JEFF CHANG
NEW WORLD ORDER
Hip hop had blown out of its niche into the
mainstream. It suddenly seemed difficult to remember a time when youths of
color had not been represented in the media, whether as consumers or producers.
But just as hip-hop was now crucial content for the consolidated media, media
consolidation also affected hip-hop's content. Women in hip-hop lost the most.
During the late 1980s, videos had been a boon to women rappers. Queen Latifah, for instance, presented herself in the Fab 5 Freddy-directed video for "Ladies First" as
a matriarch, military strategist and militant. Others – Salt-N-Pepa, MC Lyte, Roxanne
Shante – established their own personalities, equals
alongside their male peers. A decade later, successful female artists like
Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill were the exceptions
rather than the rule. Scantily-clad dancers seemed in
endless supply, while women rappers were scarce. Big money clearly had a
distorting effect.
At the same time, hip-hop feminism emerged in the work of writers and poets
like Joan Morgan, Toni Blackman, Rha Goddess and
dream hampton, offering a loyal but vocal opposition
to hip-hop's ubermasculinity. Hip-hop feminism's
musical counterpart was not in rap but in the so-called "neo-soul"
movement, a genre opened up by Elliott and Hill, Mary J. Blige,
Meshell Ndegeocello, Jill
Scott, and Erykah Badu, that put the groove back into
the music and the love back into lyrics. Emblematic of the shift was Angie
Stone, who had been a female rap pioneer in The Sequence, and now returned to
the limelight as a singer.
In one sense, "neo-soul" was a clever marketing strategy, invented by
Motown exec Kedar Massenburg
to package R&B artists that he had discovered, including Badu, India.Arie and D'Angelo. In time,
the artists themselves would disavow the term, a reflection of their
sensitivity to the fickleness of the market and the cycle of cool. But neo-soul
also created space for voices to dissect the masculinist
attitudes and ideals projected in the hip-hop mainstream. Badu sang, "The
world is mine. When I wake up I don't need nobody telling me
the time."
There was an unstable mix of Million Woman March-styled self-empowerment and
AIDS- and gangsta-rap-era self-defense in the music,
perhaps best epitomized by Hill's hit "Doo Wop (That Thing)." In
these songs, critiques of hip-hop and patriarchy came together. Jill Scott
imagined reconciliation, no longer having to love hip-hop from a distance. On
"Love Rain," she sang 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
ended badly: "All you did was make a mockery of somethin'
so incredible beautiful. I honestly did love you so." If hip-hop had
dominated discussion of the crisis of gender relations with a boys' locker-room
point of view, neo-soul responded with the sista-cipher.
Neo-soul's hip-hop feminist critique came into sharp relief in 2001. After
years of flying high, rap sales crashed by 15 percent, leading a music
industry-wide plunge. But newcomers Alicia Keys and India.Arie
were honored with a bevy of Grammy nominations, and embraced by millions of
fans. 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" – took joy in
flipping the music that had once been sampled for Akinyele's
deez-nuts ode, "Put It in Your Mouth." On
"Fallin," Alicia Keys wove the chords of
James Brown's "It's a Man's World" into a complicated examination of
a relationship. In her video, it became a symbol-laden examination of black
love – the man caught in the prison-industrial complex, the woman torn between
loyalty and leaving.
The questions raised resonated far beyond the fraught
issues of gender: what did it mean to "keep it real" anymore? What
did it mean to be true to something when that something had changed? Could one
preserve any kind of individual agency or did one have to ride with the new
flow of exploitation?
Identity was on sale. Brands had become sophisticated. During the 2001 holiday
season, the Modernista!-designed
Gap ads sold a single line of clothes by using different artists as stand-ins
for different niches: Sheryl Crow for the VH1 lifestyle, Seal for the SUV
lifestyle, Liz Phair for aging indie-rockers, Robbie
Robertson for aged arena-rockers, India.Arie for
urban hipsters, Shaggy for urban players.
Media monopolies favored
artists who did not merely produce hits, but synergies of goods. In this new
corporate order, a song could become a movie could become a book could become a
soundtrack could become a music video could become a video game. Here was the
media monopolies' appropriation of dub logic, profits stacking up with each new
version.
The biggest artists were brands themselves, generating lifestyles based on
their own ineffable beings. Sean "P-Diddy"
Combs leveraged himself across music, film, television and high fashion. Jay-Z
peddled movies, clothing, shoes and vodka. Once the journey of cool had made
the complete circuit from the artist to the mall, the artists had to reject
what they had created, and reinvent themselves. In Jay-Z's case, the ultimate
reinvention would be retirement, as if to recognize that excessive branding and
positioning had prematurely exhausted the possibilities of art.
The cycle of cool was the oldest hip-hop story ever told. Busy Bee had
influenced his followers, like a young Run DMC, to wear bugged-out, geek-chic,
plaid-striped suits. Run DMC then commanded their black-on-black sporting
audiences to throw their white Adidas shelltoes in
the air, branding-on-top-of-branding. The difference was in scale. At the turn
of the century the hip-hop generation was now at the center of a global
capitalist process generating billions in revenues. "We're survivalists
turned to consumers," rapped Talib Kweli.
Just as brands developed their niches, each niche, in turn, came with its own
set of brands. "Political rap" was defanged as "conscious
rap," and retooled as an alternative
hip-hop lifestyle. Instead of drinking Alize, you
drank Sprite. Instead of Versace, you wore Ecko.
Instead of Jay-Z, you dug the Roots. Teen rap, party rap, gangsta
rap, political rap – at the dawn of hip-hop journalism these tags were just a
music critic's game. Now they had literally become serious business.
What materially separated Jay-Z from a rapper like Talib
Kweli? The answer was in the marketing. Media
monopolies saw Jay-Z as an artist with universal appeal, Kweli
as a "conscious rapper." A matter of taste, perhaps, except that the
niche of "conscious rap" might be industry shorthand for reaching a
certain kind of market – say, college-educated, iPod-rocking, Northface backpacking, vegan, hip-hop fans. In this
late-capitalist logic, it was not the rappers' message that brought the
audience together, it was the things that the audience bought that brought the
rappers together.
So Talib Kweli faced the
uniquely thorny problem of the "conscious rapper." "Once you put
a prefix on an MC's name, that's a death trap,"
he said. When he unveiled a song called "Gun Music" – a complicated
critique of street-arms fetishism – his fans grumbled he wasn't being conscious
enough. At the same time, Kweli worried that being
pigeonholed as "political" would prevent him from being promoted to
the kids who loved Jay-Z. In fact, Jay-Z had cut anti-war and anti-police
brutality raps. But by the turn of the century, to be labeled a
"conscious" or" political" rapper by the music industry was
to be condemned to preach to a very small choir.
Christgau's old-school observation – that hip-hop
exploitation had layers of complication – had boomeranged back.
[This excerpt of Jeff Chang's book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (St. Martin’s Press, 2005) is taken from the chapter "New World Order."]