I'm an '84 baby. According to Walter Kimbrough and Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar I barely made the Hip Hop Generation.  I don't really remember the "golden" era of Hip Hop culture as lived experience - I was too busy with He-Man, Care Bears, Lite Brites, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - but I went back later on in life and appreciated that moment in history.  


What I DO remember, however, is what I was doing on September 13, 1996 and March 9, 1997. 


That date in September was a Friday (go figure) and I was watching MTV music videos and on the phone with the BFF. Suddenly, the screen switched to a flashing "this just in" announcement that the rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur died from the gunshot wounds he sustained the week before in a drive-by shooting. The next morning when I got together with the crew, people were outside in my neighborhood walking the streets as if they had lost a dear family member.  Tupac's music seeped into the streets from open windows and, already, folks were wearing homemade "R.I.P. 'Pac" shirts.  It was a similar scene when Biggie Smalls died that March. He died late that Sunday night. The next day, I was at school in Band class. Our teacher, Mrs. Dobberstein (which, by the way, is the most trill white woman THIS side of the 'Sippi) announced that he passed and we'd have a moment of silence for his memory.  


Still, I was around for, remember, and could appreciate other moments in the last twenty years that my students make me feel old for remembering - like Bill Clinton being  the first black president; Buying OutKast albums as new releases; watching the live news report about 50 Cent being shot nine times; Eminem's first major album drop; and Dave Chappelle pre- Chappelle's Show.  I guess in similar fashion to generations past and future, life for me began with a certain moment in history that I latched onto as the epicenter of that generation's identity.  What is so fascinating about my generation, however, is the notion that the majority of our milestone events are tragic or comedic (or both) in nature.  


I'd argue that my era of folks - those people born between 1980 and 1990 - are the tragi-comedic generation.  This decade is unique because of not only the memories of the Tupac and B.I.G. deaths referenced earlier, but also the assistance with and election of the first U.S. president of color Barack Obama. I stopped at 1990 because those folks were 18 and eligible to vote in the 2008 presidential election. To include 1990, however, was iffy for me. My youngest brother, who was born in 1990, and his friends, born the same year or later, believe that rap music started with Gucci Mane and OJ da Juiceman (smh). Tragic-comedy as defined by Shakespearean scholars and Ralph Ellison is the act of dark, bitter comedy to speak to a socially relevant issue or concern.  Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) speaks to the existential question of  humanity in American society with a nod toward how that impacts the understanding of blackness. Often profound in his thinking, Ellison once situated his use of tragi-comedic writing as the most formidable approach for him to talk about the underlying tropes of Americanism: 


Ralph Ellison
"Maybe ultimately what I write always turns out to be tragicomedy, which I think has proved to be the underlying mode of American experience.  We don't remember enough; we don't allow ourselves to remember events, and I suppose this helps us to continue our belief in progress."  


While Ellison refused to pigeonhole himself into strictly African Americanist thought and literature, his thoughts about the ideas of remembrance keenly speak to the current situation of black American culture and our understanding of community.  While Ellison spoke to a generation that looked to overcoming tangible racial barriers of prejudice and oppression, today's tragi-comedic generation does not. Many of us have been taught by parents to take a hold of the American mantra of manifest destiny and "get in where we fit in."  The opportunities to advance (capitalistically and otherwise) are not stigmatized outwardly by those issues faced by many of our parents and grandparents who fought for access to those rights in the 1950s and 1960s.  


Us 1980s babies perceive America through a different lens than that of folks before or after us.  We were born and grew up in an era where blackness indefinitely crossed over, i.e.  the year 1986 when the historical collaboration between Hip Hop pioneers Run D.M.C. and Aerosmith "Walk this Way" (a remake of Aerosmith's "Walk this Way" from their 1975 album Toys in the Attic) became wildly popular and talk show legend Oprah Winfrey's show  The Oprah Winfrey Show was nationally syndicated. Blackness was no longer presented as a monolithic struggle - it was no longer televised images of dogs attacking weaponless marchers in the south or beret and leather jacket wearing, mean-mugging black men calling for whites to kiss their asses.  Instead, in a nearly "Kum Bah Yah" moment, black folks seemed to be successful.  The tides shifted and there was an audience for the "new" black America in a white public space. 


Cue Ellison's warning about forgetting the past.  That is a dangerously prophetic notion to discuss present day black culture.  What is, unfortunately, severely overlooked are the remembrances of those horrific notions of racial consciousness that shaped generations past.  The "passing down" of previous experiences is no longer common practice.  The generation gap that is referenced so often in both academic and lay conversations about the state of African-Americans is widening.  The need to remember is overshadowed by the desire to focus on the present. 


Usher in the need to find a way to collapse the rickety discourses about blackness and American life in the late 20th and 21st centuries.  Cue African American humor.  


As critic Bambi Haggins points out, "no longer was the laughter solely to keep from crying; the [post] civil rights moment marked the beginning of black humor's potential power as an unabashed tool for social change for the unfiltered venting of cultural and political anger, and for the annunciation of blackness." The 1990 debut of Keenen Ivory Wayans' comedy sketch show In Living Color carved itself a niche as a filter for the rapidly changing racial and social-cultural front of American (popular) culture.  The inclusion of white comics - a la a young James (Jim) Carrey - suggested a shift in race relations and spoke to the changing tide of social acceptability and consumption of black comedy and culture.   In Living Color challenged people to re-think what was appropiate to laugh at and what should be left alone.Wayans' intentional grappling of social-cultural taboo issues - (homo)sexuality, prison, and taunts at hegemonic white privilege - forced the show's audience to (re)consider those underlying motifs framing American society and its experiences. Wayans' work set up shop for later comedic variety shows like Mad TV (1995) and the now infamous Chappelle's Show (2004). 


The question, then, is how African American Humor shapes not only our understanding of the black experience but how it is transforming the narratives that are coming out of the last 20 years.


I'm working on it.