This is the sixth in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future. Read the first one Click Here, the second one Click Here, the third one Click Here, the fourth one here Click Here, and the fifth one Click Here.
It's time for the showdown. Get ready for the lowdown. We've come to the end of the road.
When I started this series of columns six weeks ago, I wanted to think through a series of issues: why the bulk of contemporary African-American culture has defaulted into hip-hop, why materialistic narratives seem to dominate the genre, what has happened to the concept of black cool, what increasingly anemic sales mean for both big stars and independent artists, and where all of this leaves us.
It leaves us here, in the sixth and final column, thinking about all these things. Sometimes when you think, you come up empty. But when I go back through this series in my mind, I come up so full that I’m not sure what to do next. Three decades plus into this exciting and vibrant genre, there are some serious structural problems that seem almost insoluble. There are times that I feel that the whole thing is perched on the edge of a cliff and time is about to push it off.
When I think that, I always find my thoughts returning to music. Not to music as an aesthetic category, but to music in the social sense. Music can be created by an individual or a group, but it is meant to be heard by others. It operated that way as ritual (in weddings and funerals, in wars and parades) long before it was ever preserved as a physical product, or sold as a commercial one. Music is something that happens between people. This is true for classical music or instrumental jazz, but it's true with one added dimension for a music like hip-hop, because it's narrative by nature. As a result, it's music between people that is also explicitly about people.
These are the basics. Let's color outside the lines a little bit. Sun Ra said that space is the place, but there's race in the space also. Hip-hop is inseparable from black America and black Americans, who are either creators or consumers or subject matter, or sometimes all three. Like it or not, it exerts a pull on the black community. It can pull us up or it can pull us down or it can pull us apart.
Does black culture need to care about what happens to hip-hop? Does it need a cultural force like hip-hop at all? I can't predict the future. If I could, I'd have put a bundle on California Chrome. But I can say that black culture has needed that historically. The famous black academic Charles S. Johnson, who was instrumental in the Harlem Renaissance, published a magazine for black Americans called Opportunity; its title sent a different message than W.E.B. DuBois's Crisis, but they were two sides of the same coin. Johnson thought (knew?) that the arts were important because black Americans were denied equal treatment in many other respects. The arts, he figured, could be a site of resistance.
Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society. After Johnson, after DuBois, the Harlem Renaissance itself stalled, largely as a result of the Great Depression, and many of the economic gains made by African-Americans were lost, but cultural influence persisted. You could make an argument that it was as important as anything for speeding along the very real political and social gains of the '50s and '60s.
That's what music has been good for, historically, in the black community. Jazz did that. It forced the mainstream to see black musicians as virtuosos with complex ideas and powerful (and recognizable) emotions. How are you going to treat someone as less than human, in any way, once they've been so deeply human in full view? Soul music did that, because it addressed universal romantic problems. Who has trouble identifying with a Smokey Robinson lyric? No one human, that's for sure. Hip-hop started from that premise. It was rooted there. It didn't shy away from the fact that America, built the way it was, made certain economic and social advances difficult for African-Americans, but it also made an entire community visible, impossible to ignore, impossible to dehumanize. Hip-hop, because of the way that it was made, because of what it was at its heart, blazed new trails and also recontextualized the past. Where other musics, like disco, were plastic to the point where they started to feel like factory product, early hip-hop was the perfect music for an era of flexible accumulation: fast on its feet, fleet with its thoughts. It could range and roam and shine a light into any corner of the culture.
Six weeks ago, at the beginning of this series, I opened with quotes from John Bradford, Albert Einstein, and Ice Cube. Between them, they sketched out their own version of this idea. Bradford talked about luck and providence (“There but for the grace of God go I”); Einstein talked about community (“spooky action at a distance”); and Ice Cube talked about appetite (“Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money”). Those three ideas outline a triangle, and inside that triangle are people reflecting on their own good fortune, recognizing that they’re connected to others, grappling with their own aspirations. Hip-hop has a responsibility to these ideas, and because of that, a responsibility not to fall victim to other ideas that actively obstruct them. This responsibility doesn’t fall to individual artists in a narrow way. There will always be artists who want to be shallowly materialistic or who permit themselves to be reduced to caricature. But the broader genre needs to balance them off with other kinds of artists, other perspectives, and there’s been a steady move away from that kind of balance for the last decade at least. Culture needs to struggle against meaninglessness and flattening. That's why it's vital that one of those sites of meaningless shouldn't be the culture itself.
These may seem like uncontroversial ideas — that art should, at some level, be about humanity, and that culture should, in some way, be a tool for fighting adversity. But any support for those ideas have to have better practices attached to them than the ones that have taken over hip-hop. People pick up on the ideas that pop culture puts down, so if one of those ideas is that only so-called winners get a platform, which they then use to talk more about their winning, that will seep into the groundwater. Contemporary hip-hop worries too much about the bottom line, which is lower than it's ever been. If you dive for it, you may find yourself stuck down there. And being stuck down there means mean fewer options for future artists, more investment in stereotypical portraits of hip-hop acts (some encouraged by the acts themselves), and less empathy all around. It’s important not to let this whole thing eat itself. It's more than important. It is, in a sense, everything.
I’ll end with two examples from the early '70s, around the time I was born, when soul music seemed as if it was largely fulfilling these responsibilities. In fact, if there’s one era in the history of popular music where community awareness and social contract seem secure, it’s the soul music of the early '70s. And yet, and yet. In 1972, after the success of What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye started an album of explicitly political songs in the vein of “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler).” The first track from that set, and the projected title track, “You’re the Man,” went after political candidates. If you have a plan, Gaye sang, then I’ll give you my vote, but you have to handle real problems: busing in schools, urban economics. The most piercing part of the song is a repeated spoken-word couplet:
Don't you understand
There's misery in the land
Gaye had different politics than Berry Gordy, and Gordy didn’t throw much support behind the “You’re the Man” single, which stalled mid-chart, after which the album was shelved. Two decades later, after Gaye’s death, tracks started to appear on compilations. Some of these were open-ended laments for society’s short-sightedness (“Where Are We Going?”); others were more specific arguments about the dangers of controlling others (“Piece of Clay”) or the hypocrisy of objecting to sex in the face of so many other kinds of social pornography, from poverty to violence to pollution (“The World Is Rated X”). The details may have shifted, but the core of Gaye’s argument remains intact. When we resist cultural acts that directly address the complexity of the human condition, both intellectually and emotionally, we reduce ourselves.
The second example is an extended quote from Bobby Womack. Is there any other kind? This particular quote is the monologue that preceded his 1971 cover of the Carpenters’ “Close to You.” In his rap, Womack doesn't talk about the complications of black cool, or the history of social responsibility in the arts. He focuses only on one aspect, which is the pressure of the market, and how it can both insidiously and obviously strip all meaning out of artwork, draining and demoralizing its artists by insisting they need to satisfy some impersonal notion of product. The fact of the matter, of course, is that Womack had no problem covering pop songs — he did it all the time, from “Sweet Caroline” to “Fire and Rain” — but he frequently added material up top or improvised to make the material more personal, more empathetic. As he goes through his monologue, Womack does exactly what he worries he isn't being allowed to do — he paints a full picture of himself as a thinking, feeling, suffering, achieving human, capable of irony and insight, impossible to reduce to a caricature.
Sittin' here sippin' on a glass of wine and I'm trying my best not to lose my mind. You know, thinkin' about the word. Heh, "commercial": That's a funny, funny, funny word! Ya know what's funnier than that? When show people use it. You know what I'm talking about, record companies, presidents, vice-presidents, producers — and a little ol' engineer. But, you know what? I feel, down in my heart, I don't care what it is. If I can get into it, it's commercial enough for me. But anyway, I remember a little while back, I walked into a recording studio with just me and my guitar. Heh. And I remember starting out on a song … sort of went something like this … well, it had the same melody, anyway. The head man called in, the president, vice-president, and just one of his producers, and an engineer. You know they all sit around with their heads dropped down while I was trying to get over. You could hear a pin fall. I know y'all know what I'm talking about. And I'm steady trying to get over. But anyway, after I got through doing my thing — or should I say, doing the best that I could — I’ll never forget what they told me. One of the cats got up and say, “I like you, and I ain't saying that you can't sing.” But as they all began to leave the conference table, they kept saying “But you're not commercial. No, you’re not commercial!" So, I went on out or, should I say, I sold out. But like I've said before, music is music, that's how it is — and that's the way it is. Well, I didn’t change my style because I still had the same heart but just like the man said, he said, “Bobby, it’s got to be funky.” I came back and said, “I want to sing something. I want to sing.”
And then he does.
Showing posts with label Questlove Essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Questlove Essay. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Questlove | Does Black Culture Need to Care About What Happens to Hip-Hop?
This is the sixth in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future. Read the first one Click Here, the second one Click Here, the third one Click Here, the fourth one here Click Here, and the fifth one Click Here.
It's time for the showdown. Get ready for the lowdown. We've come to the end of the road.
When I started this series of columns six weeks ago, I wanted to think through a series of issues: why the bulk of contemporary African-American culture has defaulted into hip-hop, why materialistic narratives seem to dominate the genre, what has happened to the concept of black cool, what increasingly anemic sales mean for both big stars and independent artists, and where all of this leaves us.
It leaves us here, in the sixth and final column, thinking about all these things. Sometimes when you think, you come up empty. But when I go back through this series in my mind, I come up so full that I’m not sure what to do next. Three decades plus into this exciting and vibrant genre, there are some serious structural problems that seem almost insoluble. There are times that I feel that the whole thing is perched on the edge of a cliff and time is about to push it off.
When I think that, I always find my thoughts returning to music. Not to music as an aesthetic category, but to music in the social sense. Music can be created by an individual or a group, but it is meant to be heard by others. It operated that way as ritual (in weddings and funerals, in wars and parades) long before it was ever preserved as a physical product, or sold as a commercial one. Music is something that happens between people. This is true for classical music or instrumental jazz, but it's true with one added dimension for a music like hip-hop, because it's narrative by nature. As a result, it's music between people that is also explicitly about people.
These are the basics. Let's color outside the lines a little bit. Sun Ra said that space is the place, but there's race in the space also. Hip-hop is inseparable from black America and black Americans, who are either creators or consumers or subject matter, or sometimes all three. Like it or not, it exerts a pull on the black community. It can pull us up or it can pull us down or it can pull us apart.
Does black culture need to care about what happens to hip-hop? Does it need a cultural force like hip-hop at all? I can't predict the future. If I could, I'd have put a bundle on California Chrome. But I can say that black culture has needed that historically. The famous black academic Charles S. Johnson, who was instrumental in the Harlem Renaissance, published a magazine for black Americans called Opportunity; its title sent a different message than W.E.B. DuBois's Crisis, but they were two sides of the same coin. Johnson thought (knew?) that the arts were important because black Americans were denied equal treatment in many other respects. The arts, he figured, could be a site of resistance.
Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society. After Johnson, after DuBois, the Harlem Renaissance itself stalled, largely as a result of the Great Depression, and many of the economic gains made by African-Americans were lost, but cultural influence persisted. You could make an argument that it was as important as anything for speeding along the very real political and social gains of the '50s and '60s.
That's what music has been good for, historically, in the black community. Jazz did that. It forced the mainstream to see black musicians as virtuosos with complex ideas and powerful (and recognizable) emotions. How are you going to treat someone as less than human, in any way, once they've been so deeply human in full view? Soul music did that, because it addressed universal romantic problems. Who has trouble identifying with a Smokey Robinson lyric? No one human, that's for sure. Hip-hop started from that premise. It was rooted there. It didn't shy away from the fact that America, built the way it was, made certain economic and social advances difficult for African-Americans, but it also made an entire community visible, impossible to ignore, impossible to dehumanize. Hip-hop, because of the way that it was made, because of what it was at its heart, blazed new trails and also recontextualized the past. Where other musics, like disco, were plastic to the point where they started to feel like factory product, early hip-hop was the perfect music for an era of flexible accumulation: fast on its feet, fleet with its thoughts. It could range and roam and shine a light into any corner of the culture.
Six weeks ago, at the beginning of this series, I opened with quotes from John Bradford, Albert Einstein, and Ice Cube. Between them, they sketched out their own version of this idea. Bradford talked about luck and providence (“There but for the grace of God go I”); Einstein talked about community (“spooky action at a distance”); and Ice Cube talked about appetite (“Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money”). Those three ideas outline a triangle, and inside that triangle are people reflecting on their own good fortune, recognizing that they’re connected to others, grappling with their own aspirations. Hip-hop has a responsibility to these ideas, and because of that, a responsibility not to fall victim to other ideas that actively obstruct them. This responsibility doesn’t fall to individual artists in a narrow way. There will always be artists who want to be shallowly materialistic or who permit themselves to be reduced to caricature. But the broader genre needs to balance them off with other kinds of artists, other perspectives, and there’s been a steady move away from that kind of balance for the last decade at least. Culture needs to struggle against meaninglessness and flattening. That's why it's vital that one of those sites of meaningless shouldn't be the culture itself.
These may seem like uncontroversial ideas — that art should, at some level, be about humanity, and that culture should, in some way, be a tool for fighting adversity. But any support for those ideas have to have better practices attached to them than the ones that have taken over hip-hop. People pick up on the ideas that pop culture puts down, so if one of those ideas is that only so-called winners get a platform, which they then use to talk more about their winning, that will seep into the groundwater. Contemporary hip-hop worries too much about the bottom line, which is lower than it's ever been. If you dive for it, you may find yourself stuck down there. And being stuck down there means mean fewer options for future artists, more investment in stereotypical portraits of hip-hop acts (some encouraged by the acts themselves), and less empathy all around. It’s important not to let this whole thing eat itself. It's more than important. It is, in a sense, everything.
I’ll end with two examples from the early '70s, around the time I was born, when soul music seemed as if it was largely fulfilling these responsibilities. In fact, if there’s one era in the history of popular music where community awareness and social contract seem secure, it’s the soul music of the early '70s. And yet, and yet. In 1972, after the success of What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye started an album of explicitly political songs in the vein of “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler).” The first track from that set, and the projected title track, “You’re the Man,” went after political candidates. If you have a plan, Gaye sang, then I’ll give you my vote, but you have to handle real problems: busing in schools, urban economics. The most piercing part of the song is a repeated spoken-word couplet:
Don't you understand
There's misery in the land
Gaye had different politics than Berry Gordy, and Gordy didn’t throw much support behind the “You’re the Man” single, which stalled mid-chart, after which the album was shelved. Two decades later, after Gaye’s death, tracks started to appear on compilations. Some of these were open-ended laments for society’s short-sightedness (“Where Are We Going?”); others were more specific arguments about the dangers of controlling others (“Piece of Clay”) or the hypocrisy of objecting to sex in the face of so many other kinds of social pornography, from poverty to violence to pollution (“The World Is Rated X”). The details may have shifted, but the core of Gaye’s argument remains intact. When we resist cultural acts that directly address the complexity of the human condition, both intellectually and emotionally, we reduce ourselves.
The second example is an extended quote from Bobby Womack. Is there any other kind? This particular quote is the monologue that preceded his 1971 cover of the Carpenters’ “Close to You.” In his rap, Womack doesn't talk about the complications of black cool, or the history of social responsibility in the arts. He focuses only on one aspect, which is the pressure of the market, and how it can both insidiously and obviously strip all meaning out of artwork, draining and demoralizing its artists by insisting they need to satisfy some impersonal notion of product. The fact of the matter, of course, is that Womack had no problem covering pop songs — he did it all the time, from “Sweet Caroline” to “Fire and Rain” — but he frequently added material up top or improvised to make the material more personal, more empathetic. As he goes through his monologue, Womack does exactly what he worries he isn't being allowed to do — he paints a full picture of himself as a thinking, feeling, suffering, achieving human, capable of irony and insight, impossible to reduce to a caricature.
Sittin' here sippin' on a glass of wine and I'm trying my best not to lose my mind. You know, thinkin' about the word. Heh, "commercial": That's a funny, funny, funny word! Ya know what's funnier than that? When show people use it. You know what I'm talking about, record companies, presidents, vice-presidents, producers — and a little ol' engineer. But, you know what? I feel, down in my heart, I don't care what it is. If I can get into it, it's commercial enough for me. But anyway, I remember a little while back, I walked into a recording studio with just me and my guitar. Heh. And I remember starting out on a song … sort of went something like this … well, it had the same melody, anyway. The head man called in, the president, vice-president, and just one of his producers, and an engineer. You know they all sit around with their heads dropped down while I was trying to get over. You could hear a pin fall. I know y'all know what I'm talking about. And I'm steady trying to get over. But anyway, after I got through doing my thing — or should I say, doing the best that I could — I’ll never forget what they told me. One of the cats got up and say, “I like you, and I ain't saying that you can't sing.” But as they all began to leave the conference table, they kept saying “But you're not commercial. No, you’re not commercial!" So, I went on out or, should I say, I sold out. But like I've said before, music is music, that's how it is — and that's the way it is. Well, I didn’t change my style because I still had the same heart but just like the man said, he said, “Bobby, it’s got to be funky.” I came back and said, “I want to sing something. I want to sing.”
And then he does.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
How Hip-Hop Failed Black America, Part II | Questlove
Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America, Part II
By Questlove
This is the second in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future.
What do people think of when they think about hip-hop? I don’t mean the technique of the music so much as its meaning. Technique is a limited part of any art form, really: how well Rapper X raps is important but not central. How devious or wonderful Producer X’s beats are can get you on your feet more quickly, but hip-hop isn’t an abstract sonic art form. It’s a narrative one. And what that means is that matter matters more than art. Or rather: what matters to art is its matter, what it’s about, the ideas it communicates to its audience. The other aspects serve it, but perfect performance and production of empty ideas can’t fake the fill. I hope this isn’t a controversial view. It shouldn’t be.
I’d argue that when people think of hip-hop, pretty quickly they think of bling, of watches or cars or jewels or private jets. They think of success and its fruits, and the triumphant figures who are picking that fruit. This linkage isn’t limited to hip-hop — all of American celebrity, to some degree, is based on showing what you can buy — but it’s stronger there. The reasons are complex, of course, but the aspirational strain in African-American culture runs all the way back to slavery days. Slaves couldn’t own property because they were property. When freed, they were able to exist politically, and also economically. Owning things was a way of proving that you existed — and so, by extension, owning many things was a way of proving that you existed emphatically. Hip-hop is about having things to prove you’re not a have-not; it works against the notion that you might have so little economic control that you would simply disappear.
But what are the haves that you might have? And are they the same haves that people had 10 years ago, or 20? You only have to wind the clock back a few decades to see how drastically this dynamic has changed.
Back in 1986, the group standing on top of the rap heap was Run-DMC, and after rising to international prominence, they released a song about one of their prized possessions. That song, of course, was “My Adidas.” Let’s take a look at how rap stars back in the '80s celebrated what they owned:
My Adidas
walked through concert doors
and roamed all over coliseum floors
I stepped on stage, at Live Aid
All the people gave and the poor got paid
It doesn’t take much scrutiny to see that this is an especially benign form of consumerism. For starters, it’s not about the shoes themselves, in the main. It’s about the group’s experiences on the way to stardom: the audiences that came to see them, the shows they headlined. And fairly quickly, it’s not about them at all — it’s about Live Aid, a benefit concert focused on making sure that “the poor got paid.” In last week’s column, Albert Einstein and I talked about spooky action at a distance, which I reimagined as a version of the social contract: what happens elsewhere also happens to you, and it’s hard to divorce yourself from other people’s circumstances, no matter how much you try. This is that same principle, an illustration of connection. It’s sole music: the shoes convey you to the spot where you can see the haves working on behalf of the have-nots.
But there’s something else, too. Think about the product that’s carrying the song along. It’s a little strange: It’s a German athletic shoe from Herzogenaurach, not Hollis, Queens. But it is also (or was also) part of the Run-DMC uniform: the terry-cloth Kangol hat, the warm-up suits. At the time, Run-DMC was counterprogramming the flamboyance of other hip-hop artists, who were dressing like they were still in the funk and disco eras, with furs and studded jackets. Run-DMC stripped it down, and in doing so, sold a new kind of cool. More to the point, they sold a cool that was accessible to their fans. You could buy Adidas and be in their club, which was a club that you wanted to be in.
What has changed? Well, back in Run-DMC’s day, hip-hop had winners and others, on a sliding scale, all the way down to artists who were making more modest local impact. Now, because of the radical contraction of the market and the reluctance of companies to invest in anything that’s not a sure bet, hip-hop has become almost exclusively about winners, big sellers who have already proven their muscle. And even those numbers are dwindling, to the point where the million-seller club these days contains almost no one — Jay Z, Eminem, Drake, Macklemore, and Kendrick Lamar. You could argue that there are artists a tick down who have more cultural cachet: the big example there is Kanye West, who has sold not quite 700,000 copies of Yeezus. But that’s a half-dozen artists, total, with any appreciable influence.
And what do those artists do? They celebrate themselves, just like the artists of a generation earlier. They talk about products that prop them up, just like the artists of a generation earlier. But what have the products become? Let’s look at one of the descendants of “My Adidas” — a song on Jay Z’s recent Magna Carta Holy Grail called “Picasso Baby.”
I just want a Picasso, in my casa
No, my castle
This is on the opposite side of the planet, ethically and socially, from “My Adidas.” It associates personal satisfaction with a product, but on an entirely different scale. I went to the mall the other day. They didn’t sell any Picassos. You can accuse me of a certain amount of humorlessness, and I’ll plead temporary insanity. But let’s look back into the lyrics. Jay Z isn’t just collecting art. He’s using the brand names of other famous painters to declare himself, by association, as an artist.
It ain't hard to tell
I'm the new Jean Michel
Surrounded by Warhols
My whole team ball
Twin Bugattis outside the Art Basel
Whereas “My Adidas” highlighted consumer items, “Picasso Baby” is all about unattainable luxury, fantasy acquisitions. Within the first ten words of the song, Jay Z ensures that no one in his audience can identify with the experience that he’s rapping about. He would never want to be in a club that would have you as a member. But this doesn’t offend his audiences. They love it. They want to be just like him so they can exclude people just like them. There’s an even more egregious (comic?) example, from Ace Hood, with his song “Bugatti.” I’ll quote the chorus.
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
Now I’ll quote a verse:
Niggas be hatin’
I’m rich as a bitch
A hundred K? I spent that on my wrist
Two hundred thousand, I spent that on your bitch
You and your model put that on the list
I don’t know exactly how much a Bugatti costs. Oh, wait: I’ve been told by my business manager that it costs Amused Laughter. Very few people I know, including several best-selling artists in various musical genres, can afford this item, which depreciates as violently as whiplash the minute it’s off the lot. Something about the song, though, creates an environment where I feel a twinge of shame admitting that. And I won’t even get into whether I can spend a hundred K on my wrist.
But what does it mean that hearing the song somehow makes me measure myself against its outsize boasting? For starters, it means that hip-hop has become complicit in the process by which winners are increasingly isolated from the populations they are supposed to inspire and engage — which are also, in theory, the populations that are supposed to furnish the next crop of winners. This isn’t a black thing or even a hip-hop thing exclusively. American politics functions the same way. But it’s a significant turnaround and comedown for a music that was, only a little while back, devoted to reflecting the experience of real people and, through that reflection, challenging the power structure that produces inequality and disenfranchisement.
Who’s to blame? It’s hard to say. Certainly, Puff Daddy’s work with the Notorious B.I.G. in the early '90s did plenty to cement the idea of hip-hop as a genre of conspicuous consumption. Before those videos, wealth was evident, but it was also contextualized, given specific character that harmonized with the backgrounds of the artists. Run-DMC had East Coast cool and cachet; Dr. Dre had West Coast cool and cachet. But Puffy had — and wanted to tell everyone he had — a different idea of power, an abstract capitalist cachet. His videos, and the image they projected, played as well in California as in New York, as well in Chicago as in Florida. It was a cartoon idea of wealth, to the point that specific reality no longer mattered. In literary terms, it was pure signifier. It would take him a little while to formulate that into a manifesto, but when he did, he hit it on the nose. “Bad Boy for Life,” in 2001, contained a line that says all that anyone needs to know about this strain of hip-hop: "Don’t worry if I write rhymes / I write checks.” Picasso, baby.
A few years back, there was a video on YouTube that featured the rapper Lil Boosie. It showed him counting out his money onto the pavement of a parking lot. You can see it here. I haven’t studied too much contemporary performance art, but whoever’s doing it — Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic — can’t be doing anything stranger than this. (You too, James Franco.) The money is a pure abstraction. Nothing is purchased with it — no goods, no services. It’s a series of symbols being thrown to the ground, one after the other. And as each one lands, the message gets stronger and stronger. You don’t have this money. You may never see this many hundreds. You don’t belong here.
The last stop on this train, at least for today, is the “Otis” video that Jay Z and Kanye West made to promote the hit single from Watch the Throne. In the video, which was directed by Spike Jonze, the two of them go to an industrial space and proceed to demolish a Maybach (another car, like a Bugatti, that no one can afford), after which they drive around the lot, four models in the backseat. What are they destroying with their hammers and their saws? The car? The idea of the car? The idea of the car in other videos? And what are they building as they destroy? The idea that they exist at a level where they can afford to discard something as valuable as the car? The idea that their cool transcends money and the things that it can acquire? The belief that art should always violate and remake consumer products? A hierarchy of image that somehow, strangely, privileges the human element? The car was eventually auctioned, and proceeds were donated toward the East African Drought Disaster. Spooky action at a distance.
This is the second in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future.
What do people think of when they think about hip-hop? I don’t mean the technique of the music so much as its meaning. Technique is a limited part of any art form, really: how well Rapper X raps is important but not central. How devious or wonderful Producer X’s beats are can get you on your feet more quickly, but hip-hop isn’t an abstract sonic art form. It’s a narrative one. And what that means is that matter matters more than art. Or rather: what matters to art is its matter, what it’s about, the ideas it communicates to its audience. The other aspects serve it, but perfect performance and production of empty ideas can’t fake the fill. I hope this isn’t a controversial view. It shouldn’t be.
I’d argue that when people think of hip-hop, pretty quickly they think of bling, of watches or cars or jewels or private jets. They think of success and its fruits, and the triumphant figures who are picking that fruit. This linkage isn’t limited to hip-hop — all of American celebrity, to some degree, is based on showing what you can buy — but it’s stronger there. The reasons are complex, of course, but the aspirational strain in African-American culture runs all the way back to slavery days. Slaves couldn’t own property because they were property. When freed, they were able to exist politically, and also economically. Owning things was a way of proving that you existed — and so, by extension, owning many things was a way of proving that you existed emphatically. Hip-hop is about having things to prove you’re not a have-not; it works against the notion that you might have so little economic control that you would simply disappear.
But what are the haves that you might have? And are they the same haves that people had 10 years ago, or 20? You only have to wind the clock back a few decades to see how drastically this dynamic has changed.
Back in 1986, the group standing on top of the rap heap was Run-DMC, and after rising to international prominence, they released a song about one of their prized possessions. That song, of course, was “My Adidas.” Let’s take a look at how rap stars back in the '80s celebrated what they owned:
My Adidas
walked through concert doors
and roamed all over coliseum floors
I stepped on stage, at Live Aid
All the people gave and the poor got paid
It doesn’t take much scrutiny to see that this is an especially benign form of consumerism. For starters, it’s not about the shoes themselves, in the main. It’s about the group’s experiences on the way to stardom: the audiences that came to see them, the shows they headlined. And fairly quickly, it’s not about them at all — it’s about Live Aid, a benefit concert focused on making sure that “the poor got paid.” In last week’s column, Albert Einstein and I talked about spooky action at a distance, which I reimagined as a version of the social contract: what happens elsewhere also happens to you, and it’s hard to divorce yourself from other people’s circumstances, no matter how much you try. This is that same principle, an illustration of connection. It’s sole music: the shoes convey you to the spot where you can see the haves working on behalf of the have-nots.
But there’s something else, too. Think about the product that’s carrying the song along. It’s a little strange: It’s a German athletic shoe from Herzogenaurach, not Hollis, Queens. But it is also (or was also) part of the Run-DMC uniform: the terry-cloth Kangol hat, the warm-up suits. At the time, Run-DMC was counterprogramming the flamboyance of other hip-hop artists, who were dressing like they were still in the funk and disco eras, with furs and studded jackets. Run-DMC stripped it down, and in doing so, sold a new kind of cool. More to the point, they sold a cool that was accessible to their fans. You could buy Adidas and be in their club, which was a club that you wanted to be in.
What has changed? Well, back in Run-DMC’s day, hip-hop had winners and others, on a sliding scale, all the way down to artists who were making more modest local impact. Now, because of the radical contraction of the market and the reluctance of companies to invest in anything that’s not a sure bet, hip-hop has become almost exclusively about winners, big sellers who have already proven their muscle. And even those numbers are dwindling, to the point where the million-seller club these days contains almost no one — Jay Z, Eminem, Drake, Macklemore, and Kendrick Lamar. You could argue that there are artists a tick down who have more cultural cachet: the big example there is Kanye West, who has sold not quite 700,000 copies of Yeezus. But that’s a half-dozen artists, total, with any appreciable influence.
And what do those artists do? They celebrate themselves, just like the artists of a generation earlier. They talk about products that prop them up, just like the artists of a generation earlier. But what have the products become? Let’s look at one of the descendants of “My Adidas” — a song on Jay Z’s recent Magna Carta Holy Grail called “Picasso Baby.”
I just want a Picasso, in my casa
No, my castle
This is on the opposite side of the planet, ethically and socially, from “My Adidas.” It associates personal satisfaction with a product, but on an entirely different scale. I went to the mall the other day. They didn’t sell any Picassos. You can accuse me of a certain amount of humorlessness, and I’ll plead temporary insanity. But let’s look back into the lyrics. Jay Z isn’t just collecting art. He’s using the brand names of other famous painters to declare himself, by association, as an artist.
It ain't hard to tell
I'm the new Jean Michel
Surrounded by Warhols
My whole team ball
Twin Bugattis outside the Art Basel
Whereas “My Adidas” highlighted consumer items, “Picasso Baby” is all about unattainable luxury, fantasy acquisitions. Within the first ten words of the song, Jay Z ensures that no one in his audience can identify with the experience that he’s rapping about. He would never want to be in a club that would have you as a member. But this doesn’t offend his audiences. They love it. They want to be just like him so they can exclude people just like them. There’s an even more egregious (comic?) example, from Ace Hood, with his song “Bugatti.” I’ll quote the chorus.
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
Now I’ll quote a verse:
Niggas be hatin’
I’m rich as a bitch
A hundred K? I spent that on my wrist
Two hundred thousand, I spent that on your bitch
You and your model put that on the list
I don’t know exactly how much a Bugatti costs. Oh, wait: I’ve been told by my business manager that it costs Amused Laughter. Very few people I know, including several best-selling artists in various musical genres, can afford this item, which depreciates as violently as whiplash the minute it’s off the lot. Something about the song, though, creates an environment where I feel a twinge of shame admitting that. And I won’t even get into whether I can spend a hundred K on my wrist.
But what does it mean that hearing the song somehow makes me measure myself against its outsize boasting? For starters, it means that hip-hop has become complicit in the process by which winners are increasingly isolated from the populations they are supposed to inspire and engage — which are also, in theory, the populations that are supposed to furnish the next crop of winners. This isn’t a black thing or even a hip-hop thing exclusively. American politics functions the same way. But it’s a significant turnaround and comedown for a music that was, only a little while back, devoted to reflecting the experience of real people and, through that reflection, challenging the power structure that produces inequality and disenfranchisement.
Who’s to blame? It’s hard to say. Certainly, Puff Daddy’s work with the Notorious B.I.G. in the early '90s did plenty to cement the idea of hip-hop as a genre of conspicuous consumption. Before those videos, wealth was evident, but it was also contextualized, given specific character that harmonized with the backgrounds of the artists. Run-DMC had East Coast cool and cachet; Dr. Dre had West Coast cool and cachet. But Puffy had — and wanted to tell everyone he had — a different idea of power, an abstract capitalist cachet. His videos, and the image they projected, played as well in California as in New York, as well in Chicago as in Florida. It was a cartoon idea of wealth, to the point that specific reality no longer mattered. In literary terms, it was pure signifier. It would take him a little while to formulate that into a manifesto, but when he did, he hit it on the nose. “Bad Boy for Life,” in 2001, contained a line that says all that anyone needs to know about this strain of hip-hop: "Don’t worry if I write rhymes / I write checks.” Picasso, baby.
A few years back, there was a video on YouTube that featured the rapper Lil Boosie. It showed him counting out his money onto the pavement of a parking lot. You can see it here. I haven’t studied too much contemporary performance art, but whoever’s doing it — Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic — can’t be doing anything stranger than this. (You too, James Franco.) The money is a pure abstraction. Nothing is purchased with it — no goods, no services. It’s a series of symbols being thrown to the ground, one after the other. And as each one lands, the message gets stronger and stronger. You don’t have this money. You may never see this many hundreds. You don’t belong here.
The last stop on this train, at least for today, is the “Otis” video that Jay Z and Kanye West made to promote the hit single from Watch the Throne. In the video, which was directed by Spike Jonze, the two of them go to an industrial space and proceed to demolish a Maybach (another car, like a Bugatti, that no one can afford), after which they drive around the lot, four models in the backseat. What are they destroying with their hammers and their saws? The car? The idea of the car? The idea of the car in other videos? And what are they building as they destroy? The idea that they exist at a level where they can afford to discard something as valuable as the car? The idea that their cool transcends money and the things that it can acquire? The belief that art should always violate and remake consumer products? A hierarchy of image that somehow, strangely, privileges the human element? The car was eventually auctioned, and proceeds were donated toward the East African Drought Disaster. Spooky action at a distance.
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