Can't Stop Won't Stop (69 page)

Branding everything: P-Diddy at play in the New World Order.
Photo © Kevin Winter/Getty Images

 

 

Every truth ain't evident

Every slave story present tense

Every uprise a consequence

—Boots Riley, The Coup

Pre-millennium tension came early to the hip-hop generation.

In the mid-1990s, the talk in Five Percent street ciphers and Zulu Nation study sessions was of the New World Order. The time of Revelations seemed imminent. The sound—Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep, Outkast, Company Flow—fit the mood, claustrophobic and swarming. Youths trooped through the cities in camouflage jumpsuits and combat boots and called each other “souljahs.” Street-side book vendors from Harlem to Atlanta to Oakland did brisk business with alt-histories like Howard Zinn's
People's History of the United States
and Ward Churchill's
The COINTELPRO Papers
, and mysterious tracts like
The Illuminati 666, Secrets of Freemasonry
, and
The Unseen Hand
.

This particular miasma of dread had been unleashed by President George Herbert Walker Bush's peculiar phrase, “new world order,” used in speeches meant to justify U.S. military action against Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Communist threat was fading and the president was mobilizing against new enemies. In January 1991, as fighters screamed toward Baghdad and police forces drew down on American ghettoes, Bush said, “We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.”

To the street soldiers, that future presented itself, as Atlanta's Goodie Mob would put it, as one of “cell therapy,” a lockdown nation. On their skin-crawling
1995 single, Bush's one-world “rule of law” was connected with resistance-destroying addictions and military-trained assassins, social conformity numbers and computer chip implants, nighttime paratroopers and black helicopters, gated projects and concentration camps.

Conspiracies were a shorthand for grasping the astonishing pace of change: school closures and skyrocketing university tuitions, the rise of youth curfews and sweeps and urban zero-tolerance campaigns, Big Brother technology and racial profiling, a prison-building boom and soaring incarceration rates. The Goodie Mob looked at these developments and concluded Bush's enemy really was
them
. “Time is getting shorter,” Cee-Lo warned. “People, if we don't get prepared it's gon' be a slaughter.”

Every street soldier carried a copy of M. William Cooper's
Behold a Pale Horse
, the survivalist's bible. It was a strange match. Cooper was a white radio broadcaster and a hero of the right-wing Patriot movement. When his end came, he did not die on his knees. One of the two Apache County sheriffs who came to his mobile home to arrest him on November 5, 2001, received a bullet in the head. The other shot Cooper dead on the desolate stretch of Arizona desert where he lived with his shortwave radio, two dogs, a rooster and a chicken. Cooper may have written his book for high-plains tax protestors and free-land patriots, but the book found a willing readership on the streets.

What made Cooper so compelling to rural white militiamen and ghetto youths of color alike? His worldview grafted post-COINTELPRO conspiracy onto New World Order paranoia.
Behold a Pale Horse
, which reportedly sold hundreds of thousands of copies, was like an overstuffed folder—five hundred pages of autobiography, news clippings, photos, Congressional legislation and allegedly top secret transcripts and memoranda meant to document the creation of a malign, shadowy one-world government and its efforts to enslave the masses. Armageddon was already here, Cooper was saying.
Behold a Pale Horse
was your late pass
and
your lesson plan.

Large portions of Cooper's “proof” were just the same old thing. Cooper offered up the old saw,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, with strange instructions that “any reference to Jews should be replaced with the word ‘Illuminati'; and the word ‘goyim' should be replaced with the word ‘cattle.' ”
¹
But for the street soldiers,
Behold a Pale Horse
affirmed their realities like no other media would.

When Cooper argued that drug-war legislation and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency Act was laying the foundation for the suspension of the constitution and the permanent establishment of a police state, it was just a different version of Farrakhan's message. In the ‘hood, state pressure certainly could feel a short step away from martial law.

Cooper spoke of CIA ops that smuggled drugs into the ghetto to finance covert political operations. In 1996, newspaper reporter Gary Webb uncovered evidence of a crack pipeline from Nicaragua to Los Angeles opened by U.S. government-backed supporters of the Contras in his infamous “Dark Alliance” series in the
San Jose Mercury News
. Webb was hounded by official denial and concerted media blackballing, but his basic facts were later confirmed in investigations by both Congress and the CIA.

Cooper's strange worldview insinuated into the mainstream like a virus, seeping out into hundreds of rap songs, then suddenly exploding into social consciousness on September 10, 1993, when
The X-Files
—with its motto, “The Truth Is Out There”—debuted. Fox Mulder's Cooper-esque rantings about one-world government, master-race plotters, alien abductees, secret torture chambers and Tuskegee-style bioterror experiments felt realer than reality, a speculative history of the Cold War in which the actual struggle had always actually been between the leaders and the people, the Illuminati and the cattle, the one-worlders and the sheeple. Against end-of-history crowing and worldwide web ecstasy, the passionate pessimism of
The X-Files
matched that of the street soldiers.

“Hip-hop,” Russell Simmons said, “moves as an army.” But exactly who and what they were going to move against seemed still as spectral as Mulder's enemies. Nobody knew how to define the attacks, or where the next attack might be coming from. “Who's that peekin' in my windows?” Goodie Mob had said. “
Pow!
Nobody now.” Here was the defensive b-boy stance recast as complete social alienation.

Planet Rock had entered the new order: a world in which the War on Youth was being driven to new heights of hysteria and repression, and government-deregulated, globalized media monopolies were colonizing and branding hiphop's countercultural spirit.

Once, there had been a creative tension between hip-hop's role as a commodity in the global media industry and as the lifeblood of a vast vibrant network of
local undergrounds. But during the mid-'90s, the power shifted decisively in the direction of the media monopolies. And when corporations began to understand the global demand for postwhite pop culture, hip-hop became the primary content for the new globally consolidated media, the equivalent of gold dust in the millennial monopoly rush. The tensions between the culture's true believers and the captains of industry intermittently flared into open, polarizing conflict. Such was the case of hip-hop radio at the end of the century.

At the beginning of the 1990s, San Francisco's KMEL-FM was one of the country's leading urban stations. Calling itself “the people's station,” it produced on-air personalities that seemed as of the streets as hip-hop itself. Through its innovative community-affairs programming, it engaged the social issues of the hip-hop generation.

To be sure, KMEL had not become “the people's station” because of enlightened corporate philosophy. It happened to be located in an area blessed with one of the strongest campus and community radio networks in the country, as well as one of the mostly fiercely competitive commercial markets in the country. Its makeover, however, became a win-win situation for its owners and the community.

During the early ‘80s, Bay Area urban radio was a stagnating format dominated by slick, disposable R&B. But college and community stations like KPOO, KZSU, KUSF and KALX were championing hip-hop. Author and former
Vibe
editor Danyel Smith grew up with the frequencies on the left-of-the-dial.

“You had to know where Billy Jam was gonna be playing, where Davey D was gonna be playing. To the rest of the world they were very little radio stations that came in staticky and the show was on in the middle of the night, but you were in the know and things were really exciting,” she says. “And as much as I think we all liked being part of our little secret thing, we all thought, ‘Wow this music needs to be heard by everyone. Someone needs to take it and blow it up, give it the respect that it deserves.' And for the Bay Area, that station was KMEL.”

In the mid-1980s KMEL changed from a rock format to a “contemporary hits” format and became one of the first crossover pop stations in the nation to target young multiracial audiences with hip-hop, house, and dancehall music. To make it work, KMEL desperately needed street credibility. College and community
radio jocks, such as KALX's David “Davey D” Cook, Sadiki Nia, Tamu du Ewa, and KZSU's Kevin “Kevvy Kev” Montague, and local artists like Sway and King Tech, were recruited to the station. “They took what we were doing at community radio and brought it to the station,” says KPOO radio personality KK Baby, who joined the station in 1991. “They would use us to attract the rest of the pop music audience.”

Most of the jocks were never offered full-time positions, but they brought their listeners with them, and pushed KMEL to play cutting-edge music and offer community-oriented programming. The station's ratings soared. KMEL's approach fit the Bay Area well—progressive, edgy, multicultural, inclusive—and listeners embraced “the people's station” with open arms.

KMEL's music shows, community-affairs talk-show programming, and its pioneering Summer Jam concerts were soon imitated throughout the country. The station helped launch the rap careers of Tupac Shakur, Hammer, Digital Underground, Too Short and E-40, and introduced local slang like “fa sheezy” into the hip-hop nation's lexicon. Although much smaller than Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, the Bay Area became the number-two hip-hop market in the country.

In 1992, an upstart station, KYLD, emerged to challenge KMEL. Michael Martin, then the KYLD Program Director, says, “We felt KMEL was a little lazy, so we came in with a vengeance.” In the cauldron of this fierce competition, nationally influential shows like Sway and Tech's “Wake-Up Show,” Joe Marshall's “Street Soldiers,” and Davey D's “Street Knowledge” were forged. At the same time, the dueling stations often deferred to the mixshow DJs to break new artists, resulting in national hits for local artists. The result was a massive growth in the local urban radio audience.

Then Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, a landmark of deregulation, the legal codification of the pro-media monopoly stance. At the time of its passage, the act was barely debated.

The Telecom Act profoundly affected the radio business, removing station ownership caps, and unleashing an unprecedented wave of consolidation. Radio deregulation left the public airwaves dominated by less than a handful of companies—Clear Channel, Cumulus, Citadel and Viacom—who laid off hundreds, decimated community programming and all but standardized playlists
across the country. Average listening time plunged. FCC Chair Reed Hundt had justified the legislation by arguing, “We are fostering innovation and competition in radio.” But by all accounts, KMEL's innovative years were over, and competition, the driving force of that innovation, was about to end.

Before the ink on the act was dry, KMEL's parent company Evergreen Media ended a ratings war by purchasing KMEL's competitor, KYLD, and the stations found themselves literally under the same roof. It didn't end there. A series of ever-larger mergers culminated in 1999 with a whopping $24 billion deal in which KMEL and KYLD were two of the hundreds of stations that passed from AMFM, Inc. into the hands of Clear Channel Communications. That's when, critics say, everything that was once so right began to go so wrong.

Waves of layoffs left all the Clear Channel radio stations with one sales force, fewer music programmers, a smaller promotions staff and no community affairs department. Individual staff responsibilities often doubled. Employees complained that they were being worked harder than ever. No other firm had benefited from the Telecom Act as much as Clear Channel. It went from owning forty stations in 1996 to 1,240 in 2003, commanding a whopping 28 percent share of all radio revenues and 27 percent of all radio listeners. Its closest competitor, Cumulus, owned 248 stations. But many industry insiders speculated that Clear Channel was eager to slash its payrolls because it had overpaid for its radio properties.

Technology replaced engineers, and sometimes even DJs. From the beginning of the radio industry, one of its most cherished tenets was that all radio was local. But in a process known as “voice tracking,” Clear Channel jocks might pre-record vocal drops and listener calls to send out to other Clear Channel stations. Conglomerates had no commitment to the idea of the local. The future of their profits was in global monopolies.

To the average listener, the effect of consolidation was most apparent in the radio's sound. KMEL and KYLD's playlists now looked so similar that, on any given weeknight, more than half of each station's “Hot 7 at 7” countdowns might be the exact same songs. The same executive, Michael Martin, now Clear Channel's regional vice president of programming, was programming both stations.

The national trend, Martin said, was toward fewer songs. “When I first
signed on at KYLD, I signed it on with eighty-six records,” he said. “Around the country the stations that play less have bigger ratings. Power 106 in LA, who has huge ratings, their most spun record in a day can go up to sixteen times in a day. My most-played will hit eleven maybe twelve, that's it. Because at the end of the day, the hits are the hits. And the audience comes to you for a reason—to hear the hits.”