The day I met Jay-Z, my roommate and I tried to tell him that his 2001 album “The Blueprint” had changed our lives. I’d spent my summer and fall on the campaign staff of a candidate for county commissioner, and the connections I’d made led to an impromptu phone call from an organizer looking for volunteers for a Get Out The Vote event on the east side of Columbus in a predominantly black neighborhood the Monday night before Election Day. My fondness for the genre was already well known in the campaign’s inner circles—mostly due to the fact that when I had the office to myself I tended to invite the music of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur into the empty room. When the event coordinator called looking for help, my roommates and friends from home, Colin and Ace were only another phone call away.
The proposition of meeting Jay-Z was a no-brainer—between the three of us we could probably transcribe each and every song verbatim, and we’ve been known to start a lyric out of thin air just to make sure the other can finish it on command. And so in spite of their political apathy, they were both waiting on the front porch in campaign t-shirts ready to recruit volunteers when I pulled into my driveway. A few hours later, we were standing at the base of the stairs leading onto the stage that had been erected at the Martin Luther King Community Center, and were shocked to be able to greet Hova , Diddy (previously known as Puff Daddy), Mary J. Blige, and Beyoncé Knowles as they made their way around the blockade to greet fans after stumping for Barack Obama. After we exchanged our awkward and fumbling handshakes with Jay, we tried to call after him, hoping that he might sign the cover of the album that we felt had so monumentally altered our lives.
When I told my dad about my encounter with the best rapper alive he laughed, asking me how I felt a rap album had really changed my life and I found myself without a clear and definitive answer. And although my father isn’t adverse to hip-hop, he’d introduced me to Arrested Development early in my listening career when I stumbled across their greatest hits album in the CD holder in his car, I struggled with how I could explain this musical love affair to him. After all, what sort of resonance could songs like “Girls, Girls, Girls”, “Izzo”, and “Hola Hovito” have with me? I don’t sell drugs, have never lived in a housing project, have never threatened to end the life of anyone who called me out during lunch on a Tuesday and unfortunately, have never been able to wield the type of influence over women that apparently accompanies fame and stardom as a rapper. Clearly, translating a simple and unnamed affinity for the genre into a coherent response capable of articulating my relationship to the music is easier said than done.
***
The first time I heard “Peter Piper” by Run DMC I was hooked. It was October 2002, and I was sitting in my 4th period English class while the teacher, Ms. Reitman introduced our poetry unit. Considering the many ethnicities represented within the class, I think that she had decided to bridge the cultural gap between Yeats and her students with some fairly innocuous verses courtesy of America’s first mainstream rap group. Since I spent the first half of the day during my freshman year at an inner-city charter school in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, I typically arrived to English a few minutes late. On this particular day I walked into the concrete-walled classroom on the second floor, just as DJ Run was launching into his first verse, spitting cleverly conceived wordplays on fairy tales and the group’s own prodigious talents. And while our teacher used our foot-tapping to introduce us to poetic feet, quatrains, couplets and the like (who’d have thought Run DMC favored iambic pentameter?), she instilled in me something that has lasted far longer than whatever Shakespearean sonnet I eventually had to recite for a grade—from that point on, I’ve been in love with hip-hop.
But before I moved to Windsor, Connecticut, a suburb that ran right up against the city of Hartford when I was 13, I lived in Leesville, South Carolina, a rural town in the Carolina sandhills with a population just over 5,000 people, and the type of place where exposure to hip-hop was minimal. And while no middle school dance was complete without a bunch of prepubescent Dixie-bred kids trying to figure out just how to dance to the edited version of “Shake Ya Ass” by Mystikal, aside from the occasional radio friendly track, I’d never really heard rap before. Of course that’s not to say that I wasn’t aware of the genre, but rather that I had yet to be exposed to it in a way that lent itself to a deeper interpretation of the music, one that went beyond the condescension my mother would express when it came on the radio. The closest I came to what insiders, pants-sagging-white-kids, and radio hosts on Hartford’s very own Hot 93.7 would call the rap game was in fifth grade when I played on a town league basketball team dubbed the “Hot Boy$.” And let me assure you, there’s nothing like being the only nonathletic white kid on a team named after a New Orleans super group led by Lil Wayne ; not that I had any idea who he was at the time.
During my time south of the Mason-Dixon, I went to a public school with mostly white kids, a third of them well off and decked out in designer jeans and polo shirts from second grade on, others wore shirts from Wal-Mart or Goodwill and shivered in hand-me-down jackets at trailer park bus stops, and I fell somewhere in the middle. Most of the black kids, and the children of Mexican migrant workers, lived (quite literally) on the other side of the tracks, where the houses were a lot closer together, and satellite dishes more expensive than the cars in the driveway were how you kept up with the Joneses. Even if you lived in a somewhat racially diverse neighborhood like I did, odds are you weren’t in class with your friends from your street—only two black students were admitted into the “gifted and talented” track at Batesburg-Leesville Middle School. This type of de facto segregation didn’t always end in the classroom however, at recess, the suggestion that football teams be divided along racial lines typically went off without much of a hitch. It seems that sixth graders of either race were too busy trying to establish their athletic (and what else I wonder) superiority to actually move beyond the color lines and engage each other in some manner beyond gridiron dominance. Instead of seeing each other as a bunch of grade school kids, we divided ourselves along lines based on an arbitrary physical characteristic that should have had absolutely no impact on our interests, hobbies, or friendships. But for whatever reason, that’s just the way things had always been in a little rural town where the “skyline” consisted of chicken feed silos and church steeples. While some of my classmates grew up on golf courses and behind deer blinds, the rest of us often subsisted on cheese toast or canned ravioli for dinner and got our kicks on the cracked blacktops and drought stricken fields of long forgotten basketball courts and local parks. Even at ten years old, you were either in the club or you weren’t, a membership oftentimes dictated by your parents’ membership (or lack thereof) to the Ponderosa Country Club. You either came from old Southern money or you didn’t, and invitations to birthday parties and where you sat in the school cafeteria often seemed to uncannily reflect the social status dictated by a good ‘ol boy aristocracy.
It seems obvious then to state that my relationship with hip-hop hasn’t always seemed as natural as it does now. After all, how much could I expect to relate to the content of the music? Cash, bling, and hoes really had very little to do with my everyday life as a bookish twelve-year-old with an interesting predisposition to the Cosby Show and until I got to high school I’d been more familiar with Marshall Tucker than Marshall Mathers. Hip-hop struggled to find a place in my heart—and in a town whose biggest claim to fame is its status as host of the South Carolina Poultry Festival, an annual event held each Mother’s Day weekend, where headlining acts have included a chicken-calling contest, which I may or may not have entered, and audience friendly rock acts cut in the mold of another homegrown Carolina favorite, Hootie and the Blowfish. That type of worldview quickly changes following such a radical transplant; South Carolina still flies the Confederate flag over the Statehouse in Columbia, whereas Hartford celebrates Mother’s Day weekend with a raucous Puerto Rican pride parade, announced to the masses by blaring Spanish music, a stunning amount of Puerto Rican flags fluttering in the wind behind parade cars, and an unusually high number of infants being held out of windows for a Saturday.
***
During my junior year of high school I became friends with a Puerto Rican kid named Rolando Ortiz. Rolando was a big, tattooed, football player who lived with his mother, father, and three siblings in a falling-down house on Wilson Avenue, the last street in Windsor that served as the border between our town and Hartford. His father was a drug dealer who pushed coke, probably crack, and whatever else on the streets of Hartford’s shittier North Side neighborhoods. One day when I was over at Rolando’s house, I overheard a phone conversation in which Rolando, in Spanish, threatened to kill a man who had accosted his mother regarding a deal gone wrong with Rolando’s father. That same day, Rolando showed me the six-inch blade he kept in the drawer of his bedside table.
Another time we drove to visit his cousin in Hartford, who I learned on the way had just been released from prison after two years. As we drove through the projects in Rolando’s rusty Buick, we listened to Young Jeezy’s first album Thug Motivation 101, a series of anthems dedicated to the artist’s rise out of poverty through his success as a cocaine dealer. We pulled up the house in the late afternoon, and as I climbed out of the car I immediately regretted my decision to wear a pink button down shirt that day (a decision I have since regretted for unrelated reasons). We crossed the street, dodging the dozens of barefoot kids sharing bikes and throwing a football, and walked up the steps of the run-down tenement building. A few knocks later, a strung-out guy who couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds answered the door and pulled each of us into the standard one-armed handshake/embrace, his hands curiously burnt and calloused. He showed us upstairs, into Rolando’s cousin’s room, which consisted of a mattress on weathered hardwood floor and water damage in the ceiling. As I looked around at the decrepit apartment, at Rolando’s prison-hardened and tattooed cousin crying as they embraced, and at the still anonymous free-baser standing in the doorway, I was left wondering where the glory and excitement of the hood was hiding.
Later that week, Rolando moved into my house for the better part of the next month. We looked for part-time summer jobs together, and I tried to convince him to pursue a collegiate football career. Eventually Rolando gave in to the pressure of the streets of Hartford. He dropped out of our high school when he didn’t graduate on time, and last I heard he was strapped and pushing weight just like his old man. I haven’t seen him in over three years, and when he left, he took with him any disillusions I might have had about a life spent in darkened streets and dilapidated projects. As glamorous as some hip-hop videos might have made the struggle out to be, there was little luster in the image of a grown man crying on the edge of a soiled mattress, or in the sight of far-too-skinny children running barefoot amongst shards of broken glass, neglected and forsaken in an asphalt jungle.
***
One thing I’ve learned is that it is far from easy to accurately label or qualify hip-hop music. Hell, it’s nearly impossible to find a consensus among a group of say, three, regarding whether or not it’s even music in its own right. Fans and supporters might say that it’s a form of lyrical expression, one that often lends a voice to disadvantaged, minority, or urban life. Others might defend its musical value, based on its origins in other African and African American musical genres from tribal storytelling to jazz music. Some critics would argue that it isn’t even music, that it perpetuates racial tensions, advocates drugs and violence, or glorifies a life spent slinging dope and packing heat. And you know something? They’d be right. You could probably gift-wrap the globe with all of the record and CD covers of albums like N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton, or Naughty by Nature’s self-titled debut; featuring tracks calling for a violent resistance to and a disrespect for law enforcement or commending those living a lascivious lifestyle.
And in spite of all of the music and lyrics that incense parents worldwide, it wouldn’t be fair to assume that all rap merits self-imposed “earmuffs” by children any more than it would be fair to assume that America’s youth can’t discern for themselves when music, art, or literature are simply offensive or hold a deeper, perhaps more personal meaning. Sure there’s plenty of hip-hop that is nothing more than misogyny, violence, and drug use, but that’s not to say that there aren’t calls for a better world, encouragement to stay in school , and songs dedicated to young adults, and not just males, but females too, to take control of their futures and be somebody? Doesn’t it seem odd that high school art teachers will discuss the artistic value, if any, of a painting of a black Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung and surrounded by superimposed images of genitalia but music teachers don’t touch on rap? Why not have these conversations? Don’t we trust ourselves to know what’s right and wrong, when we’re being dumbed down and when we’re hearing/reading/seeing something that can inspire self-actualization, education, and motivation?
It should come as no surprise that the many of the same complaints people bring to the argument surrounding hip-hop were said about numerous transcendental musical artists ranging from Elvis to Bob Dylan to Janis Joplin. Are we really shocked to realize that the attacks against the style, presentation, and content of hip-hop music stir echoes of controversies generated by groups like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Lynryd Skynrd, or Queen? People have always railed against forms of expression that didn’t conform to their worldviews, their sets of values, etc. and they will undoubtedly continue to do so. The government censors hip-hop now, but how happy can we assume Richard Nixon was that guys like Neil Young and Paul Simon were coming through the speakers of millions of young Americans in the 1970s? Of course something may need to be said in drawing these comparisons—these guys were all white. But it’s not my intention to make this a strictly racial issue. For all of the Sistah Soulja moments over the last x-number of years, the culture gap that exists between hip-hop and the mainstream is based on a lack of understanding, not on some unbridgeable racial chasm. Hip-hop music is about experience, about where the artist is from and what they represent as a voice from their upbringing, community, rung on the socioeconomic ladder, etc. Perhaps even more so, it’s about where the listener is from, and about how their own personal experiences can relate to the content and subject matter of the music.
Not everyone is going to understand and relate to the appeal of Public Enemy, because not everyone has experienced or witnessed some of the injustices they decry in their songs. And while it’s never the listener’s fault when they decide to turn off the radio or change the station because they don’t appreciate the use of profanity in music, it’s likely those listeners are simply overlooking the crux of the argument—they still have the right not to listen… Just like these artists have the right to try and make themselves heard. Somehow, we continue to get caught up in debates over content that are taken entirely out of context. If Eminem raps about a psychotic fan who kills himself and his wife in his song “Stan” or rebuke’s middle America’s calls for censorship in another many members of the public go through the all too familiar motions that involve letters to Congress or protests outside of performances, rather than not only defending free speech but respecting what the artist might have come to say. Taking the time to listen between the obscenities might reveal a deeper subject matter and maybe it won’t. Oftentimes the foul and vulgar language used in hip-hop is simply there for the sake of being exactly that, and other times it might just be present in a vernacular and colloquial sense. But it is not beyond reason to suggest that the hip-hop’s obscenity can be incredibly relevant, conveying the strongest forms of emotion, particularly anger, resentment, and distrust. Hip-hop is just as full of calls for putting an end to domestic violence and teen pregnancy , as it is filled with club-bangers written and recorded for the sole purpose of getting young women to “Back That Ass Up.” But an artist commenting on the federal government’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina, or criticizing the handling of the Jena 6 trial, should be afforded the same type of and opportunity for expression that earned John Mellancamp critical acclaim for his 2008 album “Love, Death, and Freedom.” The problem arises when the Cougar or Harry Connick Jr. have to come to the defense of the very people who have been trying to assert themselves the entire time but have been disregarded for a plethora of illegitimate and ill-conceived rules and reasons.
***
The last thing I would be able to write is that all rap music is quality music. God knows it’s not. There will always be hacks in hip-hop, just as there are in any genre. For every revolutionary MC like Notorious B.I.G, Jay-Z, or Nas, we are sure to discover and subsequently endure the presence of a Soulja Boy on the radio, or to find ourselves contemplating the artistic value of a song like “Baby Got Back.” Aside from comedic relief, these artists bring very little to the table in the way of musical or artistic expression, and undermine what little credibility more talented hip-hop artists might have earned in the mainstream. If a song breaks into the Billboard Top 40, and its lone subject matter is nothing more than an arguably disgusting sexual act , its quite probable that instead of drawing attention to an important issue or celebrating a cultural achievement , the perpetrating artist is really just whoring his or herself out to ignorant listeners who have caught onto a dance they’ve made up to make their song seem innocuous enough to get on MTV. Then again, maybe they’re just benefitting from the system, and the joke’s on white kids everywhere when we get tricked into making asses of ourselves on TRL.
Amid the wealth of ridiculous and laughable material that makes it into the mainstream solely for entertainment value, it’s easy to lose sight of hip-hop’s value as a means of literary expression and experimentation. Many artists view themselves not just as musicians but also as writers, using their talents to provide a voice for their communities. Whether they’re addressing serious issues or simply making music for their listeners to enjoy (imagine that!), rappers employ the many of the same techniques orally that writers do through literacy. By keeping their voices in the music, rappers create works that express collective ideals and beliefs that may not be prevalent in other more traditional means of expression. When you move past the gaudy videos, scantily clad women, and profanity laced lyrics, you can often uncover incredibly clever wordplay, creative adaptations of sampled songs, genuinely new and inventive lyrical styles and even positive messages for America’s youth. Contrary to what much of Middle America might think, hip-hop isn’t all guns and drug dealing, although plenty of that abounds. Just like any “legitimate” musical artist or author, good rappers bring a purpose and a message to their music ; it’s up to the listener to work hard enough to find it. After all, if we continued to rail against everything we had ever deemed to be obscene (a judgment that usually relies on a lack of understanding and perspective), Ulysses would still be banned in the United States because lawmakers refused to approve such a provocative work for publication and Tipper Gore and the FCC would have made sure that nobody ever heard “Purple Rain.”
***
The more I’ve thought about my unlikely fondness for hip-hop the more I’ve started to realize that it comes down to sharing a common bond. When my family moved from South Carolina to Connecticut, I went from one very different environment to another. In South Carolina, the things that many of my fellow classmates shared were rooted in our surroundings. They played Little League, ran around in the acres of woods behind our houses, and watched wrestling together. Those of us who were less inclined to religiously follow the rivalry between the WWF and NWO, or did not belong to the same Methodist church as everyone else, found ourselves on the outside looking in. In Connecticut, I attended a high school where I was a member of the minority. I played basketball and football, and generally found myself immersed in a very different group of friends than the wealthier white kids that had formed the “in” crowd at my former school. It was only natural for my tastes to begin to shift towards rap music because it enabled me to relate to other students through a common interest. It wasn’t because I wished I could live the kind of life depicted within their rhymes, but rather the songs were a source of conversation, whether we thought Kanye West had revolutionized the genre with “College Dropout” (he did) or who we thought was coming out ahead in the Jadakiss and 50 Cent beef. It didn’t matter that I talked with a funny Southern drawl, or that I hadn’t spent my entire life down the street from these kids. In fact, I was good as long as I could sit down at the lunch table and answer why yes, I have heard 50’s new single and yes, by god you’re right, it is most definitely the shit. It wasn’t that I had to know what rappers were rhyming about through personal experience, only that I could live vicariously through lyrics about fast cars and faster women, that I could see a part of the world I’d never known through the radio, and that once in awhile, I could insert a clever joke regarding a friend’s mom into a freestyle battle.
No matter how much we all came to love hip-hop, it never convinced us that it would be glamorous to go to prison just because Shyne recorded an album over the phone, and it wasn’t any cooler that half of my friends lived in the projects just because Jay-Z grew up poor in Brooklyn. But it did become cool to play up how ridiculous it was that your final AP project was turning Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle” into a recorded rap song , to act like your 1986 Mercedes Benz station wagon was the most “baller” (aka “cool” for the adults out there) car on the block, and to spend the next two months after we watched “8 Mile” freestyling with each other when we slept over at each others houses. For all the controversy and criticism that surrounds rap, the music didn’t turn us into gangbangers or criminals, didn’t encourage us to try any drugs (other than weed, although we probably would have done that anyways), or even teach us to assume that the only way to get out of the “hood” was drop out of high school and start rapping, dancing, or playing basketball. We never participated in a drive-by (although we did throw jelly donuts at cars from the top of an old movie theatre), and we never really got in trouble with the cops outside of lighting off fireworks outside the dorms at the elite prep school on the other side of the Farmington River. Hip-hop simply gave us an opportunity to hang out and enjoy music together, providing a perfect soundtrack for our high school years.
***
Over the last seven years since I “got into the rap game”, I like to think that I’ve refined my tastes quite a bit, and that hopefully, I can spot the good music when I hear it. For what it’s worth, Tupac Shakur is the greatest rapper of all time, and Outkast and the Fugees don’t get nearly enough respect. If you’ve got the time, look up Blue Scholars on the Internet, and while you’re at it, download Nas’ album “Illmatic”. Don’t believe the hype about Lil Wayne (he’s just high on prescription cough syrup, its not really genius coming out of his mouth), know that the Roots are as musically talented as anyone, and hopefully after you listen to “Definition” by Talib Kweli and Mos Def there’s no way you won’t be able to see at least one rap song as a legitimate form of literary expression. Chris Rock once joked that he likes hip-hop because “whatever music is popular when you start getting laid is the music you’re going to listen to for the rest of your life”. And while I don’t think that’s entirely true, hip-hop has become the definitive music of America’s youngest/this author’s generation.
Hip-hop has exploded onto the popular scene over the last twenty years, with the most successful rap artists selling more albums than rock icons Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, or Elton John. It’s transcended racial boundaries, evidenced by the fact that well over two-thirds of rap albums are purchased by white listeners. It’s moved beyond being a fun and playful genre defined by pioneering acts like the Sugarhill Gang and become an active force in political and social activism. It’s given a voice to racial tensions, social inequalities, poverty, and drug abuse in the same way rock and roll gave a voice to my parents’ generation. What we listen to now, like it or not, has been and will continue to be an enduring part of our written history, one that speaks from a unique vantage point, and one that should not be ignored. Good hip-hop, like any art has the ability to entertain, educate, and inspire, regardless of age, race, or ethnicity. It’s encouraged political participation, increased public awareness of important issues, bravely addressed problems like the crack epidemic, teen pregnancies, and gun violence, and on top of all of that, it introduced twenty white, black, and Puerto Rican kids to the rhythm and meter of English poetry. So if we can get past the stuntin’, trappin’, hustlin’, and flowin’, past all of the commercialized/over-sensationalized/subsequently trivialized blather that inhabits hip-hop just like any genre of music, literature, or whatever, we might just be lucky enough hear what hip-hop fans like to call “real shit”.
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