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Monday, January 30, 2012

Video More on the State of Hiphop

Posted by Charles Mudede on Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 11:54 AM

The death of democratic hiphop.

I wrote this two weeks ago:

The strange thing is this: Mainstream hiphop was not always dominated by Jay-Z types, the big exploiters of black male precariousness. It was much more democratic in its composition. Recall Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." ("Who you calling a bitch?") was a huge hit and a part of mainstream hiphop discourse. The death of this democracy began when Tupac and Biggie Smalls turned hiphop over to corporate interests, which essentially saw a huge white market for black males who exploited their precariousness. Recall that insightful scene at the end of The Cotton Club. What are the choices for a black male in this society? To dance or the underworld. Gangster rap makes one of the two.

With gangsta rap you had something of an autocatalytic process: Black males exploiting their exploitation for their exploiters and for those who are exploited like them (keeping it real). That has been rap since 1997. Furthermore, democratic hiphop went underground and cultivated (in both senses of that word) a predominately white audience. Whites got the best of hiphop and blacks were stuck with the worst. (It's important to point out that hiphop for blacks was beneficial when there were "Potholes in My Lawn" and "Gangsta Gangsta" in the hood—both tracks were released in 1988, both were in groundbreaking and commercially successful albums.)

If you think I was making this stuff up, then watch Beyond Beats & Rhymes, a doc about black masculinity and Bush-era hiphop:

The real achievement and wonder of early hiphop is that it was democratic at all. Considering the unrelenting racism, violence, and socially imposed poverty black Americans experienced in the inner city, one would have expected hiphop to begin and end with a 50 Cent. But what happened instead, what hiphop revealed with its staggering diversity, its multivocality is that black humanity was not crushed by 500 years of systematic white oppression—an oppression that, in the 70s, was intensified by the neoliberalization of the welfare state and deindustrialization of the inner city. It took instead white record executives to make this humanity (hiphop democracy) invisible. This process began around 1993, and was completed by 1997.