Who Got the Camera?: A History of Rap and Reality

358 Pages·2021·1.221 MB·English

by  Eric Harvey

WHO
GOT
THE
CAMERA?
AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES
Jessica Hopper and Charles Hughes, Editors
Peter Blackstock and David Menconi, Founding Editors
ALSO IN THE SERIES
Stephen Deusner, Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the
South with the Drive‑By Truckers
Kristin Hersh, Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood
Hannah Ewens, Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture
Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary
Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
Chris Stamey, A Spy in the House of Loud: New York Songs and Stories
Holly Gleason, editor, Woman Walk the Line: How the
Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives
Adam Sobsey, Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography
Lloyd Sachs, T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit
Danny Alexander, Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige
Alina Simone, Madonnaland and Other Detours into Fame and Fandom
Kristin Hersh, Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt
Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue
Eddie Huffman, John Prine: In Spite of Himself
John T. Davis, The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again
David Cantwell, Merle Haggard: The Running Kind
David Menconi, Ryan Adams: Losering, a Story of Whiskeytown
Don McLeese, Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere
WHO
GOT
THE
CAMERA?
A HISTORY OF RAP AND REALITY
ERIC HARVEY
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN
Copyright © 2021 by Eric Harvey
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2021
Requests for permission to reproduce material
from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
University of Texas Press
P.O. Box 7819
Austin, TX 78713- 7819
utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Harvey, Eric, author.
Title: Who got the camera? : a history of rap and reality / Eric Harvey.
Other titles: American music series (Austin, Tex.)
Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. |
Series: American music series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers:
LCCN 2021005320
ISBN 978-1-4773-2134-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-4773-2394-6 (ebook other)
ISBN 978-1-4773-2395-3 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Gangsta rap (Music)—History and criticism. | Reality television
programs—History and criticism. | True crime television programs—History and
criticism. | Rap musicians. | Crime in music.
Classification: LCC ML3531 .H365 2021 | DDC 782.421649—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005320
doi:10.7560/321348
CONTENTS
c
Preface: Eavesdropping vii
Introduction: The Strength of Street Knowledge 1
1. Peace Is a Dream, Reality Is a Knife 23
2. Don’t Quote Me, Boy, ’Cause I Ain’t Said Shit 55
3. Get Me the Hell Away from This TV 97
4. I’m Gonna Treat You Like King! 137
5. Who Got the Camera? 161
6. Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Real 189
7. 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted 219
Conclusion: Deeper Than Rap 251
Notes
297
Index
323
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
PREFACE
EAVESDROPPING
c
During a 1993 conversation, bell hooks asked Ice Cube a question that
Black artists are commonly forced to confront: “If the major buying au-
dience is white and we want to reach that audience, to what extent do we
compromise ourselves in trying to reach that audience?” Cube replied,
I do records for Black kids, and white kids are basically eavesdropping
on my records. But I don’t change what I’m sayin’. I won’t take out
this word or that word because I got white kids buying my records.
White kids need to hear what we got to say about them and their
forefathers and uncles and everybody that’s done us wrong. And the
only way they’re goin’ to hear it uncut and uncensored is rap music,
because I refuse to censor anything I have to say about anybody.1
I write this book as an eavesdropper. I grew up watching Black entertain-
ment take over popular culture while simultaneously internalizing the
local reality of racial difference and separation. The Indianapolis district
where I attended middle and high school was desegregated by a federal
judge in 1971, after determining it was still practicing de jure segregation
in violation of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education de-
cision. The judge’s order wasn’t implemented until 1981, when the city
started busing Black students nearly an hour each way to attend school
amid the vast corn and soybean fields of the city’s white, southeastern
suburbs. I started high school in 1991, and it did not register until years
later that I was participating in a desegregation process that had begun
when my parents were children, and that the burden of integration was
borne by Black families instead of white ones.
Yet my education in Black popular culture didn’t come in the class-
room or from my Black peers, many of whom were understandably reti-
cent to engage with their white classmates. My freshman year coincided
with h ip- hop’s simultaneous pop- crossover moment and rebellious punk
phase, when stars like Tone Loc, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Va-
nilla Ice, and MC Hammer were competing with the adult world of re-
bellious, nationalist h ip- hop: Cube’s Death Certificate, 2Pac’s 2Pacalypse
Now, Public Enemy’s Apocalypse 91, and others. Hip- hop culture was
strongly influencing TV— from A Different World and The Fresh Prince
of Bel‑ Air to The Arsenio Hall Show, In Living Color, and HBO’s Def
Comedy Jam—a s well as B lack-d irected films like House Party and Boyz
n the Hood. Not only did I listen to a lot of rap and watch a lot of Black
TV and movies, but I interacted with these cultural artifacts. I borrowed
and dubbed rap tapes from my friends, maintained numerous notebooks
with my best stabs at lyric transcriptions, and investigated references I
didn’t understand. I not only learned about South Central and Comp-
ton but was introduced to the Black Panthers, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm
X, and the Nation of Islam and eavesdropped on realistic portrayals of
working- class Black Americans. By scanning the list of samples on rap
records, I learned about a world of 1960s and 1970s funk and R&B that
would have never entered my life through oldies radio, and I learned that
Black stand-up comedy and storytelling had a history that long pre-dated
Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby.
My media habits derived from an urge to more deeply participate in
media culture, to bring it closer to me. I didn’t just want to consume, I
wanted to play along. Reality TV, especially daytime and late- afternoon
talk shows, gave me that chance. I watched them all— Oprah, Geraldo,
Sally Jessy— but was especially drawn to the beleaguered populism of
Phil Donahue, the inventor of the format, forever running around the
studio audience with a wireless mic, entertaining topics that the “regular”
viii c Preface
news wouldn’t go near. Through daytime talk, I learned about people
who would never appear on the nightly n ews— transgender people, drag
queens, sex workers, and a theists— and developed my argumentation
skills at a vicarious remove, particularly on the episodes that dealt with
politics and race, for which my hip- hop homework had prepared me
well.
During the summer of 1992, I put my autodidactic education to its
first test. I was riding in the car with my father, and the story of the con-
troversy surrounding Body Count’s “Cop Killer” came on a news break.
It had been a bit more than a year since the release of the Rodney King
video, and the streets of Los Angeles were still smoldering from the re-
bellion that greeted the acquittal of King’s assailants. Thanks to Vice
President Dan Quayle stirring up election-y ear conservative anger by
denouncing it, “Cop Killer,” a punk/metal hybrid from Ice-T’s mostly
overlooked side project, had become a national news story. While the
mainstream news media was framing the story through the voices of
white officials, I was tracking the “Cop Killer” saga mostly through Do‑
nahue, Oprah, Rolling Stone magazine, and MTV News. When the radio
story concluded, I took a deep breath and offered my opinion. Ice-T was
not literally promoting the killing of police officers, I mumbled in my
dad’s direction, but expressing his anger at the constant harassment that
Black people faced from the cops. My father, a veteran Marion County
sheriff’s deputy, did not agree.
I idolized my dad growing up and had planned to follow his career
path until my early teens. I grew up immersed in cop culture and loved
hanging out at the police station, a room full of middle-a ged men who
drank endless coffee, cracked rude jokes, typed up warrants, and went
on calls. The pioneering Fox reality show Cops debuted when I was
eleven, though my dad wasn’t a fan. He joked that the most accurate
representation of day-to-day police life was the humdrum office poli-
tics of the 1970s sitcom Barney Miller, and he watched endless reruns
of the kindly southern sheriff Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show.
I never got to ask my dad what he was thinking at the moment I sided
with “Cop Killer.” He responded with a deep sigh, and the topic soon
changed, or we arrived where we were going— I can’t quite remember
which. Maybe he was disappointed in me; maybe he resented the fact
Preface c ix
that an increasing number of people didn’t see the cops as Barney Miller
or Andy Griffith characters anymore, and a great many more never had.
Regardless, chiming in on “Cop Killer” marked the first time I articu-
lated an informed opinion on a political topic.
Like all fans of popular culture, I had been drawn into a world imag-
ined by others, but what its performers called “reality rap” was far from
escapist fantasy. Part of why I developed my “Cop Killer” opinion came
from the subversive thrill of freaking out my parents, and part of it grew
from my naïve, youthful exoticization of rebellious Black men who
didn’t give a fuck. But at the same time, eavesdropping through h ip- hop
had helped me form a cogent opinion on the issue of racist police brutal-
ity and an inchoate understanding of the distinction between literal and
symbolic expression. I learned these not necessarily from “Cop Killer”
itself, which wasn’t even rap and which I didn’t much like as music, but
from the discourse that it generated and the debates that it fostered. And
I know I wasn’t alone. The last thing anyone needs at this point is to
read a white man explaining how hip- hop changed his life, so I’ll stop
there, with this book’s origin myth. I came of age eavesdropping on Black
popular culture, watching and listening as the concerns of a generation
left behind by a deindustrializing, law- and-o rder-o bsessed society made
their way into an ever more fractured national conversation. This pro-
found and thrilling change in popular music and Black representation
overlapped with another shift, as the mainstream journalistic establish-
ment gave way to a sensationalistic and often vulgar network of news
and information from the outskirts of centrist, corporate news: tabloid
culture.
All books have numerous starting points, and I’ll briefly note two more.
The first came in 2000, when I took my first job out of college with a
small documentary production company in Indianapolis. Run by two
veterans of Indianapolis’s WTHR NBC News affiliate, the company’s
contract with the Discovery networks allowed me (first as a production
assistant, then briefly as chief videographer and editor) to learn the in-
tricacies of nonfiction television, from local news broadcasts to national
documentaries. My nearly three years with the company left me with
dozens of hours of local and national programming on my résumé and a
profound desire to never work in TV production again. The s ixty-h our
x c Preface