Stakes is High

Re The Nation Special Music Issue / Stakes is High 

'Stakes Is High'
by JEFF CHANG

[from the January 13, 2003 issue]

Fifteen years ago, rappers like Public Enemy, KRS-One and Queen Latifah
were received as heralds of a new movement. Musicians--who, like all
artists, always tend to handle the question "What's going on?" much
better than "What is to be done?"--had never been called upon to do so
much for their generation; Thelonious Monk, Aretha Franklin and Stevie
Wonder were never asked to stand in for Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou
Hamer or Stokely Carmichael. But the gains of the civil rights and Black
Power movements of the 1960s were being rolled back. Youths were as fed
up with black leadership as they were with white supremacy. Politics had
failed. Culture was to become the hip-hop generation's battlefield, and
"political rap" was to be its weapon. 

Today, the most cursory glance at the Billboard charts or video shows on
Viacom-owned MTV and BET suggests rap has been given over to
cocaine-cooking, cartoon-watching, Rakim-quoting, gold-rims-coveting,
death-worshiping young 'uns. One might even ask whether rap has
abandoned the revolution.

Indeed, as the central marker of urban youth of color style and
authenticity, rap music has become the key to the niching of youth
culture. The "hip-hop lifestyle" is now available for purchase in every
suburban mall. "Political rap" has been repackaged by record companies
as merely "conscious," retooled for a smaller niche as an alternative.
Instead of drinking Alizé, you drink Sprite. Instead of Versace, you
wear Ecko. Instead of Jay-Z, you listen to the Roots. Teen rap, party
rap, gangsta rap, political rap--tags that were once a mere music
critic's game--are literally serious business.

"Once you put a prefix on an MC's name, that's a death trap," says Talib
Kweli, the gifted Brooklyn-born rapper who disdains being called
"conscious." Clearly his music expresses a well-defined politics; his
rhymes draw from the same well of protest that nourished the Last Poets,
the Watts Prophets and the Black Arts stalwarts he cites as influences.
But he argues that marketing labels close his audience's minds to the
possibilities of his art. When Kweli unveiled a song called "Gun Music,"
some fans grumbled. (No "conscious" rapper would stoop to rapping about
guns, they reasoned, closing their ears even as Kweli delivered a
complicated critique of street-arms fetishism.) At the same time, Kweli
worries that being pigeonholed as political will prevent him from being
promoted to mass audiences. Indeed, to be a "political rapper" in the
music industry these days is to be condemned to preach to a very small
choir.

"Political rap" was actually something of an invention. The Bronx
community-center dances and block parties where hip-hop began in the
early 1970s were not demonstrations for justice, they were celebrations
of survival. Hip-hop culture simply reflected what the people wanted and
needed--escape. Rappers bragged about living the brand-name high life
because they didn't; they boasted about getting headlines in the New
York Post because they couldn't. Then, during the burning summer of the
first Reagan recession, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released
"The Message," a dirge (by the standards of the day) that seethed
against the everyday violence of disinvestment. Flash was certain the
record, which was actually an A&R-pushed concoction by Duke Bootee and
Melle Mel, would flop; it was too slow and too depressing to rock a
party. But Sugar Hill Records released the song as a single over his
objections, and "The Message" struck the zeitgeist like a bull's-eye.
Liberal soul and rock critics, who had been waiting for exactly this
kind of statement from urban America, championed it. Millions of
listeners made it the third platinum rap single.

Through the mid-1980s, Melle Mel, Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force,
Run-DMC and others took up the role of the young black lumpenrapper
opposition, weighing in 
on topics like racism, nuclear proliferation and
apartheid. And just as the first Bush stepped into office, a new
generation began to articulate a distinctly post-civil rights stance.
Led by Public Enemy, rappers like Paris, Ice-T, X-Clan, Poor Righteous
Teachers and Brand Nubian displayed the Black Panther Party's media
savvy and the Minister Louis Farrakhan's nationalist rage. Politics were
as explicit as Tipper Gore's advisory stickers. As the Gulf War
progressed, Paris's "Bush Killa" imagined a Black Power assassination of
Bush the Elder while rapping, "Iraq never called me 'nigger.'" (Last
year, he returned to cut an MP3-only critique of the war on Afghanistan,
"What Would You Do?") Rappers' growing confidence with word, sound and
power was reflected in more slippery and subtle music, buttered with
Afrodiasporic and polycultural flavor.

Many of these artists had emerged from vibrant protest movements--New
York City's resurgent Black Power movement; the swelling campus
antiapartheid/multiculturalism/ affirmative action movement; local
anti-police brutality movements. In each of these, representation was
the cry and the media were a target. Rap "edutainment" came out of the
convergence of two very different desires: the need for political
empowerment and the need to be empowered by images of truth. On 1990's
"Can I Kick It?," A Tribe Called Quest's Phife Dawg captured the mood of
his audience sweetly and precisely: "Mr. Dinkins, will you please be our
mayor?" But while Mayor Dinkins's career quickly hit a tailspin, hip-hop
rose by making blackness--even radical blackness--the worldwide trading
currency of cultural cool.

In the new global entertainment industry of the 1990s, rap became a hot
commodity. But even as the marketing dollars flowed into youth of color
communities, major labels searched for ways to capture the authenticity
without the militancy. Stakes was high, as De La Soul famously put it in
1996, and labels were loath to accept such disruptions on their
investments as those that greeted Ice-T and Body Count's "Cop Killer"
during the '92 election season. Rhymers kicking sordid tales from the
drug wars were no longer journalists or fictionists, ironists or
moralists. They were purveyors of a new lifestyle, ghetto cool with all
of the products but none of the risk or rage. After Dr. Dre's pivotal
1992 album, The Chronic, in which a millennial, ghettocentric Phil
Spector stormed the pop charts with a postrebellion gangsta party that
brought together Crip-walking with Tanqueray-sipping, the roughnecks,
hustlers and riders took the stage from the rap revolutionaries, backed
by the substantial capital of a quickly consolidating music industry. 

Rap music today reflects the paradoxical position of the hip-hop
generation. If measured by the volume of products created by and sold to
them, it may appear that youth of color have never been more central to
global popular culture. Rap is now a $1.6 billion engine that drives the
entire music industry and flexes its muscle across all entertainment
platforms. Along with its music, Jay-Z's not-so-ironically named
Roc-A-Fella company peddles branded movies, clothing and vodka. Hip-hop,
some academics assert, is hegemonic. But as the social turmoil described
by many contemporary rappers demonstrates, this generation of youth of
color is as alienated and downpressed as any ever has been. And the act
of tying music to lifestyle--as synergy-seeking media companies have
effectively done--has distorted what marketers call the "aspirational"
aspects of hip-hop while marginalizing its powers of protest.

Yet the politics have not disappeared from popular rap. Some of the most
stunning hits in recent years--DMX's "Who We Be," Trick Daddy's "I'm a
Thug," Scarface's "On My Block"--have found large audiences by making
whole the hip-hop generation's cliché of "keeping it real," being true
to one's roots of struggle. The video for Nappy Roots' brilliant "Po'
Folks" depicts an expansive vision of rural Kentucky--black and w
hite,
young and old together, living like "everything's gon' be OK."
Scarface's ghettocentric "On My Block" discards any pretense at apology.
"We've probably done it all, fa' sheezy," he raps. "I'll never leave my
block, my niggas need me." For some critics, usually older and often
black, such sentiments seem dangerously close to pathological, hymns to
debauchery and justifications for thuggery. But the hip-hop generation
recognizes them as anthems of purpose, manifestoes that describe their
time and place the same way that Public Enemy's did. Most of all, these
songs and their audiences say, we are survivors and we will never forget
that.

The "conscious rap" and "neosoul" genres take up where 1970s soul
experimentalists like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield left off. At their
best, they are black-to-the-future havens of experimentation that
combine a grandiose view of pop music's powers, an earnest hope for a
better world and a jaded insider's disdain for rote commercialism. Crews
like Blackalicious, the Coup, Jurassic 5, Zion I and dead prez have
attained modest success by offering visions of twenty-first-century
blackness--hypertextual rhymes, stuttering rhythms and lush sounds
rooted in a deep understanding of African-American cultural production
and ready-made for a polycultural future. The Roots' album Phrenology
stretches hip-hop's all-embracing method--the conviction that "every
music is hip-hop" and ready to be absorbed--to draw from a palette as
wide as Jill Scott, Bad Brains, James Blood Ulmer and the Cold Crush
Brothers. Common's Electric Circus takes cues from Prince and Sly Stone
in reimagining the hip-hop concept album.

Tensions often spring from the compromises inherent in being given the
budget to build a statement while being forced to negotiate the major
label's Pavlovian pop labyrinth, and others have left the system to, as
Digital Underground once famously put it, do what they like, albeit for
much smaller audiences. Public Enemy has gone to the Internet and to
indies in order, they say, to "give the peeps what they need," not what
they think they want. After spending more than a decade in unsuccessful
efforts with major labels, rapper Michael Franti now records on his own
Boo Boo Wax imprint. It's hard to imagine his latest effort, "Bomb Da
World"--whose chorus goes, "You can bomb the world to pieces, but you
can't bomb it into peace"--passing muster in the boardrooms.
Berkeley-based rapper Mr. Lif cut two of the most funky and politically
challenging records of the year, the Emergency Rations EP and I Phantom
LP, for the indie Definitive Jux. The EP's clever conceit--that the
rapper has literally "gone underground" to escape angry Feds--is easily
the wittiest, most danceable critique yet of the USA Patriot Act.

Hip-hop has been roundly condemned within and without for its sexist,
misogynistic tendencies, but it has also created room for artists like
Me'shell N'degeocello, Mystic, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott,
Goapele and Angie Stone to mix up and transform both rap and r&b.
"Neosoul" has been especially attractive to women and post-young 'uns.
Its hip-hop feminist critique came into sharp relief last year. After
years of flying high, rap sales crashed by 15 percent, leading an
industrywide plunge. But multiplatinum newcomers Alicia Keys and
India.Arie were garlanded with a bevy of Grammy nominations. Keys and
Arie celebrated "a woman's worth" and were frankly critical of male
irresponsibility. India.Arie's breakout hit "Video"--in which she sang,
"I'm not the average girl from your video"--stole the music that had
once been sampled for a rap ode to oral sex called "Put It in Your
Mouth."

Hip-hop feminism has been articulated by Joan Morgan as a kind of loyal
but vocal, highly principled opposition to black (and brown and yellow)
male übermasculinity. In the same way, neosoul dissects the attitudes
and ideals projected in the hip-hop mainstream. Me'shell N'degeocello's
compelling Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape opens with
 the line, "You
sell your soul like you sell a piece of ass." The most commanding of the
neosoul artists, Jill Scott, imagines reconciliation, no longer having
to love hip-hop from a distance. On "Love Rain" she sings of meeting a
new man: "Talked about Moses and Mumia, reparations, blue colors,
memories of shell-top Adidas, he was fresh like summer peaches." But the
relationship ends badly, "All you did was make a mockery of somethin' so
incredibly beautiful. I honestly did love you so." 

Neosoul personalizes struggles, but the approach has its limitations.
India.Arie's Voyage to India, for instance, suffers from reducing black
radical conviction to self-affirmation mantra. At the same time, the
genre mirrors a deeply held conviction of the hip-hop generation:
Revolution does not come first from mass organizations and marching in
the streets, but through knowledge of self and personal transformation.
"Back in the '60s, there was a big push for black senators and
politicians, and now we have more than we ever had before, but our
communities are so much worse," says Talib Kweli. "A lot of people died
for us to vote, I'm aware of that history, but these politicians are not
in touch with people at all. Politics is not the truth to me, it's an
illusion." For a generation that has made a defensive virtue of keeping
it real, the biggest obstacle to societal change may simply be the act
of imagining it.

These are the kinds of paradoxes the silver-tongued Kweli grapples with
on his second solo album, Quality, as masterful a summation of the
hip-hop generation's ambivalent rage as Morgan's book, When Chickenheads
Come to Roost. On one of his early songs, Kweli synthesized 1960s
militancy and 1990s millenarianism in a phrase, rapping about the need
for "knowledge of self-determination." At one point on the Nina
Simone-flavored "Get By," he sees the distance his generation still
needs to cover: "We're survivalists turned to consumers." Echoing Marvin
Gaye's "Right On," he measures the breadth of his generation--from the
crack-pushers to the hip-hop activists. "Even when the condition is
critical, when the living is miserable, your position is pivotal," he
concludes, deciding that it's time to clean up his own life.

Kweli never fails to deliver fresh, if often despairing, insights. On
"The Proud," he offers a sage reading of the impact of 9/11 on the
'hood--"People broken down from years of oppression become patriots when
their way of life is threatened." Later in the song, he cites
California's Proposition 21--the culmination of nearly two decades of
fears of gangs, violence and lawlessness--and ties it to the
intensifying nationwide trend of profiling and brutality against youth
of color. But he scoffs at a revolution coming at the ballot box. Of the
2000 Florida elections, he angrily concludes, "President is Bush, the
Vice President is Dick, so a whole lotta fucking is what we get. They
don't want to raise the baby so the election is fixed. That's why we
don't be fucking with politics!"

But politicians can't stop fucking with rap and the hip-hop generation.
Senator Joe Lieberman regularly rallies cultural conservatives against
the music. Michael Powell's corporate-friendly, laissez-faire FCC has
censored only the white male rap star Eminem and the black feminist
hip-hop poet Sarah Jones. Texas Republican John Cornyn overcame
African-American Democrat Ron Kirk's November Senate bid by linking him
to police-hating (and, interestingly, ballot-punching) rappers. When Jam
Master Jay, the well-respected, peace-making DJ of rap group Run-D.M.C.,
was murdered in October, police and federal investigators intensified
their surveillance of rappers while talking heads and tabloids like the
New York Post decried the music's, and this generation's, supposed
propensity for violence and lawlessness.

Now a hip-hop parent, Kweli hopes to steel his young 'uns for these
kinds of assaults. "I give them the truth so they approach the situation
with ammunition," he raps. "Teach them 
the game so they know their
position, so they can grow and make their decisions that change the
world and break traditions." While he critiques his elders for failing
to save the children, he knows his generation's defensive b-boy stance
is not enough: "We gave the youth all the anger but yet we ain't taught
them how to express it. And so it's dangerous."

Here is the hip-hop generation in all its powder-keg glory and pain:
enraged, empowered, endangered. The irony is not lost: A generation able
to speak the truth like no other before is doing so to a world that
still hasn't gotten the message.