American Hustlers

I’m reading Freedom Just Around the Corner , Walter McDougall’s delightful tour of American history from the colonial period to the age of Jackson. His main claim is that Americans are “hustlers,” both in the sense of shrewd, industrious, creative go-getters and in the sense of manipulative, sneaky , selfish “scofflaws, speculators, rogues, and demagogues.” Americans, in short, are a future-directed people trying to get what they want (good or bad) by available means (fair or foul) in a land that allows them more opportunity to do so than any other.

If this view of America is as accurate as I think it is, it shows how profoundly American, to the point of lurid caricature, is the ethic manifested in rap. Rappers construe life in starkly agonistic terms: The goal of life is emphatically to hustle , to use ingenuity, hard work and courage to make advantageous “deals,” outwit and defy inconvenient authorities whenever possible, and finally win the “game.” This means gaining the wealth that gives access to to all the pleasures of sense, to the refined pleasures of power, prestige and public munificence, and (more nobly) that enables one to shower benefits on beloved friends and family. According to this worldview, dealing drugs, pimping, selling retail and making music are all ventures with the same goals, operating on the same basic principles—they merely have somewhat different risks and rewards. And American future-directedness is often as explicit as you could want. Consider the chorus of Jay-Z’s “I Just Wanna Love You (Give It to Me)”: “I’m a hustler, baby / I just want you to know / It ain’t where I been / But where I’m about to go.”

But rap lyrics also demonstrate a quintessentially American sense of the harrowing inconstancy of fortune and the terrible burdens of success, and show the subtle omnipresence, in the vile morass of materialism, of an awareness that the frenzy of achievement and acquisition can’t be the point. The rapper can’t shake the feeling that we are ultimately judged from a transcendent perspective; his world most-definitely “Christ-haunted.” This streak of transcendence is far from being enough to justify these songs, which glorify (they do not, contra the apologists, merely “depict”) one of the basest visions of human life ever conceived. But it is reassuring evidence that God pierces every form of darkness—He can surely pierce mainstream America’s complacent consumerism.