Despised and rejected by the Haters... but HHIG

Hip-hop under the cultural microscope
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, February 1, 2009
BY RICK MASSIMOJournal Pop Music Writer
-->-->Brown Prof. Tricia Rose is the author behind The Hip-Hop Wars.
The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo
-->
Nearly 15 years after her first book about hip-hop music and culture, Brown professor Tricia Rose saw the music skyrocket in popularity and permeate the entire American landscape. But she also saw the music getting weaker and the cultural conversation about it getting less and less informed.
“As the genre declined,” she says in an interview, “so has the conversation.”
So she got back to work. The result is The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop — and Why It Matters (Basic Civitas, 286 pages, $15.95), a book that tracks and deconstructs the main cultural attacks and defenses against the music that has grown to dominate the pop landscape.
It’s not just about the music, Rose writes: The cultural conversation about hip-hop touches on questions of commerce, community and especially what Rose calls the nation’s “racial Achilles’ heel,” and the opportunity is there to tear down walls or build them ever higher.
Rose’s first book, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in America, was an academic treatise that “really argued for the political salience of the genre, and the aesthetic significance,” Rose says. But almost as soon as it was published, she perceived hip-hop — at least, the commercial hip-hop that gets played on the radio and that sells the most records — as going downhill.
“Not that I don’t like good party music, because I do,” Rose says. “But I really think it’s declined in social value, in aesthetic value, because it’s pandered to stereotypes about African-Americans: hypersexuality, hyperviolence, gangster thugs.”
As the music went from the raucous, raunchy and righteous swagger of groups such as Public Enemy and Eric B and Rakim, through the explicit nihilism of Snoop Dogg and NWA, to today’s ghetto-fabulous styles by Nelly and, well, Fabolous, Rose says she didn’t see a well-informed debate about what was happening to hip-hop and what to do about it.
Conservative commentators such as Bill O’Reilly, as well as some middle-class African-Americans, began attacking the genre and its most popular practitioners beginning in the mid-’90s. “[Hip-hop] by itself won’t bring down civilization but it doesn’t help,” former secretary of education William Bennett is quoted in the book as saying. “He is not an artist; he is a thug,” O’Reilly says of Ludacris.
Rose didn’t find the quality of the responses in defense of the genre very inspiring either: Mainly, she says, they were limp defenses of free speech that tried to deny a relationship between what we read, hear and see and what we do.
So The Hip Hop Wars has chapter titles such as “Hip Hop Reflects Black Dysfunctional Ghetto Culture,” “Hip Hop Causes Violence” and “Hip Hop Is Destroying America’s Values” on one side, and “Just Keeping It Real,” “There Are Bitches and Hoes” and “We’re Not Role Models” on the other, along with Rose’s takes on the weaknesses of each argument.
Rose then details the mistaken assumptions that she believes the poles of the struggle have in common (a lack of regard for hip-hop’s artistic potential, a lack of true regard for the concerns of women), lays out the case for a progressive critique of hip-hop — one that respects and encourages the strengths of the genre while highlighting the traps that it can fall into — and tries to “kind of unpack what the fights are about,” she says.
“We’ve let the conservatives control the cultural demand space. They’ve just been demanding ‘stop stop stop; shut it down.’ So we’re always saying ‘whatever,’ ‘it doesn’t matter,’ ‘freedom of speech.’ We’re not asking the other questions. Maybe there should be a third way to break this up.”
In the chapter “Hip Hop is Destroying America’s Values,” Rose points out the seemingly obvious fact that African-Americans are Americans, that their values, positive or otherwise, are American values.
“The conservatives think hip-hop is destroying America’s values,” she says. “It’s the worst of America’s values — some of America’s values. The worst of individualism: Get mine. Once money’s the end, there’s nothing else.”
In the chapter “We’re Not Role Models,” Rose dissects the definition of a role model, making clear both the distinction between role modeling and positive behavior modeling, and the fact that everyone is a role model for someone, whether they want to be or not: “We can’t primarily celebrate dog-eat-dog street-level capitalists who are ready to exploit others for their own survival and then expect that the embrace of this philosophy won’t undermine the quality of how we treat each other,” she writes.
She also asks, in response to the assertion “Just Turn It Off,” “How can you turn off one video by, say, The Ying Yang Twins but turn it back on for one by Talib Kweli or Common? You’d have to be a psychic to know when the videos that take the art of hip hop and the importance of community seriously are going to be aired.”
Hip-hop was treated like a poor cousin in the music business — popular, but nothing to really get excited about — until about 1991, when SoundScan, the automated system of tallying record sales, made the Billboard charts sound a lot more like the reality. That was a watershed moment for hip-hop (as well as metal and country), and the corporations moved in.
But when they did, they refracted the hip-hop community through the lens of the gangsta rap that was selling at the time. “You have fans who want that,” Rose says, “and when corporations see it, then they exaggerate that and prime the pump.” And now commercial hip-hop is dominated by what Rose calls the Holy Trinity: the gangster, the pimp and the ho.
Despite the autobiographical boasts of the rappers, that wasn’t a realistic picture of the black community then, and it isn’t now. And the record labels were selling this distorted image of black life (which, perhaps not accidentally, fed into negative stereotypes about African-Americans) mostly to white kids. Rose says that dynamic is “kind of like the Harlem Renaissance all over again: ‘Let’s get some ghetto excitement.’ … and that’s still the fascination.”
Except it’s worse now, Rose says, because in order to get some ghetto excitement kids used to have to actually go to those neighborhoods, interact with the people there and maybe learn something. “Now it’s total mediated blackness. And it’s not just about white kids. Even middle-class black kids have to represent the hood. Or they’re not authentically black.”
On the other hand, artists didn’t help the situation by feeding into the stereotypes.
“I respect Jay-Z,” Rose says. “I think he’s very talented. I think his range of storytelling needs to be expanded a bit, so he can show me all his talent. But everything he says is not exactly true,” she says of the multimillionaire entrepreneur with a couple of misdemeanors on his record who wrote “From the dope spot with the smoke Glock/ Fleein’ the murder scene,” in “Hard Knock Life.”
She says her students at Brown, where she teaches Africana studies, often don’t grasp that: “‘No, you don’t understand, Professor Rose; you don’t get it. He’s from Marcy Projects!’,” she says, recounting a conversation. “I’m like, ‘I’m from the Bronx; it’s really OK. I really do get this, but everything he says isn’t true, son. He’s an artist, have you heard about that?’ … We want to make room for Lupe Fiasco and Jean Grae and especially women artists, who have been completely crushed in this.”
Rose points out in the book that this sky-is-falling critique happens every time black music reaches crossover (i.e., white) popularity. It happened with jazz; it happened with blues; it even happened with rock ’n’ roll. It seems even more virulent this time around, though, because hip-hop is even more in the commercial mainstream than swing and jazz were. “It just feels like it evaporated into the commercial space,” she says.
Rose says that the strongest reaction to the book so far has been positive feedback from “the progressive margins” of the hip-hop world: “People who, if they say anything against hip-hop, they get put out. I don’t have anything to lose. I don’t get paid by hip-hop. And I think that’s important. It’s one of the small values of being an academic.”
Hip-hop’s most virulent critics haven’t weighed in on the book yet, Rose says — perhaps because their arguments get plenty of space in the book: “Of course I take them apart most of the time, but I say ‘Of course what we consume matters.’ It’s a silly thing for the super-left — and I count myself among them — to claim that it just doesn’t matter what we consume. Because if that’s the case, bring back Amos ’n’ Andy; bring back the coon shows. Why fight it?”
Sitting in AS220, in Providence, Rose explains that hip-hop-loving young people such as The Rhode Show — AS220’s youth rap collective — are the people she most hopes to reach. “They’re doing one of the critical things that hip-hop does: really give voice to kids’ experiences, and make real music,” she says, and her message to them is “ ‘Here’s the way out of this ridiculous constant defensive stupidity.’ Because they’re trapped into silence. They don’t want to be the right wing, but they also don’t want to accept the idiocy. So they’re just quietly trying to do their thing. And that’s not enough. You can’t do your own thing against the machine. You’ve got to do a little more than your thing.”
The fantasy, Rose says, is that the book will take root among young fans, who will then “begin to change what’s acceptable.”
In the book, Rose says that getting this right is crucial: “If we continue to talk about black people and race generally in near-parodic terms, our nation will not overcome its racial Achilles’ heel.”
And sitting in AS220, she explains that the artists have a job to do, too.
“It matters that we make things that, at least at their core, articulate a love of community. And by that I don’t mean ‘We shall overcome’ or ‘Let’s all get along.’ We can say ‘[expletive] you’ all day long. But in a way, for a purpose, at a time, in a specific way. Not in the aim of constant separation and dissolution and destruction. Because there is a crisis. I know we don’t think that in the era of Obama, but there really is a crisis.”
rmassimo@projo.com