Is Hip Hop Dead?: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Most Wanted Music

206 Pages·2007·0.92 MB·English

by  Mickey Hess

I H H D ?
S IP OP EAD

I H H D ?
S IP OP EAD
THE PAST, PRESENT,
AND FUTURE OF AMERICA’S
MOST WANTED MUSIC
Mickey Hess
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Hess,Mickey, 1975-
Ishiphopdead?:thepast,present,andfutureofAmerica’smostwantedmusic/
MickeyHess.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13:978-0-275-99461-7 (alk. paper)
1. Rap(Music)—History andcriticism. I.Title.
ML3531H472007
782.421649—dc22 2007020658
BritishLibrary Cataloguing in Publication Data isavailable.
Copyright (cid:1)C 2007by MickeyHess
Allrights reserved. No portionof this book maybe
reproduced, byany process ortechnique, withoutthe
expresswritten consent of thepublisher.
Libraryof Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007020658
ISBN-13:978-0-275-99461-7
ISBN-10:0-275-99461-9
First published in 2007
Praeger Publishers, 88Post Road West, Westport, CT06881
Animprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in theUnited States of America
Thepaper usedin this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued bytheNational
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C
ONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
INTRODUCTION 1
1 THERAPCAREER 13
2 THERAPLIFE 43
3 THERAPPERSONA 69
4 SAMPLINGANDSTEALING 89
5 WHITERAPPERS 109
6 HIPHOP,WHITENESS,ANDPARODY 135
CONCLUSION 159
NOTES 167
BIBLIOGRAPHY 179
INDEX 187

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The support of a Rider University Summer Fellowship helped me com-
plete this book. I want to thank my colleagues in the Rider University
English Department for their support of my work. Also, thanks to all the
great students at Rider University, Indiana University Southeast, and the
University of Louisville, especially Izzy Marrero at Rider, Stephanie Smith
and Eli Lossner at IUS, and Brad Caudill at U of L.
Thanks to my mom, Wanda Hess, for ignoring the parental advisory
stickers and buying me so much rap when I was a kid, and thanks to
everyone who listened to me talk about hip hop—my friends, family, and
professors—a lot of the ideas in this book came from conversations with
you: Danielle Hess, Joe Meno, Todd Dills, Susannah Felts, Sean Carswell,
Todd Taylor, Mindy Hess, Magan Atwood, Jason Jordan, Mike Smith,
Andrew Walker, Oriana Lee, Count Bass D, Bronwyn Williams, Karen
Kopelson, Karen Chandler, David Owen, Dennis Hall, Debra Journet,
Pam Takayoshi, and Cindy Selfe.
I thank my editor at Praeger, Dan Harmon, for all his work on this
book and our next project, The Greenwood Guide to American Regional Hip
Hop, and my Greenwood editor, Kristi Ward, for her work on Icons of Hip
Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture. Earlier versions
of chapters in this book appeared in the following journals in different
forms: Chapter two in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study
of Literature; Chapter five in Critical Studies in Media Communication; and
Chapter three in Popular Music and Society. I gratefully acknowledge the
editors and peer reviewers of these journals for their help in shaping the
essays in earlier stages.
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Finally, I have to thank some of the artists who provided me with
hours of listening that I can call research: Lil Wayne, MF DOOM, Ol’
Dirty Bastard, Ghostface, Wu-Tang Clan, Count Bass D, Masta Ace, Red-
man, Lootpack, Tha Alkaholiks, Beastie Boys, De La Soul, Black Moon,
and ATribe Called Quest.
I
NTRODUCTION
In December 2006, Nas released his eighth album, Hip Hop is Dead. The
Queens rapper’s provocative album title caused controversy among rap artists
and listeners, and led to complaints from Ludacris, Young Jeezy, and Lil
Wayne, who claim that hip hop is alive and well in the South. In fact, Luda-
cris responded to Nas by wearing and marketing a T-shirt that read, ‘‘Hip
Hop Ain’t Dead. It Lives in the South.’’ On December 7, 2006, Southern
rapper Young Jeezy got into an on-air confrontation with old-school MC
MonieLove,onher radioprogram onPhiladelphia’sWPHI-FM: Jeezyargued
that hip hop has changed, not died; but Monie sided with Nas, and blamed
the content of today’s hip hop for killing the culture. She complained that the
MCs of today rhyme only about ‘‘struggles, street hustling, and coming up.’’
Yet these stories of struggling and hustling along the path to stardom are cen-
tral to hip hop’s appeal, and connect to an important history of success stories
in American autobiographies. They show artists actively engaging with the
reality that hip hop has become big business, and that its stars often get rich
selling stories of their struggle to make it in hip hop. Hip hop is no less polit-
ical today than in Monie Love’s heyday, and its topics are no less complex.
Nas and Monie Love are certainly not the first rappers to lament the
death of hip hop. Saul Williams’s song, ‘‘Telegram’’ (2004), for example,
finds hip hop lying in a ditch, ‘‘dead to itself.’’ Williams proceeds to offer
hip hop culture a litany of advice on how to revive itself by abandoning
consumer-driven rhymes about cars and jewelry, and returning to its roots.
Even Southern rap pioneers OutKast declared hip hop dead. On 2001’s
‘‘Funkin’ Around,’’ Dre claims ‘‘I’m out here knowin’ hip hop is dead,’’
and complains that the average listener can’t comprehend this statement.
But for Nas to pronounce hip hop dead at the height of its sales and popu-
larity—and at the pinnacle of Southern hip hop’s success—points to a
number of contradictions, and the new breed of Southern rapper at the
top of the charts found the proclamation insulting. For Nas to name his
2 INTRODUCTION
album Hip Hop is Dead is a marketing scheme, of course, but commercial-
ism, insincerity, and marketing to the mainstream are exactly what the
album attacks.
According to Nas’s lyrics, hip hop died because it strayed too far from
its origins. Of course, if hip hop today looked and sounded exactly like it
did when it began in the early seventies, it surely would not have survived.
Although Nas never specifically calls out Southern artists for killing off hip
hop, the implication is that hip hop was at its best and most vital when it
was contained to the New York City neighborhoods where it began. Hip
Hop is Dead, like many other nostalgic recordings ranging from Common
Sense’s ‘‘I Used to Love H.E.R.’’ (1994) to Missy Elliott’s ‘‘Back in the
Day (2003),’’ promotes the myth of a pure, unadulterated form of hip
hop that sought to promote hope and celebrate life rather than make
money. In one view, this culture never truly existed; and if it did, Nas
would have been too young to participate. In another view, this culture
still exists today, just as it did in the seventies, in small neighborhood
clubs, kids’ basements, and city parks. In 2007, the music and culture has
expanded beyond New York City; hip hop exists worldwide in local scenes
as much as it does on MTV. In fact, the wealth of hip hop scenes and
start-up independent rap labels across the globe would indicate that many
more people are involved in making hip hop outside the mainstream than
possibly could have been involved in the 1970s. Make no mistake; thou-
sands of people today still rhyme for free and out of love for hip hop. If
anything, hip hop is more alive today than it ever was.
Nas is the latest in a series of hip hop doomsday prophets, who for
three decades have declared that the music and culture is on its last legs.
Because hip hop emerged during the waning days of disco, critics origi-
nally saw it as a passing fad. On July 12, 1979, Chicago disco jockeys
Steve Dahl and Garry Meier held ‘‘Disco Demolition Night’’ at Chicago’s
Comiskey Park. In response to his having been fired when WDAI changed
to an all-disco format, Dahl called for fellow disco haters to come together
at Comiskey and demolish disco records. About 50,000 people attended to
watch disco LPs destroyed. That date often is referred to as ‘‘The Day
Disco Died.’’ Three months later, Sugarhill Gang released ‘‘Rapper’s
Delight,’’recognized as the first hip hop single to reach nationwide radio.
The death of disco is itself debatable, because disco’s influence was
heard in the 1980s in American dance music and in the emerging Euro-
pean club sound. Disco even influenced hip hop: the bassline of ‘‘Rapper’s
Delight’’ was adapted from a segment of the song ‘‘Good Times’’ (1979),
by the disco band Chic. But disco as a style, a movement, and a genre did