Murray Forman's The `Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop stresses the crucial aspect that geography has played in the phenomenon of hip hop and rap music. Suburbanization created inward pressure that pushed together a racially segregated `inner city', creating a a cultural hub that was simultaneously thriving and neglected. Through hip hop's export, this `inner city', though often misunderstood, is a recognizable motif that has accumulated layers of real and perceived connotations. That is, while the geographic phenomena creating politically neglected, over policed urban centers are very real, the idea that `inner city' can refer to one thing is really a common stereotype. While a lot of meaning has been and is conferred through hip hop, it often has to cut through or be seen past these preconceived notions.
This seems to be part of the pretense of the rapper Serengeti's creation, Kenny Dennis, a project spanning three albums so far on Anticon Records. Serengeti raps as his character Kenny Dennis, a white, middle-aged, ex-truck-driving, American Gladiator-watching, `brats'-cooking, O'doul's (non-alcoholic beer)-drinking (post AA), Bears-, Hawks-, Sox-, and Bulls-loving Chicagoan. This character is a simple Chicagoan who faithfully loves his wife Joules and is skeptical of much 21st century nonsense. He's nonviolent, non-bigoted, and highly reasonable; he expresses his clear thoughts through a thickly regionalized Chicago accent. The vocabulary is at least as regional as that of other hip hop, but drawn from a totally different source, which creative accomplishment allows Serengeti's observations to be taken close to face value. Other rap that places itself in a more recognizable hip-hop location like an impoverished black neighborhood, by contrast, suffers preconceived notions that might make new themes hard to hear.
Serengeti is calling attention to another specific product of modern American geopolitics: the lower-class working man, a noble savage. Just to be clear, Kenny Dennis is not hyper masculine or ignorant in any way; as much as he's defined as a simpleton, he subtly expresses progressive views on everything he encounters (`props to the vegans, but I ain't no vegan', etc.). He's meant to be goofy, as is clear in the music video for `Dennehy'. Furthermore, Serengeti, a black rapper, avoids any culturally appropriative tropes that might be expected from a white rapper like his character; Serengeti addresses some of these themes directly in other albums performed as himself. Serengeti overwhelmingly does one thing through Kenny Dennis: endear the audience.
Serengeti's project is obsessed with geography, and Kenny refers to everything in terms of Chicago: a song about Reno entitled `West of Western', locates Reno, Nevada as `thirty seven thousand blocks west of Western' (Western being a main Chicago thoroughfare, like `College' or `Garey' in Claremont and the IE, or `42nd' in you know where). The chorus of his song `Dennehy', which comprises a flood of references to Chicago, goes `Bears, Hawks, Sox, Bulls!' Kenny lives in a geographic urban center, while simultaneously distancing himself from the popular imagination's `inner city' by being very optimistic: he makes no references to oppression, despite the lower-class upbringing and cultural insularity his thick accent suggest.
So why's Serengeti doing this? He's quoted by Wikipedia as considering mainstream hip hop `depressing', and also said he has `been depressed for a long time' in an interview with Slate magazine. I view this project as an imagining of uplift. Critique of dominant institutions is crucial to ending oppression, but so is the optimistic reimagining and promotion of alternative realities, in the form of activism and the arts from hip hop to the most far-out (possibly afrofuturist) science fictions. In this way I see Serengeti's work depicting an urban, poor, yet enlightened and optimistic character fitting into a long tradition of such imaginings. Robin Kelley's Freedom Dreams studies other black thinkers in this tradition, and really turned me onto what such a project could be about.
It's possible that Kenny Dennis' whiteness offers an implicit critique of which dreams are and aren't actualized in America today.
I think Serengeti's doing an awesome thing and I love his music.
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