Can't Stop Won't Stop (66 page)

Black advertising agencies were also being forced to retool. Noticing that Black-targeted advertising budgets had begun to decline, industry leaders like the $60-million Mingo Group began to push for “urban marketing.” The idea had come from Black radio, which, during the ‘80s, had shifted to describing itself
as “urban radio,” a transparent ploy, Nelson George writes, “aimed as much at Madison Avenue as at Black listeners.”
⁸
“Urban” still signified “crossing over,” but in the ‘90s, the process reversed. Back then, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson sold a softened “urban,” moving up and out from the ghetto, from afro-picks to Alfa Romeos. Now hip-hop sold a hardened “urban,” drawing back in to the ghetto, from Sperry Topsiders to Nike Dunks.

What was a concession to white corporate interests in the suites during the 1980s was a recognition of the new racial dynamics in the streets of the ‘90s. Now the word “urban” described how cultural change was emerging from cities like New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, where young Blacks seemed to initiate style shifts and a cohort of hip, multiracial youth spread them. Or perhaps the process was reversed. “You go to a city like Philadelphia, which is largely Black, or Washington, or New York for that matter, and wonder who's driving social changes,” said Mingo Group head Samuel J. Chisholm.
⁹

The emerging leaders of the rap industry were often whites comfortable and conversant with a nonwhite world. Monica Lynch, who ran Tommy Boy's operations, was a feminist ex-go-go dancer with a canny eye for urban style and a golden ear for leftfield acts. Dave “Funken” Klein,
The Source
columnist, left Def Jam to start the first globally minded hip-hop label, Hollywood/BASIC, where he plucked artists from Zimbabwe and England, and signed seminal acts like Organized Konfusion, Peanut Butter Wolf, and DJ Shadow. Dante Ross was a Lower East Side red-diaper-baby-turned-skate-punk who had grown up with the Bad Brains and the Beastie Boys. Ross was the first hip-hop A&R to leave the indies for a major, jumping from Def Jam and Tommy Boy to join rock-oriented Elektra Records. There, he championed Afrocentric rappers like Brand Nubian, KMD, Leaders of The New School, and Pete Rock and CL Smooth, against hostile Black R&B execs still caught in an ‘80s idea of what it meant to be “urban.”

Five years after Michael Jackson, then the still unreconstructed King of Pop, broke the color line at MTV, white production assistant Ted Demme brought a concept for a rap video show to MTV heads. Dozens of local shows, led by Ralph McDaniels and Lionel Martin's Video Music Box in New York City, had attracted strong followings, and the cable, pay-request Video Jukebox (later “The Box”) channel had expanded its rap videos on offer. Demme thought the time was right for a national show. The
Yo! MTV Raps
pilot debuted on August
6, 1988, with Fab 5 Freddy as host. Within months it was the network's most-watched show.

MTV added former WBAU DJ and Original Concept leader Andre “Dr. Dre” Brown and radio host Ed “Ed Lover” Roberts as additional hosts, and gave
Yo! MTV Raps
daily airings. Within a year, MTV had gone from almost no rap videos to twelve hours of rap programming.
¹⁰
Urban style no longer trickled up from multiracial networks of cool, but was instantly available via remote control to vanilla exurbs where teens were adjusting to lowered life expectations. Fab 5 Freddy understood what those kids liked about it. “People identify with rap,” he told a
Time
reporter. “You feel that you can look like that, that you can be a part of it immediately.”
¹¹

At Tommy Boy Records, Lynch and her boss, Silverman, realized that they were not in the record business anymore, they were in the “lifestyle” business. They diversified into clothing, designing brand-name gear and partnering with lines like Carhart and Stussy that hip-hoppers had already made popular on the street. A decade before, hip-hop sold Absolut vodka, Williwear clothing, Swatch watches, even Honda automobiles. But few then thought hip-hop was anything but a passing youth fad. Now it was clear that hip-hop was not only selling $400 million dollars worth of records a year, but hundreds of millions of dollars worth of other products—shoes, jeans,
haute couture
, soda, beer, liquor, videogames, movies and more. In marketing terms, hip-hop had become the urban lifestyle.

At the end of 1992, as Los Angeles still recovered from the riots, ex-NWA producer Andre “Dr. Dre” Young dropped
The Chronic
. Television had brought middle America closer to a generation's rage than ever before, and Ice T had brought media multinational Time Warner closer to the establishment's rage than ever before.
The Chronic
seemed a heaven-sent balm.

Dre and Snoop's videos for “Nuthin' But a ‘G' Thang” and “Let Me Ride” drove the album beyond triple platinum. Dre was finally moving on up—out of Compton and into the Valley, not far from Eazy E's and Jerry Heller's mansions—closer to the growing fanbase. In a strange, somewhat disquieting way, Dre and Snoop had become reassuring, as if their presence now signified that the difference
between the ghetto and the exurbs needed not be measured in social indicators but in degrees of cool.

The formula for
The Chronic
had not been all that different from the formula for
Efil4zaggin
. But the riots had changed mainstream reception. Before then, “Lil' Ghetto Boy” and “The Day the Niggas Took Over” might have garnered most of the critical attention, while the third single, “Dre Day”—a brutal dis of Dre's former partners, Eazy E and Ice Cube, but interestingly, not Jerry Heller—may have stirred outcry.
¹²
Instead, Dre's songcraft, rather than his sociology, was now the focus. He was hailed as Spectorian in his pop majesty, and “ ‘G' Thang” and “Let Me Ride” were celebrated as all-American music, compared to the endless summer vibes of the Beach Boys an The Mamas and The Papas.

The irony was that these songs clearly spoke to the outbreak of gang peace and the truce parties, the ecstatic sense of freedom of being able to drive down the street without worrying about cops or enemies. Just as the gang peace movement desired to mainstream hardcore bangers into civic society,
The Chronic
wanted to drive hardcore rap into the popstream. It could be heard as as guiltless, gentrified gangsta—no Peace Treaties, rebuilding demands, or calls for reparations, just the party and the bullshit. The video for “ ‘G' Thang” seemed to ask: didn't all boys everywhere just want to bounce in hot cars to hotter beats, hang out with their crew, party all night, and spray conceited bitches with malt-liquor?

In 1993, the popularity of
Yo! MTV Raps
was fading, and majors were clearing their rosters of potential political liabilities. But “Nuthin' But a ‘G' Thang” and “Let Me Ride” propelled the post-gangsta aesthetic into heavy rotation. Later, on
Doggy Style
, Dre and Snoop largely ditched the inner-city blues for more smoothed-out roughness and gangsta parties, and sold even more records.

Artistically,
The Chronic
and
Doggy Style
were remarkable achievements because they synthesized contradictory vectors—inner-city and suburbs, street and tech, First World and Fourth, like a Gehry building covered in graffiti. But these albums also distilled a shift in corporate thinking, a growing conviction that these massive paradigm shifts—demographic change, broadcast to niche, whiteness to post-whiteness, the rise of the “urban”—were not such a bad thing after all. Hip-hop offered a way this elusive generation could be assimilated, categorized, made profitable.

The disposable could become indispensable. The Black thing you once
couldn't understand had now become the G thang you could buy into—the chronic, the crip walk, condoms, ConArt, Chevrolet, Pendleton, Zig-Zag, Seagram, Remy, Hennessey, Tanqueray, Desert Eagle, Dogg Pound, Death Row. Here was the short-lived post-truce freedom recast as the sweet sound of rapsploitation and a new corporate multiculturalism:

Rollin down the street smokin indo

Sippin on gin and juice

Laaaid back

With my mind on my money

And my money on my mind

Now that corporations were climbing aboard the urban, multicultural gravy train, what would happen to cultural desegregation? Historian Robin D.G. Kelley and scholar Vijay Prashad believed that the idea of “multiculturalism” had been co-opted by the state and capitalism. During the ‘80s, multiculturalists had pushed for inclusion and representation. But post-
Chronic
corporate multiculturalism reinforced backward notions of identity. Kelley coined the term “polyculturalism” to try to revive a radical vision of integration.

Polyculturalism built on the idea that civil society did not need Eurocentrism or whiteness at its core to function. In the real world, cultures layered, blended, and sounded together like the polyrhythms of a jazz song or a DJ riding the cross-fader. In its truest sense, this kind of integration could lift everyone. But urban marketing threatened to confer the trappings of integration while preserving the realities of segregation and inequality. So rap's big crossover set off paroxysms of self-examination in the hip-hop nation.

In a much-discussed essay in
The Source
called “We Use Words Like Mackadocious”, white Chicago graffiti writer William “UPSKI” Wimsatt ripped on the sudden influx of what he called “wiggers” into hip-hop culture that the success of
The Source
and
Yo! MTV Raps
had made possible. “One day the rap audience may be as white as tables in a jazz club, and rap will become just another platform for every white ethnic group—not only the Irish—to express their suddenly funky selves,” he wrote.

Wimsatt followed the article with a book entitled
Bomb the Suburbs
, and, in its perceptive rage over race and generation, it became an instant classic. “The suburbs is more than just an unfortunate geographical location, it is an unfortunate state-of-mind,” he began. “It's the American state-of-mind, founded on fear, conformity, shallowness of character and dullness of imagination.
¹³

“I say bomb the suburbs because the suburbs have been bombing us for at least the last forty years. They have waged an economic, political and cultural war on life in the city,” he wrote. “
Bomb the Suburbs
means let's celebrate the city. Let's celebrate the ghetto and the few people who aren't running away from it.”
¹⁴

Here was the idea of the “urban” addressed with a thorough-going optimism. Hip-hop separated from marketing imperatives was still something his generation could control and define. Suburbanites could unite with ghetto-dwellers. Whites could learn to respect Blackness, not merely consume it. Wimsatt, the militant dreamer, wanted a world that was not just polycultural, but postwhite.

Wimsatt appealed to the highest aspirations of the hip-hop generation: intellectual honesty, independent-mindedness, principled realness. Wimsatt self published
Bomb The Suburbs
and hawked it by hand to Blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians on subways and in the streets as he criss-crossed the country, selling 23,000 copies. To him, hip-hop nationalism was about staying true to yourself and your peers, backing up your words with your life.

If the city street was hip-hop nationalism's mythical wellspring, the college campus was its hothouse, the hub of the local underground. In the ‘60s, during the long economic boom, the youths had marched. In the ‘90s, with the bleakest prospects since the Depression, the youths got creative.

Around nearly every college radio station, a hip-hop underground popped up—supporting energetic enterprising networks of radio shows, b-boy, MC and DJ battles, poetry slams, cafés, clothing stores, indie record labels, and hip-hop zines. By the mid-'90s, these networks were vibrant and thriving. At national conferences like the Gavin Convention, Jack the Rapper, or How Can I Be Down, mixshow and college radio DJs, street promoters, and hip-hop journalists got organized. Grass-roots groups like the Bay Area Hip-Hop Coalition became
a model for underground radio DJs, influencing national radio playlists and press coverage, and propelling grassroots artists into the mainstream. Independent music distribution networks, particularly in the South, generated million-dollar-grossing artists and labels.

Inspired by the do-for-self energy, hip-hop journalism exploded. Some zines, like
The Bomb, Flavor, Straight From the Lip, Divine Styler, 4080, Stress, On The Go,
or
One Nut Network,
were basically bedroom projects handed out to industry insiders or sold in specialty record, graffiti, skateboard and clothing stores. Others, like
Rap Sheet, URB, The Kronick,
and
Ego Trip
began as free newsprint offerings. Some featured high-end design and edgy content, but all offered low-cost ads that attracted the new pool of major-label promo capital and, more important, local, independent start-ups, including clothing lines, record labels and club and rave promotions. Especially after
The Source
dumped its regional reports, these local magazines proliferated. Some, like
URB, Rap Sheet,
and
Rap Pages
works become newsstand sellers. Through their content and their commerce, they helped to consolidate the local scenes.

So while hip-hop's crossover had created new problems, there was also a sense that bigger opportunities than anyone could imagine awaited. Hip-hop had reached the point where it was ready to flow out of its niche into the mainstream. The only question left was whether reaching market potential and fanning potential militancy could remain consonant goals.