Adam Mansbach does not fit the profile of the typical hip-hop artist. He’s white, he’s blonde, he’s Jewish, and he hails from an affluent Boston suburb. But hip-hop is what the 25-year-old Mansbach does, and does well. When he’s not writing or performing his hip-hop-inspired poetry, he’s often hanging out with other hip-hop artists or writing about the hip-hop scene.
Mansbach’s first book, b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights, was published last year. The hip-hop inspired verses comment on issues of race, family relations, and identity. “I will arm each stanza to the teeth/With agitprop wordplay grappling hooks/Sideholsters verbage echo delay.”
Mansbach started writing his poetry as a graduate student in Columbia University’s creative writing program, but he never showed the poems to his professors. “My poems were not academic,” he says. “They were not the type of material you study about in school.” This is a problem Mansbach has faced his whole life: trying to fuse two different worlds that do not necessarily want to be fused.
Growing up, Mansbach says he “hung out with the black kids, the ones from the outer limits of Boston who got bused in to school.” Mansbach’s friends led him to their music, and he was hooked. “I was attracted to the language,” Mansbach says. “And the verses were so political. They expressed the frustrations and angers that I was feeling in my own life.” In his own suburban community Mansbach only saw “people playing lip-service to different ideas, but not doing anything about it.”
Soon Mansbach was dressing like the black kids, speaking like the black kids, and enduring the taunts of other kids in his largely Jewish and upper middle-class community. “Hey, Mans-black,” they said. “Hey look, it’s Adam Mans-black.”
But Mansbach didn’t mind the teasing, at least not enough to stop him from hanging out with the black kids. “There’s a coolness associated with being black and a coolness in associating with the blacks,” he says. “The other kids couldn’t get near it. And I think they understood that.”
Mansbach began spending his weekends in the Bronx, hip-hop’s birthplace, learning about hip-hop from the experts. At the time, Mansbach did not see anything strange about this. These people were the ones who understood him best; they shared his love of language, and they, like him, wanted more than anything to make a difference in the world. But 12 years later, Mansbach expresses surprise that he was not kicked out on his rear end and laughed out of the scene. “These cats,” he says, “embraced me much more than they should have.”
When it came time to choose colleges, Mansbach did not have to think hard. He chose New York’s Columbia University because he wanted to be close to the hip-hop movement he loved. But he soon found that Columbia’s ivory towers were about as far from the inner city streets as you could get.
And so, as an undergraduate at Columbia, Mansbach started his own hip-hop journal, Elementary. “I wanted to bring hip-hop into the higher sphere,” he says. “I wanted to get artists and professors in one place talking to each other about the movement.” The journal, which garnered national attention, impressed enough people that, when he graduated, Mansbach was offered the position of artistic consultant to Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies.
Today, Mansbach supports himself by teaching, writing, and performing. At a recent show, sponsored by the New York Jewish Community Center, he wailed about the injustices done to black people, while the mostly white, Jewish audience nodded their heads to his words.
Some of his poems, however, do also touch on Jewish themes: “and this chick/is talkin bout/they got/a gift shop at auschwitz/at which you can purchase/keychains and coffee mugs/to commemorate your visit/and never forget/like you gon’ forget.” But Mansbach also has a certain ambivalence towards Judaism. “You know,” he says, “I come from three generations of reformed non-religious Jews. Judaism is just not really part of my life.” And his poetry reflects this, too: “She asked me was I jewish/Yes well sort of/Then I dipped/Hit up/Harlem music hut.”
Mansbach is currently preparing for the release of his newest book, Shackling Waters, due out this month from Doubleday. The novel, which Mansbach says “has a definite hip hop feel to it,” is about an African-American jazz player. And in his spare time he is working on a new novel. The book will be set in the Bronx and follow the lives of three generations of a Jewish family.
