Dies Irae, Dies Illa: Hip-Hop and the Apocalypse of Whiteness

What is it about?

This writing seeks to open itself to hip-hop music and culture as a deep sonic probe of history. At stake is not only the last 500 years of European settler colonial take-over of the Americas, giving rise to a profound delirium of white supremacy, but even deeper conceits of supremacy bound up with Christianity and indeed “civilization” itself. Those convictions of superiority have all too often translated into eco-political aggressions that have proven apocalyptic for target populations, cultures, and geographies deemed “ripe for the taking.” In part a confessional writing by a white male activist/poet gradually being re-shaped by Black challenge and creativity encountered over more than 35 years of living and working in inner city Detroit, the essay will entertain hip-hop beats and bombast alike as codifying an ancestral throb rooted in the mother continent (Africa) of our race. And among other things, that “throb” can be read as a sonic membrane of apocalyptic announcement—at once “peeling back the veil” on the way large-scale powers (e.g., “racialized whiteness”) work to oppress dominated peoples while simultaneously giving animate expression in our present hour to modalities of resistance ancient and contemporary. As such hip-hop will be comprehended here as a post-modern techno-digital innovation of the kind of underground art “done” on Roman imperial oppression given mythic articulation in the Apocalypse of John as well as in the “trumpeted” requiem pronounced on medieval power-politics found in Dies Irae liturgies.

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Photo by Alex Gudino on Unsplash

Photo by Alex Gudino on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This work sets hip-hop in a big-picture frame of reference on human history, linking its craft and power with quite different expressions of insight and resistance elsewhere in the continuing struggle of our species for ways of living that are less destructive.

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