Say what you mean
The first one floated up a few months back. Weirdly anachronistic, it was tacked on to the end of a standard-issue “we’re new to the neighborhood” letter of introduction. In the place generally reserved for “Sincerely,” this mom-and-pop copy shop spiced its pitch with “Peace.”
It was soon forgotten. Until the next one.
“Paz” wrapped up one business e-mail.
“Paix” was the postcard sign-off from a vagabond friend.
Soon after arrived the deluge: Two-finger V’s flashed vigorously from the season’s succession of red-carpet processions, from Grammy to Oscar; fat white peace signs soaped on funky boutique windows; the retro, three-pronged symbol emblazoned across everything from cutoff shorts to French-cut fatigue-green T-shirts -- all upward of $50 a pop.
But something else was significant about the word’s reappearance, its freshly minted, ubiquitous spirit. It wasn’t just that it had been recycled or reclaimed -- that was hardly surprising.
Starting with Sept. 11 and followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, this period of violence and uncertainty has made many grasp for an antidote, even if it is just symbolic. And why not a symbol that had come from an earlier era -- the ‘60s, attached to another war, Vietnam -- but had fallen out of fashion?
But the term, and the wish, hadn’t fallen out of usage or fashion in one arena: the world of hip-hop, rap, black music in general, and the concentric circles of African American social life and pop culture. Here it was far from generic pop art or generalized pop philosophy. Instead, it telegraphed a more specific sort of of-the-moment “coolness”; “peace” in these quarters has long been imbued with faith, longing and hope even in moments of chaos and dissonance.
While much of slang is a fluid, ever-changing set of passwords, “peace” has for decades been a wish and a blessing. “For a lot of us, ‘peace’ started with self-love,” says Emil Wilberkin, editorial director of Vibe magazine. “It was about what we learned in church and Sunday school. It was black people coming together. It was saying, ‘Be safe.’ ‘Be good.’ ‘Be peaceful.’ ”
So to those who have an ear finely tuned to such matters, it’s disturbing to hear “peace” morph into mere accessory -- “the outro.” “Hip-hop truly claimed that word early on, and it is still a very important part of that world,” says Claude Grunitzky, editor of Trace magazine, which examines the intersections of arts, culture and politics among multiethnic youth. “But mostly nowadays it’s been taken out of context. And oftentimes it doesn’t have any meaning. But that’s what happens. Now a lot of time it’s just jewelry.”
Messages of uplift
But it hadn’t always been costume.
Back in the day, the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when hip-hop and rap were evolving, much of the music was brightly hued novelty tunes full of clever one-upmanship boasts. But some artists also began to turn their attention to the issues -- unemployment, gangs, guns, crack -- eating away at struggling urban neighborhoods coast to coast. Tucked inside the documentary-style rhymes were messages encouraging self-improvement and spiritual uplift. “At the end of the day it came out of something real,” says Donnell Alexander, a culture critic and author of “Ghetto Celebrity: Searching for My Father in Me.” “Eric B. and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane stand out with this ‘we’re going to make this happen’ thrust to their music. They had the will.”
In that moment, “peace” was like a prayer, an oath, the note-to-self, signing off the most politically/socially aware or “conscious” rhymes. But at the same time, says Alexander, tension was building between the East Coast and West Coast rap factions. Cuts like “All in the Same Gang” (1990) by the West Coast All Stars and “Self Destruction” (1989) by Stop the Violence Movement became collective calls for peace and harmony, but by the time Ice Cube weighed in on “Tales From the Dark Side,” a track from the 1990 album “Amerikkka’s Most Wanted” (“Peace? don’t make me laugh ... I’m a nigga gotta live by the trigga”) all bets were off. Notes Alexander: “With that record you really got a sense of the distance between the stated and the understood.”
Veronica Chambers has always been acutely aware of the dissonance. Now an L.A.-based journalist and novelist, Chambers grew up in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. “From the time I was 5 or 6 there was always something out there to worry about -- drug dealers and drive-bys. Young girls were raped and thrown off roofs. That was war behavior,” she says. “You got the sense that your life wasn’t very valuable.”
But while all of it was happening, says Chambers, “there was this music -- Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest, who were putting out this message of peace and unity and uplift. They were meaningful to me then. They are meaningful to me now.”
Even now, 20 years later, as “peace” pops up in e-mails and vintage tin pins show up on lapels, it scratches at something Chambers realizes is still quite tender: “I know that this war [in Iraq] is different, but I’ve felt in jeopardy for a long time. For as long as I can remember.”
It’s that battlefield -- both physical and emotional -- that Wilberkin has tried to address. Billed in its early years as black music’s Rolling Stone, Vibe had the difficult task of parsing the peace/violence contradictions in the music and on the streets. “We definitely raised a lot of questions. When [the artists] are about peace and love in one moment, then about pimp-slapping women the next, well, there’s a problem,” says Wilberkin.
There was a deluge to sort through: A spin-art collection of neo-hippie/boho, hip-hop acts from De La Soul to the Fugees took up the constructive, look-inward, self-reliance “peace” baton that acts like KRS-One, Eric B. and Rakim had passed down. “De La Soul changed everything,” says Saul Williams, a musician, poet and activist who was heavy on the hip-hop-influenced poetry slam scene. “They were the first rappers to wear fluorescent peace signs in videos. Their album ‘3 Feet High and Rising’ is to hip-hop what the Beatles’ ‘White Album’ was to rock.”
Their refurbished “Daisy Age” power was everywhere: De La Soul’s Trugoy the Dove sported a peace sign -- one shaved into his scalp. Fab Five Freddy closed his “Yo! MTV Raps” segment by throwing up the peace sign, with the shout out, “Peace in the Middle East.” For a time the love and goodwill seemed to permeate everything. Peace and pride were entwined. “Everyone was wearing X caps. Spike Lee was making movies. ‘The Cosby Show’ was on TV. In that golden era it was all about peace and pride,” says Williams. “It was an intense and beautiful time. It was surreal.” But what did it all mean in the end?
“Much of it just went overboard,” he says. That everywhere-at-once effect diluted the message’s sharpness. “Everyone else picked up on it....It became commodified.”
A trickle-down effect
Though amorphous and seemingly out of reach, “peace” as a rallying force, a wish, has had such staying power in this world because of its deep roots, its linguistic layers of meaning.
“When I was coming up in the ‘80s, brothers in the street down with the Nation of Islam would greet each other with ‘As-Salaam Alaikum’ -- the traditional Muslim greeting, ‘Peace unto you and the mercy of Allah’ -- or simply ‘Peace’ when departing,” says Austin Jackson, an instructor in the department of writing, rhetoric and American cultures at Michigan State University. “And Five Percenters [an offshoot of Islam] would greet most black people, Five Percent or not, with ‘Peace.’ ”
Five Percenter artists like Rakim, Big Daddy Kane or Brand Nubian embroidered the message into their socially conscious rhymes, creating a trickle-down effect -- from Islam to the music to the streets. But, Jackson says, “like anything cool it was picked up and used by most heads, socially conscious or not.”
“Peace’s” surface cool cachet will no doubt endure. However, times as politically fraught as these have served to reanimate not just the symbolism but also inspire new meditations on the word’s layered meaning. Particularly for the twentysomething generation, who grew up with the Persian Gulf War, Sept. 11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, peace isn’t musty nostalgia, but a notion full of fresh challenge and prospects. It’s Gen-Y, then, says Wilberkin, that is “best positioned to play a crucial moral role in the call for not just global peace but peace where they live.”
If anything can be learned from “peace’s” linguistic longevity in black vernacular, it is that despite the ebbs and flows of aggression and despair, peace remained a moral guidepost. It is not simply the absence of hostility, but a wish to strive for something better. What has to be kept at the front of one’s mind is this: Just invoking the word itself isn’t a magic incantation. It takes work too. As Wilberkin suggests: “Gen Y has been through so much. The burst of the Internet bubble, financial ruin, 9/11, AIDS. They seem to be more aware, they are willing to make friends across race lines, open around sexuality, are community oriented. Maybe, hopefully, they will complete the peace circle.”
