The alternative is signifyin’—it puts an ironic spin on the resolution that empowers those at the margins to reclaim ownership over what has been taken from them

In many ways, A Tribe Called Quest follows the signifyin’ ways of Douglass in its 1990 song “Can I Kick It?” which parodies and deconstructs Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” The song samples from and criticizes Reed’s ode to sexual adventurism. In his song, Reed has “bitten,” or stolen, African American R&B rhythms from the 1970s and exoticized black urban spaces through his sexualized lyrics. A Tribe Called Quest’s parody, however, operates primarily through its samples, rather than the lyrics themselves. The samples rework Reed’s song, deconstructing its references to drug use, interracial sexuality, and societal rebellion. When he asks, “Can I Kick It?” Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest calls out Lou Reed for both identifying the location of his “walk on the wild side” as New York City and including African American girls within that walk.38 Q-Tip questions Reed’s ability to walk his streets or “hang” with A Tribe Called Quest. Although the lyrics do parody Lou Reed’s, the group signifies on Reed primarily through the rhythm tracks and the melody. By reclaiming a stolen or bitten rhythm line, A Tribe Called Quest is engaged in a turf war with rock and roll. This battle is not about a physical space, but appropriated elements of intellectual property. Later in the song, Q-Tip asks David Dinkins, “Would you please be my mayor?” This references the election of the first black mayor of New York City and extends the parody and the claim of cultural ownership over New York City. A Tribe Called Quest calls out not only Lou Reed and rock and roll but the white political establishment that has attempted to dominate black urban spaces. “Can I Kick It?” simultaneously constitutes a parody of white popular culture and a demand for political and cultural freedom. The form of the music, although it shares some characteristics with Douglass’s parody, also suggests a new use of signifyin’ in the post–Civil Rights era.

Signifyin’ functions like a trademark or copyright symbol. A successful instance of signifyin’ constitutes an act of rhetorical ownership over an object, a text, or even an individual. For example, Douglass’s parody demonstrated his moral superiority over Christian apologists through his verbal acuity, and A Tribe Called Quest asserts claims of cultural ownership over rock and roll and New York City. In both cases, African American cultural workers write over well-known texts. Signifyin’, especially in the case of hip-hop, adds an “ironic spin” on the original, frequently “contradicting the original meaning.”39 The practice of signifyin’ also refuses to acknowledge the seemingly settled distribution of property rights, which legal discourse purports to confer, and writes over them.40 Although Gates does not call attention to this explicitly, he describes how signifyin’ offers a method and a form to claim cultural and personal ownership over an object, sound, image, text, or trademarked logo. As a clandestine or alternative property-ownership system, signifyin’ allows participants within African American culture to write over an unjust distribution of intellectual and cultural resources. This competing legal structure “allocates” rights over intangible objects within African American culture without following the requirements identified in copyright or trademark law. For popular and vernacular culture, law, as written in the statute books, is simply irrelevant. Keith Aoki asserts that, especially during the formative years of blues and jazz, the lack of of‹cial copyright protection fostered creativity and innovation among African American musicians.41

Signifyin’, as described by Gates, constitutes a second-level legal order. This legal order does not possess the judicial authority to adjudicate claims, levy fines, or order parties to desist from certain conduct, but it does possess cultural authority in conferring status, power, and authority within African American culture. Such recognition frequently can translate into market success within the white community.42 Eduardo Penalver and Sonia Katyal have argued, in the case of property law, that property outlaws or dissidents have been the catalysts for legal change.43 Applying their analysis to the expansion of intellectual property law, Katyal argues that we have entered into a period of marked “semiotic disobedience,” in which “social activism exposes the need for alternative political economies for information.44 In many ways, I am arguing that Gates’s description and canonization of signifyin’ constitutes a strategy of semiotic disobedience.45 This strategy may ultimately transform the definition and distribution of intellectual property rights.

Signifyin’ and Copyright Infringement Gates’s theory of signifyin’ does not explicitly purport to undermine the foundations of American jurisprudence, but it does, however, uncover a paradox or contradiction at the heart of liberal legal theory: the self-evident nature and meaning of cultural properties. Gates, along with a bevy of hip-hop artists and critical race theorists, arrives at similar criticisms about the role of subjectivity in shaping what an object or text means. Speakers, writers, artists, and viewers bring a set of narrative assumptions about the world when they interpret the meaning of a text. These narrative assumptions frequently are connected to their identity and their experiences. Texts, in and of themselves, may be indeterminate and open to endless deconstruction—an argument made by Derrida, his followers, and legions of postmodern thinkers. Hip-hop aesthetics, as articulated through Gates, and the rise of hip-hop respond to Derrida’s call by demonstrating how cultural speci‹city works to create interpretative networks or lenses that simultaneously specify a determinate meaning and keep texts open for reinterpretation.46 This paradoxical property of signifyin’ produces an impasse—or aporia, in Derrida’s vocabulary—for legal discourse. Intellectual property law has increasingly protected copyright holders from any trespass, including those that might constitute fair use. Such borrowings, however, are fundamental to African American vernacular practices, especially as prescribed by Gates’s theory of signifyin’.47 The very boundaries that intellectual property law seeks to establish to protect intellectual properties directly conflict with how African American vernacular culture and hiphop aesthetics operate. Thus, hip-hop aesthetics, when read through Gates’s theory of signifyin’, constitutes an outlaw practice because it values long-standing cultural practices over the recent expansion of intellectual property doctrines.48