Can't Stop Won't Stop (70 page)

But with narrowing playlists, local, new, and independent artists—the kinds of folks unable to compete with six-figure major label marketing budgets—inevitably got squeezed out. Even mixshow DJs—once hired to be the tastemakers and to break records—increasingly found their mixes subject to executive approval. As one local rapper put it, “What good is a request line?”

Specialty shows were quietly eliminated. Local personalities got fired. And KMEL's community affairs programming was severely reduced. Shortly after September 11, 2001, on-air personality and hip-hop activist Davey D was fired. The station blamed economic woes. Some critics saw a company that had over-paid for its market share and was now desperate to reduce costs. Others saw the sinister silencing of a key activist voice. Soon youths of color—KMEL's target audience—began to launch protests against the station. The people's station had become a target of the people's anger.

By then, just ten companies controlled most of the U.S. media landscape—down from fifty in 1983—including music, movies, magazines, television, video games and the Internet.
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At the beginning of the new millennium, five of these companies—Vivendi Universal, Sony, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI—controlled 80 percent of the music industry. Another, Viacom, owned both MTV and BET.

To Chuck D, the forces that controlled hip-hop looked like this: “You got five corporations that control retail. You got four who are the dominant record labels. Then you got three radio outlets who own all the stations. You got two television networks and you got one video outlet. I call it 5-4-3-2-1. Boom!”

The impulse of any monopoly is to absorb all profit potential. Local hip-hop undergrounds suddenly appeared to be veins of gold waiting to be exploited. During the mid-1990s, indies were bought up, squeezed out or rolled right over.

Take the experience of the indie distributors and the indie labels. During the
‘80s, a thriving network of independent regional distributors could take independent label records gold, sometimes even platinum. The proof was in artists like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Geto Boys and Magic Mike, and labels like Sugar Hill, Rap-A-Lot and Cheetah.

But by 1995, the two remaining national independent distributors, INDI and Alliance, faced serious financial difficulties and merged. Before long, Alliance closed its INDI operations, laid off its two hundred employees and filed for bankruptcy. In three years, it had gone from a $500-million company to one that owed $500 million. Soon there would be no national independently owned distributor. The next dominoes to fall were the regional “one-stops” like Valley Record Distributors, M. S. Distribution and Select-O-Hits. Smaller local distributors and niche distributors struggled to hang on in the new environment.

The trigger was the massive shakeout in music retailing. Major distributors, the end of the media monopoly's pipeline, were partly to blame. Major distributors squeezed indie distributors by offering chain stores deep discounts and incentives at the expense of indie retailers. As hundreds of stores and dozens of chains closed, indie distributors were stuck with millions in unpaid invoices and forced to fold. The effect on indie labels was immediate.

In 1996, indie record label market share had peaked. For the first time, and probably the last, indies together had actually outsold all the major labels. The indie leader was Ruthless Records, the label Eazy E had formed to put himself and NWA out in 1987.
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But as soon as that happened, media monopolies went on a buying binge. Armed with the substantial capital their parent companies gave them, they snapped up indie labels like Master P's No Limit Records, E-40's Sick Wid It Records and Tony Draper's Texas-based Suave House label. Indies had three choices to survive in the new market: cut deals with major label distributors if they could, get comfortable with reaching a niche market through a crazy-quilt of much smaller distributors, or go under. When the millennium arrived, indie label market share had plunged. There was a notable historical equivalent: during the late ‘50s, rhythm-and-blues and rock indies owned up to half the market share. By the end of the sixties, the number of record label-owning firms had dropped from forty to twenty, as majors absorbed the indies to capitalize on the rise of the baby boomers.
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Once major labels made these big investments they had to make them pay
off. Artist marketing budgets routinely pushed northward of six figures; break-even points sometimes climbed above gold sales. A decade before, rap music and Black film had surprised corporate execs by showing huge profits on tiny investments. Now the music industry had adopted the big Hollywood studios' blockbuster-or-bust mentality. They placed bigger bets on fewer projects in the hopes of bigger payoffs. The more that Soundscan-hawking execs spent on an album, the more units they forced through their distributors into retail chains, searching for that first-week score.

On the one hand, some hip-hop artists—not to mention executives, entrepreneurs, promoters, managers, and others—cashed in and built bigger empires than black artists of previous generations might have ever imagined possible. On the other, there was a steady narrowing of voices available through the majors' channels, a decrease in the diversity of sounds, opinions, ideas, news, and art available to mass audiences.

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 übermasculinity. 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 could become a book could become a soundtrack could become a music video could become a videogame. 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 Alizé, 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.

The further one got from North America, the greater the dissonance became.

For two decades, Bambaataa had been a hip-hop ambassador, seeding cities around the world with Universal Zulu Nation chapters and the basic elements. By the end of the century, many of these cities—from Sarajevo to Sydney, Amsterdam to Zanzibar—had been through two generations of hip-hop heads with their own defiant youth countercultures. The cultural revolution had been won.

So it was in a spirit of triumph that the Black August tour—with an entourage of the cream of “conscious rappers” including Talib Kweli, Black Thought of The Roots, Boots Riley of The Coup, Jeru The Damaja, and dead prez—arrived in 2001 to play a concert at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban and
a series of dates in South Africa. Black August had begun in Brooklyn as part of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement's project to educate rappers and hip-hop audiences on the plight of Black political prisoners. It had taken rappers and activists—including Common, Tony Touch and Mos Def—to Cuba in successful exchanges that participants described as profoundly moving. South Africa would prove profound, too, but for much different reasons.