[rumori] ''Stakes Is High'' from The Nation


From: Art McGee (amcgeeATfreeshell.org)
Date: Tue Jan 07 2003 - 13:21:02 PST


Art McGee thought you'd be interested in this article from The Nation.

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   'Stakes Is High'
   by Jeff Chang

   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 white, 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.

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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030113&s=chang

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