emphasis on that which is fleeting/"also-ran."

Regarding the valuing of the local, here's a snippet: "Local hip-hop seems to keep it the realest, I think, because it's us in time. When I hear Slug chornicling his everyday life, I think, 'Hey, I've been to that drugstore,' ' Hey, I've bought records there,' 'Hey, I'm dying too.'"

How true. I think of Youngstown moments in literature and pop culture: Kerouac's reference to the pie and coffee at the diners of Ashtabula and Youngstown, Richard Pryor's routine about getting started at mafia-run taverns there, the rise and fall of Y'town's favorite son/the great punk icon Stiv Bators, Trafficant-as-icon, Henry Hill picking up a copy of the Youngstown Vindicator at the end of Goodfellas (Scorsese's homage to mobtown USA) during the voice-over about lousy sauce, and the Springsteen song. Detroit's moments are countless, but I think of the ones that have prompted identification/affinity in me: the poems of Jim Daniels, Joyce Carol Oates' Them (with its pomo framing device as a story of Oates' years teaching at U of D), Gridlockd with Tim Roth and Tupac, White Stripes mythology, and a thousand others.

Connections: place, pop culture, passion, and what Sirc calls "perfect moments." These converge and lead to, well, art.

I'm not sure what to make of the ending of the article where he gets all "cultural crisis" on us. I read Sirc as being sarcastic when he writes: "You have no idea how different I wish things were. Art? Give me a break...[few read poetry, go to museums, listen to opera]...[T]hat's my world, and I must respect the life and the fashions of the children." There's a strange positioning of hip hop as second best at the article's end. If they ain't got high culture, at least they got the poignancy of hip hop. Sarcasm, I think. The poignancy of the local is more than second best, more than a stand-in for art.