Whatever You Say I Am Page 15

  Public Enemy wound down after member Professor Griff’s anti-Semitic remarks in 1989 (Jews were “responsible for the majority of wickedness around the globe”) did irreparable damage to the group creatively and publicly. The thirst for shocking, hardcore rap was soon to be quenched by West Coast gangsta rap. Over party-hearty James Brown and Parliament/Funkadelic samples, gangland storytelling equated social consciousness with a glorified view of the outlaw reality that has dominated hip-hop since the nineties.

  Gangsta rap celebrated ghetto outlaw tales, both real and imagined, stories of men thriving by their own design in the face of every conceivable obstacle. In the early eighties, Kool G Rap, Too short, and Ice-T personified the stance that would become gangsta, but it was Andre “Dr. Dre” Young’s musicality that perfected it and, like Run-D.M.C., connected with the masses. Whereas East Coast acts such as Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions relied on a dense, pounding musical backdrop, Dr. Dre melded his noise collages to a deep, rolling funk. Dr. Dre’s earlier work, on tracks such as “Express Yourself,” from N.W.A’s landmark Straight Outta Compton, followed producer Eric B.’s (of Eric B. and Rakim) style of mining James Brown for a new generation, yet to an altogether different end. Dr. Dre and his associates in N.W.A—Ice Cube, Eazy-E, MC Ren, and DJ Yella—upped the ante on scaring the system. Chuck D had called for revolution and had criticized society, but N.W.A stood for chaos. Without reflection or talk of consequence, their songs celebrated the harassment of women, drunk driving, drug selling, and shoot-outs with cops and rivals. In 1988, Straight Outta Compton, largely driven by the megaphoneblast shock value of the single “Fuck Tha Police,” went platinum with absolutely no major radio airplay or support from MTV. The FBI deemed the group’s image as threatening as terrorism: As sales of Straight Outta Compton added up, N.W.A’s record company, Ruthless, and their parent company, Priority Records, were sent letters from the Bureau that warned that the group should tone down their act. At the same time, N.W.A’s runaway sales perked the ears of corporate music executives who would soon craft stars in their image, as the group launched a legacy that defined popular rap music into the next century. It was a sign of things to come, and a reminder to any who hadn’t noticed, that an excess of sex, violence, and money in entertainment connects with Americans.

  When Dr. Dre formed Death Row Records with notorious executive Suge Knight in 1992, the West Coast “G-Funk” style became an empire. Death Row artists such as Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur dominated the hip-hop and pop charts in the early and midnineties with the hedonistic, romanticized nihilism of gang life, drug dealing, misogyny, and murder. Images of West Coast house parties, vintage low-rider cars, and gang-banging “homeboys” who ruled the neighborhood from the comfort of their mom’s house flooded MTV, at which point it was absorbed by teens in suburbs all over the country. White kids in the Midwest and elsewhere connected with the rebellion even if they didn’t understand its roots, musically or socially. What they did was imitate its style and dance to its groove immediately. Across the country, suburban teens of all races, and a greater majority of young whites than ever, relished the music’s tantalizing danger; they soon dressed, spoke, and attempted to party like gang members from Compton, California. Hollywood reflected the gangsta takeover, too, sending up films that depicted the treacherous reality of West Coast ghetto life, such as Boyz ’N the Hood (1991) and Menace II Society (1993), as well as those that made light of it, such as Friday (1995), the weed-fogged comedy starring Ice Cube, and the ghetto-themed horror movie Tales from the Hood (1995). As the decade tipped toward its second half, “thug life,” like the motto tattooed across Tupac Shakur’s torso, became an institution, a vision of living above the law without consequences; a vision shattered when art spilled into reality and the nineties’ two brightest stars, Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G.), were gunned down in separate incidents that remain unsolved mysteries. But gangsta rap, as it is most commonly known, began with Dr. Dre, who drove mainstream hip-hop—some say for the worse, some say for the best—into lewd, visceral territory: a cross between the insane reality comedy of Richard Pryor and the violent decadence of Brian De Palma’s Scarface.

  The Chicago Sun-Times writer Jim DeRogatis regards Dr. Dre as responsible for a decade of mediocre rap that has stifled the art form. “I think Dre is perhaps the most overrated producer in rock history,” he says. “I don’t think that musically Dre has ever been the genius people say he is. I think it’s bubblegum—big, stupid, dumb, simple hooks. And that’s okay, but I listen to De La Soul, Gang Starr, and Eric B and Rakim and the innovations that were inherent in hip-hop pre-N.W.A’s Niggaz 4 Life. I chart it all back to that album in 1991. Every single element of the Eminem formula—the same formula Dre has used to sell a billion records since 1991 were all there in Niggaz 4 Life. That record had memorable ditties like ‘find ’em fuck ’em and flee,’ ‘she swallowed it,’ ‘to kill a whore,’ and ‘yo bitch, hop in my pickup and suck my dick up until you hiccup.’ Hip-hop, to me, has betrayed the boundless artistic possibilities in the music and been mired in a gangsta rut ever since. It’s a shame.”

  “There is certainly innocent hip-hop and then there’s gangsta—and there’s a whole range of expression included there,” says author Shelby Steele. “Gangsta rap has something to do with the fracturing of the black family that began to be very serious in the seventies and eighties and has continued. It has something to do with the attitudes, it has something to do with life in the underclass. There seems to be a painful alienation there, between men and women, individuals and society. It’s an anti-innocent culture. It does not allow for innocent expressions of love back and forth, you know, the way Motown did with all the ‘ooh baby baby.’ It suggests that innocence will get you hurt, get you wounded. So it seems to me to be in many ways emotionally defensive, and there’s an undercurrent of alienation. You have to remember that seventy percent of black kids are illegitimate. Black women get married at half the rate of white women, and get divorced at twice the rate of white women. That suggests an adolescence that is much, much more alienated than the one I knew. To me it’s ridiculous to criticize hip-hop because it is an outgrowth of a very real change in the culture. It’s just telling us what is there, whether we like it or not, and it’s not a very attractive picture.”

  The deaths of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur brought another picture into focus: the side effects of mythologizing thug life and death. Their murders marked the decline of gangsta rap: Dr. Dre had left Death Row Records to form his own label, Aftermath Entertainment, in 1996, and Suge Knight’s criminal management tactics landed him in jail. Countless rappers have borrowed from 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G.; many, such as Ja Rule, profited more, as Eminem says in “Marshall Mathers” on The Marshall Mathers LP, and have all of the dollars that belong to Biggie and 2Pac, as if they had switched wallets. Violence, gunplay, and the drug game never disappeared from rap, but the flagrant celebration of it took a backseat as if rappers learned from 2Pac and Biggie that boasting could turn bloody and lyrically obsessing about your death could deliver it to your door. At the same time other hardcore rappers were eager to fill the void, they were also careful not to follow in Biggie’s and 2Pac’s footsteps too closely.

  Toward the end of the century, the Wu-Tang Clan, DMX, and Jay-Z took the helm of what came next: a diverse range of hardcore rap view points—from the Five-Percent-Nation-of-Islam-inflected, martial arts- and mathematics-obsessed rap of the Wu-Tang Clan to the spiritual gangster tales of DMX. The upside of gangsta rap—high living—became the focus, mythologized and exaggerated as guns and murder had been. On MTV and BET, for all intents and purposes the strongest outlets for nonurban youth to access popular culture, the hedonistic spoils of the game were celebrated to the fullest. Gangsta became synonymous with ostentatious consumption, the be-all and end-all of rap life. Violence, guns, and death were never far behind, in lyrics and reality, but it was as if rappers chose to accentuate
the positive and reiterate what it was all for: the money. A display of power was no longer made by a street soldier’s lyrical cold-blooded killing, it was asserted through boasts of popularity, wealth, and style befitting a kingpin. Puff Daddy epitomized the new gangsta, who preferred to be tough only in reputation, while dressing, rapping, and playing for success with mainstream America. Rappers spit rhymes that tied Chanel to Prada while hubcap-size diamond pendants hung around their necks; they sipped Cristal champagne like they once drank malt liquor, or mixed it with Kool-Aid like Mannie Fresh of the Cash Money Records crew does; block parties moved down to Miami’s Ocean Drive as rappers opined about freaky sex on ecstasy, hot tubs, motorboats, motorcycles, Mercedes, and more words for money than ever before.

  At the same time that hip-hop dominated late-nineties pop music with diamonds, parties, and accessible dance-floor anthems, independent record labels such as Rawkus and Quannum fostered an alternative to this overt materialism: back-to-basics innovation. Rap fans gravitated to their artists’ simple, decidedly low-fidelity production aesthetics and diverse sensibilities. There is the raw, rugged stomp of Pharoahe Monch, who scored a hit in 1999 with “Simon Says,” to the versatile, soulful production and remix work of DJ Spinna. Rawkus and the “backpacker scene” (dubbed for the casual, no-frills backpack, sweatshirt and baseball hat attire that was typical of the fans and artists) were the antithesis to Bentleys and Cristal, an alternative that in 1999 and 2000 seemed on the verge of changing millennial hip-hop. In New York, Rawkus Records dominated the East Coast wing of the scene on the strength of a string of influential releases. Rawkus was a struggling label with no clear identity until it signed Company Flow, a three-man rap collective from Queens. Backed by the production work of El-P, short for El-Producto (born Jaime Meline), Company Flow revitalized the hip-hop underground with a series of twelve-inch releases, starting in 1992. Their dense abstract lyrics, irregular yet funky beats, and spacey ambiance brought an experimentalism back to the genre that in 2002 made its way into the mainstream, echoed in the herky-jerky syncopation of songs such as Missy Elliott’s “Work It.” But in 1995, the members of Company Flow worked day jobs to fund an EP on double vinyl, Funcrusher (1996), which sold a successful thirty thousand copies. The group was soon courted by several record labels, but the fledgling Rawkus was the only one to accept their demands: Company Flow maintained ownership of their recordings, received 50 percent of the net royalties, and were not tied to a multialbum contract. Company Flow kept their freedom, Rawkus earned credibility. The label signed Mos Def (born Dante Terrell Smith), Talib Kweli (born Talib Greene), and Cincinnati, Ohio’s Hi-Tek (born Tony Cottrell) as the collaborative Black Star in 1997, a trio that preached a halt to the negativity in rap by echoing the self-awareness and freedom of mind in the teachings of legendary black activist Marcus Garvey. Black Star similarly harped on Afrocentric unity, resonating the style and consciousness of the Native Tongues collective in the eighties. When Black Star’s eponymous debut was released in 1998, they were lauded by critics and fans as the next coming of hip-hop.

  I’m on a mission and my mission won’t stop: Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre in 1993.

  On the West Coast, a group of artists, most of whom met at the student radio station of the University of California at Davis, formed the Solesides-Quannum collective. Solesides began as DJ Shadow (Josh Davis), Blackalicious (includes Gift of Gab, a.k.a. T. J. Parker, and Chief Xcel, born Xavier Mosley), Lateef the Truth Speaker (Lateef Daumont), and Lyrics Born (Tom Shimura); Lateef and Lyrics Born also recorded as Latyrx. The Solesides crew, like some of the bright lights in the Rawkus family, were a mix of a fractured, funky, stream-of-consciousness aesthetics and rich, old-school rap. Through the nineties, first on Solesides Records, then on Quannum Projects, these artists made eclectic, quality rap music that, like that of their East Coast counterparts in Company Flow, did not catch on until the decade headed to a close.

  At the time, artists on labels like No Limit, Cash Money, and Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy Records would sell a million records on the reputation of the label and the sound the label was known for, which often eclipsed the performers’ abilities. At the height of No Limit Records’ popularity, kingpin Master P could literally have put out an album by your mother and watched it sell one million copies. By contrast, underground acts with limited means relied on talent. Eminem came up with a solid class of battle MCs in the late nineties: J.U.I.C.E., Supernatural, Chino XL, Xzibit, Thirstin Howl III, as well as Detroit’s Royce Da 5′9″ and Proof. Some of these names have made it. Some, like Supernatural, are more the stuff of legend.

  But the late-nineties underground hip-hop scene, even at its most innovative, focused on a return to basic, straightforward rap: looped grooves and MC skills first and foremost. Rap battles and ciphers—lyricists passing the mike from one to the other—hadn’t disappeared, but had become a staple of underground parties. An MC’s credibility depended on how well he could captivate a room on the spur of the moment, not on his clothes, clique, or cash. Competitions where MCs would take each other down with prepared and improvised verses, as in the final scenes of 8 Mile, were the building blocks of a rapper’s reputation.

  The golden age of gangsta rap and the late nineties underground are the two influences at play in Eminem, a convergence of the hardcore sensibility with a rhyme style born of a diverse, MC-centric scene. Eminem first heard rap music when his uncle Ronnie Polkingham, who was just a few months older than Eminem, played him Ice-T’s “Reckless” from the soundtrack to the 1984 film Breakin’. Eminem grew up break-dancing, listening to LL Cool J, Run-D.M.C., and the Beastie Boys, and began writing his own rhymes in his early teens. He performed at local talent shows and at school functions in groups with names such as the New Jacks and Sole Intent. As he continued writing, performing, and consuming rap, Eminem found his way into the heart of Detroit hip-hop, and when he turned his skill to a different end, accomplished locally what performances alone could not.

  “Eminem started out just doing shows,” Proof says. “He was doing local little high school shows, like at Center Line, the high school in Center Line, Michigan. They had a lot of them there. He wasn’t really a battle-rapper. That was more my forte. I did it because I enjoyed it. I clung to it because I was more of a freestyle artist. Em was focusing on constructing songs. He was a genius at it then and he still is now. But what he had to battle for was credibility. Battling solidifies your street credibility as an MC. You don’t go talking about killing motherfuckers in your songs to gain credibility in the street. Most people are homing in on your skills, ‘Can he rap? Can he flow?’ Em is an extraordinary rapper and he was doing extraordinary things with his songs then, too. But it didn’t matter; he had to earn that credibility in battles. Now, everybody is doing battles, dropping verses about each other the way Jay-Z and Nas have been doing. Back then it wasn’t really happening that much with that level of artists.”

  There is a well-documented history of popular artists battling for supreme boasting rights on record, with songs aimed at each other and popular opinion as the judge, that has come in and out of vogue. LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee (formerly of the Treacherous Three) went at each other ceaselessly in the late eighties over who stole whose rap style. 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. taunted and accused each other over a series of songs and, though the tradition cooled following their deaths, it has returned with gusto: Jay-Z and Nas have lobbed lyrical shots at each other since 2001 and an animosity between Dr. Dre and Eminem’s Shady Records and Aftermath camps and the Murder Inc. family of Ja Rule and Irv Gotti, in part inspired by 50 Cent, grew into another theater of conflict in 2003. These recorded battle tracks and their renewed popularity bring the tradition to the radio waves—literally. New York’s Hot 97 set up a battle of the beats during which Nas and Jay-Z’s tracks were played back to back and listeners phoned and faxed in their votes for the winner (Nas was victorious, with 52 percent of the vote over Jay-Z’s 48 percent). Battle competitions are more popular th
an ever, occupying more time on MTV and BET as well as inspiring more regional and national events sponsored by a variety of hip-hop entities, from magazines to coalitions of labels and promoters, than just a few years ago. The verbal warfare so well-captured in 8 Mile will do nothing but further the trend.