Hyphy - hip-hop

Slate.com
Go Dumb
Why hyphy is the best hip-hop right now.
By Jody Rosen
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007, at 6:41 PM ET

As the poet said, there's a fine line between clever and stupid. But must one choose sides? Not if you listen to "Stewy" by D.B.'z, a rap group from Vallejo, Calif. The song is propelled by a deliriously catchy beat—big wobbly bassline, blasts of keyboard fuzz, and what sounds like a schoolyard full of Ritalin cases chanting taunts—and by a young voice intoning a chorus: "Mainy, cuckoo, silly, bananas/ Mainy, cuckoo, silly, bananas." Mainy is slang term meaning, well, cuckoo, silly, bananas—craziness of the most inspired and enjoyable sort. A second refrain elaborates on this theme: "Stewy-ewy-ewy-ewy-ewy/Stewy!" To be stewy is to be extra-mainy, really silly. Midway through the song, guest rapper E-40 arrives to deliver his own variation on the theme. "Look at all my young dreadheads," he exults. "They so dumb!"

"Stewy" is one of 20 songs on Hyphy Hitz (TVT), a new compilation chronicling the Bay Area hip-hop genre known as hyphy (pronounced "hi-fee"), in which stewiness, maininess, dumbness are everything: the means and ends, the sun and moon and stars. The song titles tell the story: "Go Dumb," "I'm a Fool Wit It," "Get Stupid." Stupid has been a term of praise in hip-hop for a couple of decades now. ("That beat is stupid.") But hyphy elevates idiocy to a new level of esteem. When rapper Mistah F.A.B. boasts of doing "the dummy retarded" in "Super Sic Wit It," he's describing an aesthetic and philosophical ideal. Hyphy may be the most conscientiously "dumb" music in history. It's also by far the best party going on in hip-hop right now.

Hyphy's origins are shadowy, but most trace its beginnings to the early part of this decade. It has often been described as a West Coast analogue to Southern crunk, and though the comparison is imprecise, the two styles do have things in common. Like crunk, hyphy is dance music first and foremost; like crunk, it's loud and garish, with lots of thudding bass-heavy beats and blaring synthesizers. But where crunk could almost be called post-rap, with bellowed chants replacing traditional verses, hyphy is exuberantly verbose. Listen to songs like E-40's "Tell Me When To Go," the genre's one legitimate crossover hit, and the Federation's much smaller hit, "18 Dummy." The rappers are swift, stylish, and to the uninitiated, inscrutable, delivering lines thick with regional argot. That slang is a point of civic pride. In "Tell Me When To Go," E-40, the scene's spiritual godfather, raps: "I'm from the Bay where we hyphy and go dumb/ From the soil where them rappers be getting their lingo from." (Hyphy rappers have long complained about rappers from other cities stealing their slang. Snoop Dogg's catchphrase "fo' shizzle" is an E-40 coinage.)

Online hyphy glossaries can help a newcomer get a handle on stewy and mainy and their many synonyms—as well as flamboasting (showing off), grapes (marijuana), stunners (sunglasses), thizz (ecstasy), yadadamean ("you know what I mean?"), and, of course, hyphy itself, whose etymology remains the source of some debate but which most agree connotes an advanced state of hyperactivity and wildness. Next, there are the many terms related to the automotive hijinks central to hyphy culture. Sydeshows are street corner displays of automotive stunts, usually featuring doughnut-turning at very high speeds. (Sydeshow greats have been known to sign their name on parking lot asphalt with tire skid marks.) The most celebrated hyphy pastime is ghostriding, or "ghostriding the whip," whereby passengers exit an idling car and dance beside or atop it as it continues to roll. (Here hyphy culture grades into Jackass and extreme-sports culture.) And like many a cultural practice forged in the inner city, ghostriding has been imitated by suburbanites, often with ugly results.

To listen to hyphy, in other words, is to be immersed in a vibrant and eccentric regional culture, a universe away from the pop-rap mainstream. Chart-topping rappers boast about their late-model luxury coupes and fur coats; hyphy MCs extol their vintage "scrapers" and big goofy sunglasses. Clipse and Young Jeezy pretend to be coke kingpins; Bay Area MCs Nump and Keak Da Sneak celebrate party-hearty drug-taking. Rap superstars set their songs in the Olympian splendor of nightclub VIP rooms; hyphy rappers sing praise songs to street pageantry and hoedowns in parking lots. After years of being bludgeoned by hip-hop violence and materialism, it's hard not to be thrilled by hyphy's gentler, earthier, more democratic atmosphere.

But the great thing about hyphy is how lightly it wears its street cred, especially compared with the self-righteousness of so much "alternative" hip-hop. Hyphy rejects the formulas of rap radio, but it is unpretentious, and its mix of cut-rate synth blips and bass slaps—perfected by producers like Traximillion and E-40's teenage son, Droop—has as much pop appeal as anything on the Billboard rap charts. The best hyphy MCs, meanwhile, have superstar-sized charisma. I love Keak Da Sneak's coarse sandpaper tone and conversational boasts and putdowns. (In "Super Hyphy," he hisses, "First, second verse, dis my third/ Six grade driving to school, I had a Firebird/ I don't think they knowing, that's my word/ Oh, you hip now? I was problem child, you was nerd.") And E-40 is one of the world's most charming rappers, with a liquid flow, a voice that sounds like it's been soaked in thick buttermilk, and air about him of unshakeable sagacity.

Of course, what really sets E-40, Keak Da Sneak, and other Bay Area MCs apart is their subject matter—their obsession with getting hyphy and going dumb, their willingness to reject the old hip-hop clichés and create some new ones. Hyphy Hitz is a reminder of what has long been missing in hip-hop: a little hot hot heat. For years, hip-hop has been colonized by a cult of cool—sleek sedans, icy blue bling, silken-toned rappers trying their best to sound as immaculate and above-it-all as Jay-Z. It's a stupefyingly tight-assed style. Think how many MCs in recent years have bragged that they don't dance! Compare 50 Cent's "Disco Inferno" ("Look homie, I don't dance/ All I do is this/ It's the same two step with a little twist") and Terror Squad's "Lean Back" (See my niggas don't dance/ See we just pull up the pants and/ Do the Roc-a-way") with the scenes of doofy dance-floor abandon in the video for the late Oakland rapper Mac Dre's "Thizzle Dance." Hip-hop's story can be told as a succession of regional styles, and listening to the vigorous, funny, joyful music on Hyphy Hitz, it's hard not to hope that the Bay Area's turn is next, that we're just one breakthrough hit away from a hyphy takeover. E-40, for his part, is already trying to rewrite history, imagining not just a hyphy present and future, but a hyphy antiquity, complete with Ancient Near Eastern sydeshow: "Imagine all the Hebrews going dumb/Dancing on top of chariots and turning tight ones."

Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2159745/

Something in the Air (Radio/Rock) - review - NYT - 1-28-07

NYTimes

January 28, 2007

Radio Days

By DAVE MARSH

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation.

By Marc Fisher.

Illustrated. 374 pp. Random House. $27.95.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, broadcasting experts predicted that the advent of television would kill off radio. Many of them didn’t especially want it to survive, since it could only hold back the acceptance of TV. In fact, the radio those experts knew didn’t survive. By the mid-1950s, the national networks that had dominated since the ’20s had all but evaporated, replaced by more than twice as many local stations. Television took over presenting broadcast drama and comedy, variety shows and in-depth news.

Yet radio itself survived. Radio outstrips television as a means of conveying intimacy and, precisely because it doesn’t show but can only tell, may stir the active imagination more deeply. It’s cheaper to operate a radio station, and in those years broadcasting equipment was much more mobile, making it perfect for local presentations. With recorded music (before the advent of TV, most radio programming consisted of live performance), stations found a cheap programming source that attracted enough listeners to generate its lifeblood — advertising revenue — even after TV took hold.

In “Something in the Air,” Marc Fisher takes the story from there, arguing that radio — those who programmed and performed on it, and the music they played — inspired his entire generation to come together: “We grew up dancing and dreaming to the same soundtrack, and we were therefore somehow united,” he writes. “Until the Great Unraveling of the late 1960s and early ’70s, this shared pop culture was a meeting ground for our nation, a commons that we only years later realized we had lost.”

But Fisher can’t deliver on this premise, because it simply isn’t true. Different groups of people experienced that period differently, and they listened to radio differently too. The kids in Fisher’s neighborhood, and mine, spent 1963 listening to the Chiffons and Motown and were led to dream of a better world. The black kids in Birmingham, Ala., spent part of that year listening to local radio not only for those hit records but for coded messages about where to gather for illegal demonstrations that concretely changed their world for the better. Those are not equivalent experiences.

But most of “Something in the Air” isn’t concerned with its broad premise, and therein lies the book’s value. It provides a history of the development of radio in the postwar era, but it works best when it backs away from the general and settles upon particular broadcasters who fascinate Fisher. He writes engagingly about the late-night giants Jean Shepherd and Bob Fass, the shock jock Tom Leykis, the National Public Radio co-founder Bill Siemering, the Long Island radio rebel Paul Sidney and the white R & B disc jockey Hunter Hancock.

There are reasons to quarrel with the history. Fisher likes to settle on a single source for each section, which would be fine if he’d written a collection of profiles rather than a book billed as a comprehensive historical survey. Giving a history of Top 40 radio with only a single paragraph about the programmer Bill Drake (inventor of the hyperkinetic “Boss Radio”) is like writing a history of hit singles with only a single paragraph about Phil Spector. Writing about New York City radio’s response to the arrival of the Beatles through the eyes of WABC’s Bruce Morrow, without even mentioning “the Fifth Beatle,” WMCA’s Murray the K, is just bizarre.

In his chapter on satellite radio, Fisher grows so fixed on the programmer Lee Abrams of XM that the rival Sirius network all but vanishes. (Disclosure: I am the host of a show on Sirius.) The chapter on shock jocks focuses so completely on Leykis that the portions on the much more important Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern (who gets only three pages) feel like intrusion.

Fisher has little to say about anything that happened outside the East Coast. B. Mitchell Reed, the great Los Angeles disc jockey who inspired Joni Mitchell’s “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” is mentioned only briefly, for his work in San Francisco. There’s nothing about CKLW, in Windsor, Ontario, which was the No. 1 station in both Detroit and Cleveland for more than a decade. Wolfman Jack is mentioned for his role in “American Graffiti” and his brief dalliance with WNBC in New York, but there is only a passing acknowledgment of his long career in Mexican border radio, which could be heard from San Antonio to Buffalo. Fisher adores late-night radio, but he says nothing about the legendary John R. and Hoss Allen of WLAC Nashville, who also had an audience across broad swaths of the nation.

Fisher describes how disco divided the rock radio audience and galvanized black and Latin listeners, who had been written off by FM rock radio, though he writes about such matters superficially. He claims that black disc jockeys simply “mimicked Top 40’s style,” which I presume means he never heard Martha Jean the Queen, Butterball, Georgie Woods, the Magnificent Montague or, for that matter, the young Sly Stone. If anything, the mimicry ran in the other direction. Readers will finish “Something in the Air” with no insight into how Spanish-language disc jockeys played the key role in delivering hundreds of thousands of immigration-rights supporters into the streets of Los Angeles and other cities last year, because Fisher says absolutely nothing about Latin radio in general and its crucial role in the Chicano community in particular. Turning out those demonstrators was a much greater accomplishment than the “Rush Rooms” that sprang up in restaurants across the nation in Limbaugh’s heyday, which Fisher does mention.

Fisher provides a good deal of useful information about satellite and Internet broadcasting, and there are solid discussions of the consequences of the Federal Communications Commission’s laissez-faire policy toward fairness and community service and on the Clinton administration’s successful efforts to change the rules that prevented large corporations from owning large blocks of stations. He writes a devastating account of one of the focus groups that many big-city stations use to pick their playlists, arguing that such questionable research (each recording is judged by a seven-second sample) leads to unimaginative programming. He also has the courage to defend payola: “Despite the ugly underside of the promotion business,” he writes, “the old payola had a desirable result: a wider variety of music got on the air.”

The problem, in the end, is the vastness and mutability of the radio culture that developed in the half-century since TV took over as the family hearth. Fisher’s book is at its best when he lets himself speak about passions that are almost but not quite private: the importance of his first transistor radio; the way that radio and its successors blew musical winds of change into his life; the near magical effect of listening to someone who is committed not to playing good music or making political points but simply making good radio, whatever form it may take. In such moments, readers will find that they and Fisher have much to share — not as a generation, but simply as lovers of a medium that, however scorned and abused, retains its fascination.

Dave Marsh is writing a history of music and the civil rights movement. He is host of the weekly Sirius Satellite Radio program “Kick Out the Jams With Dave Marsh.”

Af-Am Indie music/fans - NYT - 1-28-07

NYTimes
January 28, 2007

Truly Indie Fans

By JESSICA PRESSLER

WHEN Douglas Martin first saw the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a teenager in High Point, N.C., “it blew my mind,” he said. Like many young people who soothe their angst with the balm of alternative rock, Mr. Martin was happy to discover music he enjoyed and a subculture where he belonged.

Except, as it turned out, he didn’t really belong, because he is black.

“For a long time I was laughed at by both black and white people about being the only black person in my school that liked Nirvana and bands like that,” said Mr. Martin, now 23, who lives in Seattle, where he is recording a folk-rock album.

But 40 years after black musicians laid down the foundations of rock, then largely left the genre to white artists and fans, some blacks are again looking to reconnect with the rock music scene.

The Internet has made it easier for black fans to find one another, some are adopting rock clothing styles, and a handful of bands with black members have growing followings in colleges and on the alternative or indie radio station circuit. It is not the first time there has been a black presence in modern rock. But some fans and musicians say they feel that a multiethnic rock scene is gathering momentum.

“There’s a level of progress in New York in particular,” said Daphne Brooks, an associate professor of African-American studies at Princeton. She was heartened last summer by the number of children of color in a class she taught at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, where kids learn to play punk-rock standards.

There is even a new word for black fans of indie rock: “blipster,” which was added to UrbanDictionary .com last summer, defined as “a person who is black and also can be stereotyped by appearance, musical taste, and/or social scene as a hipster.”

Bahr Brown, an East Harlem resident whose Converse sneakers could be considered blipster attire, opened a skateboard and clothing boutique, Everything Must Go, in the neighborhood in October, to cater to consumers who, like himself, want to dress with the accouterments of indie rock: “young people who wear tight jeans and Vans and skateboard through the projects,” he said.

“And all the kids listen to indie rock,” he said. “If you ask them what’s on their iPod, its Death Cab for Cutie, the Killers.”

A 2003 documentary, “Afropunk,” featured black punk fans and musicians talking about music, race and identity issues, and it has since turned into a movement, said James Spooner, its director. Thousands of black rock fans use Afropunk.com’s message boards to discuss bands, commiserate about their outsider status and share tips on how to maintain their frohawk hairstyles.

“They walk outside and they’re different,” Mr. Spooner said of the Web site’s regulars. “But they know they can connect with someone who’s feeling the same way on the Internet.”

On MySpace, the trailer for Mr. Spooner’s new film, “White Lies, Black Sheep,” about a young black man in the predominantly white indie-rock scene, has been played upward of 40,000 times.

Rock was created by black artists like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, and Elvis Presley and other white artists eventually picked up the sound. In the ’60s, teenagers were just as likely to stack their turntables with records from both white and black artists — with perhaps a little bit of Motown, another musical thread of the time, thrown in, said Larry Starr, who wrote “American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV,” with Christopher Waterman. But that began changing in the late ’60s. By the time Jimi Hendrix became the ultimate symbol of counterculture cool, with his wild wardrobe and wilder guitar playing, the racial divisions were evident.

Paul Friedlander, the author of “Rock and Roll: A Social History,” noted that Hendrix became popular just as the black power movement emerged. Yet his trio included two white musicians and his audience was largely white. That made him anathema to many blacks.

“To the black community he was not playing wholly African-American music,” Mr. Friedlander said, even when Hendrix formed a new all-black band.

By the early ’70s, “you began to have this very strict color line,” Mr. Starr said. Music splintered into many different directions and, for the most part, blacks and whites went separate ways. Black musicians gravitated toward genres in which they were more likely to find acceptance and lucre, such as disco, R & B and hip-hop, which have also been popular among whites.

The next few decades saw several successful and influential black musicians who crossed genres or were distinctly rock, such as Prince, Living Colour and Lenny Kravitz, and rock melodies and lyrics have been liberally sampled by hip-hop artists. But rock is still largely a genre played by white rockers and celebrated by white audiences.

THE recent attention given several bands with black members — like Bloc Party, Lightspeed Champion, and the Dears — could signify change. “Return to Cookie Mountain,” the second album by the group TV on the Radio, a band in which four of the five members are black, was on the best-album lists of many critics in 2006. Around the country, other rock bands with black members are emerging.

On an evening in December, at Gooski’s, a crowded dive bar in Pittsburgh, Lamont Thomas, sweating through a red T-shirt that read “Black Rock,” played the drums behind the lead singer Chris Kulcsar, who was flinging his skinny frame around the stage, and the guitarist Buddy Akita. The bass player, Lawrence Caswell, dreadlocked and gregarious, introduced the band, a punk quartet from Cleveland with the name This Moment in Black History.

“The funny thing is, a lot of people assume from the name that we’re just white kids being ironic,” Mr. Thomas said.

This may be because their fans, like the ones who attended the show at Gooski’s, tend to be white, although there are usually one or two people of color, Mr. Caswell said.

Nev Brown, a photographer and writer from Brooklyn, said that at the indie rock shows that he has covered for his music blog, FiddleWhileYouBurn.com, he is almost always the only black person in the room. Some fans are curious about why he is at the show and try to talk to him about it.

“And then you get idiots, like people who think you’re a security guard,” he said.

Damon Locks, a Chicago-based publicist and singer in a hardcore band called the Eternals, said he is frequently mistaken for “one of the other three black guys” in the city’s rock-music scene. “We joke about it,” he said. “We’ve been thinking about getting together and starting a band called Black People.”

That kind of isolation is one of the reasons Mr. Spooner, the documentary director, regularly showcases black and mixed-race rock bands at clubs. For a band to participate, the lead singer must be black. This caused some friction early on, he said. “A lot of white people were offended that I was saying, ‘This is for us,’ ” Mr. Spooner said on a recent evening at the Canal Room, a club in downtown Manhattan, where he was the D.J. between sets for multiethnic bands like Graykid, Martin Luther and Earl Greyhound.

But, he added: “Almost every black artist I know wants to play in front of their people. This is bigger than just rocking out or whatever.”

Mr. Thomas, of This Moment in Black History, said that white fans sometimes want to know why he is not rapping. “It’s the stupidest question,” he said.

Just as often, it is African-Americans who are judgmental. “There’s an unfortunate tendency for some black people to think if you listen to rock music or want to play rock music, you’re an Uncle Tom,” Mr. Thomas said.

LaRonda Davis, president of the Black Rock Coalition, an organization co-founded by Vernon Reid of Living Colour in the mid-80s to advocate for black rock bands, said the resistance is rooted in group-think. “Black people were forced to create a community,” she said. “We’re so protective and proud of it, like, ‘We have to protect our own,’ and why should we embrace something that has always excluded us?”

Nelson George, author of “Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Boho’s: Notes on Post-Soul Culture,” suggested that the rock ’n’ roll aesthetic had been a major deterrent. “Black kids do not want to go out with bummy clothes and dirty sneakers,” Mr. George said. “There is a psychological subtext to that, about being in a culture where you are not valued and so you have to value yourself.”

But lately, rock music, and its accouterments, are being considered more stylish. Mainstream hip-hop artists like Kelis wear Mohawks, Lil Jon and Lupe Fiasco rap about skateboarding, and “all of the Southern rap stars are into the ’80s punk look, wearing big studded belts and shredded jeans,” said Anoma Whittaker, the fashion director of Complex magazine. At the same time, the hip-hop industry’s demand for new samples has increased the number of rock songs appearing on hip-hop tracks: Jay-Z’s latest album features contributions from Chris Martin of Coldplay and R & B artist Rihanna’s current single samples the New Wave band Soft Cell.

“Hip-hop has lost a lot of its originality,” said Mr. Brown of Everything Must Go, the East Harlem skateboard shop. “This is the new thing.”

Dixie Chicks - Grammy Sweep - NYT - 2-13-07

NYTimes
February 13, 2007

Grammy Sweep by Dixie Chicks Is Seen as a Vindication

By JEFF LEEDS

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 12 — The Dixie Chicks’ big win at the Grammy Awards on Sunday exposed ideological tensions between the music industry’s Nashville establishment and the broader, more diverse membership of the Recording Academy, which chooses the Grammy winners, according to voters and music executives interviewed afterward.

To some, the voting served not only as a referendum on President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, but also on what was perceived as country music’s rejection — and radio’s censorship — of the trio.

Jeff Ayeroff, a longtime music executive and an academy member, said the resounding endorsement of the group reflected the fact that the academy represents “the artist community, which was very angry at what radio did, because it was not very American.” Mr. Ayeroff said he voted for the Dixie Chicks in at least one category.

At the awards on Sunday, the band — Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison — swept all five of the Grammy categories in which it was nominated, including the top three — album, record and song of the year — the first time all three have been swept in 14 years.

The awards amounted to vindication for the Dixie Chicks, who found their career sidetracked in 2003 after the singer Ms. Maines told a London concert audience shortly before the invasion of Iraq that the band was “ashamed” that the president hailed from their home state, Texas. In the furor that followed, country radio programmers pulled the multiplatinum-selling trio’s music from the airwaves and rallied listeners to destroy their CDs.

The storm flared anew last year when the Dixie Chicks released the album “Taking the Long Way,” which included the single “Not Ready to Make Nice,” a defiant and bitter response to the group’s treatment. And things got worse when band members said in interviews that they were not interested in being part of the commercial country music business; Ms. Maguire, who plays the fiddle, said the group would rather have fans “who get it” instead of “people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith.” Country stations once again all but ignored the Dixie Chicks’ music.

The sweep reflected something of a retort to the Country Music Association’s annual awards, held in November, when the Dixie Chicks were shut out. The vote by the Recording Academy, which is composed of performers, producers, engineers, executives and others across the country, evidently took a different view.

“I think it says that, by and large, the creative community sees what has happened to the Dixie Chicks as unfair and unjust,” said Mike Dungan, a longtime music executive who heads the C.M.A.’s board and is also the president and chief executive of the Capitol Nashville label. (Mr. Dungan said he was not speaking on behalf of the C.M.A.)

But even without support from country music’s traditional institutions, the album became something of a hit. “Taking the Long Way,” bolstered by brisk sales at Starbucks, Amazon and other less traditional outlets, has sold almost 1.9 million copies, and ranked as one of the year’s 10 best sellers. But it fell short compared with albums that did have support from country radio, including those by Carrie Underwood and Rascal Flatts. The trio’s concert tour also appeared weakened by the controversy.

As far as Grammy voters were concerned, the Dixie Chicks “made a great album this year, and their music and their commentary resonated with our membership, as it did with the entire nation,” said Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Recording Academy’s formal title.

But it is not clear that the support was uniform. Mr. Ayeroff, who founded the voter-registration group Rock the Vote, said a man sitting behind him in the Grammy audience snickered each time the Dixie Chicks received another trophy. “Finally,” Mr. Ayeroff said, “I got so disgusted, I turned around and said: ‘Dude, you’re in California now. Even our Republicans are Democrats.’ ”

It has been clear for years that the preferences of the Recording Academy’s voters differ from those of the traditional Nashville powers that be, particularly country’s major radio programmers. Sunday’s results marked the fourth year in a row that the Grammy winner in the best country album category — “Taking the Long Way” this time — was one that received scant interest from country radio. Last year the winner was Alison Krauss and Union Station for “Lonely Runs Both Ways.” (The last Grammy winner for best country album with significant country radio support was “Home,” the Dixie Chicks’ previous album, which won in 2003.)

Even the Dixie Chicks seemed unsurprised by the disparity. “When you go the C.M.A.’s, Alison Krauss doesn’t win female vocalist of the year or record of the year, but she wins it at the Grammys,” Ms. Maines said backstage. Ms. Maines contrasted the academy’s voters, who are spread among 12 chapters around the nation, with the traditional country music business. “As far as radio and the industry, they’re all right there on four blocks in Nashville.”

Veteran music executives say the membership of the C.M.A. tends to include more radio industry personnel than the Recording Academy. The C.M.A. has about 5,000 members, based primarily in or around Nashville; the academy has more than 11,000 voting members across the country, working in all genres.

The Grammy voting process switches into gear after Sept. 30, the end of the academy’s annual eligibility period for recordings. As a result, many academy members may have been considering their choices at a time when much of the nation’s attention was devoted to the midterm elections, when dissatisfaction with the Iraq war and other factors resulted in the Republicans’ loss of Congress. At the same time, “Shut Up & Sing,” a documentary about the Dixie Chicks’ experience, hit movie theaters.

Grammy nominations were announced in early December, with final ballots sent to voters about a week later.

But analysts said it would be a mistake to read the Dixie Chicks’ wins as simply a reflection of left-leaning ideology rather than the desire of many voters to strike a blow for freedom of expression. Consider “American Idiot,” the 2004 album by the punk-rock band Green Day. It was rife with political imagery, including lines like “Sieg Heil to the president gasman” and won the Grammy for best rock album. But though it also received nominations for album and record of the year, it won neither.

Alpine, N.J., Home of Hip-Hop Royalty - NYTimes Feb 11, 2007

NYTimes
February 11, 2007

Alpine, N.J., Home of Hip-Hop Royalty

By DOUGLAS CENTURY

Correction Appended

ALPINE, N.J.

DRIVING north on the Palisades Interstate Parkway, it’s easy to blow past this town and end up halfway to Rockland County. But make the turn onto Old Closter Dock Road, and you’ll find yourself touring one of the richest towns in America, a hamlet of small leafy streets and stately homes, a longtime preserve of the wealthy white elite.

By Alpine’s standards Eddie Farrell’s house is hardly jaw-dropping. A five-bedroom split-level ranch with a lawn and swimming pool, it is to all outward appearances a slice of cookie-cutter, upper-middle-class domesticity.

But buzz the intercom, and a visitor soon descends into a hip-hop version of Bruce Wayne’s Batcave: a gleaming wonderland of computers, keyboards and recording gadgetry hidden behind the soundproofed suburban facade. On a recent winter morning Mr. Farrell, a producer and D.J. known professionally as Eddie F., was holding court in his Mini Mansion Recording studio. Loading a pair of MP3 files — recent releases by Young Jeezy and Jay-Z — he used the Serato Scratch Live program and a pair of time-coded control records on his Technics 1200 turntables to execute a series of precise cuts and scratches. “It’s all digital, but the sound, the touch, everything’s the same as we used to get with vinyl back in the day,” he said.

Some of the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B, from 50 Cent to TLC to Mary J. Blige, have made the pilgrimage to Mr. Farrell’s basement to record and mix hits, a fact well documented by the rows of platinum-sales plaques and Ascap songwriting awards on his walls. But his more buttoned-down neighbors would never know it. “I try to keep a real low profile,” he said, casually dressed in a gray T-shirt, gray shorts and black slippers, a diamond stud adorning his left earlobe.

He made the move from his native Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1990, at the height of his success as the D.J. of Heavy D & the Boyz. “I was one of the first out here in Alpine,” he said. “There was no one doing hip-hop out here back then. I used to have to give people real specific directions to get out here to do a session.”

Seventeen years later they all know the way. Hip-hop has come to Bergen County full force, and this tiny, affluent town has blossomed into the favored bedroom community of rap’s moneyed set, including artists like Sean (Diddy) Combs, Lil’ Kim and Fabolous and music executives like Andre Harrell and Damon Dash. Giving a tour of his home and recording complex, Mr. Farrell pointed out the loft space where Mr. Combs used to sleep. “As a matter of fact Puffy used to live with me for about a year or two,” he said, using Mr. Combs’s now-retired nom de rap.

These days Mr. Combs hardly needs to crash on a homeboy’s sofa. The house he recently bought here, for a reported $7 million, is a 17,000-square-foot hilltop mansion with eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, indoor and outdoor pools (complete with waterfall), racquetball and basketball courts, a home theater, a wine cellar and a six-car garage.

The rapper-turned-C.E.O. Andre Harrell says it all started in nearby Englewood. “The first attraction was the glamour of the Hollywood in Jersey that Eddie Murphy created,” he said. When Mr. Harrell moved to Alpine in 1990, however, he found something quite different. “The trees and the rugged kind of nature had a serenity. If you came from an environment of any sort of urban blight, it made you feel like you’ve finally made it and you’re at peace. It was so serene and storybooklike. It was the kind of thing you grew up watching on television. You said, ‘O.K., this is what the American dream is.’ ”

Fabolous, the rapper who grew up as John Jackson in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, said the seclusion and serenity in Alpine remain a major attraction for the younger generation of hip-hop stars. “It’s a quieter environment,” he said. “It’s being able to get away from the whole hustle and bustle of the city. It puts you in a different zone, into a real comfort zone when you’re working.”

The town has long been defined by its deliberately low profile. There is no thriving downtown, no velvet-rope restaurants, no reason to come here unless you belong. Even the mail knows its place: in other towns, civil servants might stride right up to your home and drop off your letters, but in Alpine, where homes are preceded by heavy gates and long driveways, your letters are respectfully held for you until you send someone for them.

Lately, however, the town has begun appearing in both lyrics and news reports. On her song “Aunt Dot,” Lil’ Kim name-checked it: “Come on Shanice, I’m takin’ you to my house in Alpine,” she rapped. And last year, when she was released from a federal prison, reporters trailed her back to her luxurious Alpine town house, where she served 30 days on house arrest.

IT marks a strange moment in the evolution of hip-hop when its stars view Ivy League-educated, old-money establishment figures as the most desirable neighbors. And it’s a strange moment in the evolution of American capital when that old-money establishment begins to view the hip-hop stars the same way.

But on one level at least it makes perfect sense, given the mainstreaming of a once underground musical genre and its celebration of C.E.O. culture. “I don’t buy out the bar, I bought the night spot/I got the right stock,” Jay-Z raps on his new album.

Jeff Chang, the author of the hip-hop history “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” said: “Rap fortunes form as powerful an American myth as is the creativity of poverty. When these rap entrepreneurs move to Alpine, they embody a new way of envisioning the classic American capitalist story. It’s why Russell Simmons and Diddy have called their clothing lines ‘urban aspirational.’ ”

On a freezing January afternoon Wendy Credle, an entertainment lawyer and real estate agent who has lived in the Alpine area for years, and Jade Stone, a bank loan officer, offered a reporter a driving tour. “The land value out here is through the roof,” Ms. Credle said. “I know people that tear down their own house and rebuild, because they’ve got such amazing property value in the land.”

The new houses resemble Mediterranean villas or small hotel complexes, with immense indoor-outdoor pools and garages that could double as airplane hangars. That kind of room, Ms. Credle said, “affords you the head space to be creative.”

Ms. Stone, who helped secure mortgages for leading rappers like Cam’ron and Biggie Smalls, said it had not always been an easy move to make: “A few years ago, I had a client — she was a major artist too — that had excellent credit, over $2 million in the bank, was buying a house for a million-five, and because she was a new, young artist, the underwriter didn’t want to give her a mortgage.” No longer, she said. “I would say that now the banks are fighting for these guys. If I bring in a client like Jim Jones” — a rapper who is part of Cam’ron’s crew — “you’ll have three or four banks competing to do his mortgage.”

In part that is a matter of pure arithmetic. “The entry level now, they’re making $20 million,” Ms. Stone said. “The entry level back then, they were making maybe a million, so they bought a three- or four-hundred-thousand-dollar town house. Then as they got bigger, like Kim, they moved up to a $800,000 town house. Then they bought the million-five home.”

And what about the other side of the hip-hop lifestyle, the partying that earned Mr. Combs the ire of some of his Hamptons neighbors? “There’s no issue where he is now,” Ms. Credle said, explaining that in the Hamptons his guests had to park on the street. “On his estate now, trust me, he’s got room to park as many guests as he wants.” It’s all very discreet. (And fittingly, through a publicist, Mr. Combs declined to comment for this article.)

Experts say the phenomenon of the newly rich gravitating toward country-club enclaves like Alpine is well established in American society. “The old adage is ‘crowding into the winner’s circle,’ ” said Jim Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. “And so these superaffluent communities are very desirable for the big winners in our society, and there’s always the contrast between the old money and new money.” Especially in the case of hip-hop stars, many of whom insist they’ll never lose touch with their street roots.

But despite these contrasts, Mr. Hughes said, these groups have more in common than it might seem. “You have the new ultra-wealthy whose wealth may have come from sports and entertainment rather than conventional business like the corporate chieftains, lawyers, hedge-fund managers and the like. But where they want to live reflects the same values. They want to live with other winners in society. They want to live in the prestige areas. They want to live in areas that are somewhat secluded and offer them protection from citizens like you and I.”

INCORPORATED in 1903, Alpine started out as a sleepy, wooded outpost. In 1937 Frank Sinatra had his first important gig here at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse where he did double duty as headwaiter. Today the population of 2,183 is still overwhelmingly white (77 percent, according to the 2000 United States census, compared with 19 percent Asian, 2.5 percent Latino and 1.5 percent African-American). But the roadhouse era is long gone.

In 2005 Alpine’s ZIP code, 07620, was identified by American Demographics magazine as the seventh most affluent in the country. And a high percentage of the black homeowners are celebrities from the worlds of music, film and sports, like Chris Rock, Stevie Wonder, Wesley Snipes, Gary Sheffield and Patrick Ewing.

Still, the public culture of celebrity does not seem to have followed them home. “Alpine was always a pretty sleepy place, and that’s the way we try to keep it,” said Paul Tomasko, the town’s mayor. “You mentioned Stevie Wonder. He has owned a house here for quite a while now, but we rarely see him around. In fact I’ve never seen him here. You mentioned Chris Rock. I’ve seen him a total of one time in all the years that he has lived here.”

Mr. Farrell said music industry heavyweights run into one another at places like Dimora Ristorante, in Norwood, or the Kiku sushi house in Alpine. They say hello at the post office. That’s about it.

The adjacent towns of Bergen County have their own constellation of hip-hop stars. Wyclef Jean, Reverend Run and Ja Rule are Saddle River residents. Mary J. Blige has a mansion in Cresskill. Yet even among these elite addresses, Alpine has a distinct cachet. One of New Jersey’s leading real estate agents, Michele Kolsky-Assatly of Coldwell Banker, said that had to do with its limited housing supply. The last remaining privately held country clubs were sold off in the past few years and turned into Alpine’s newest cul de sac neighborhoods. “There is no more land in eastern Bergen County,” she said. “It is gone. The land is finished.”

Ms. Kolsky-Assatly, who has worked with Damon Dash and Jay-Z, added that unlike older communities in Westchester County or Long Island, these new neighborhoods — which she says her clientele prefers — have no history of discrimination. “There’s no historical anything,” she said. “This is all new.”

Though the median house price in Alpine has been estimated by Forbes at more than $1.7 million, real estate experts say the numbers are now much higher. “This side of the street is Cresskill; this side is Alpine,” Ms. Kolsky-Assatly said during a recent drive. “These are all two-acre lots, each worth between two and a half to three million dollars for the land alone. On the Cresskill side the houses go for five million and change; on the Alpine side they go for double that.” But taxes are low: there are few public school students and a minuscule police force.

Hip-hop is a culture that emerged amid urban deprivation. From the bombed-out wasteland of the South Bronx in the mid-’70s, a young generation created new beats from the breaks in old funk and disco records, often pirating power from street lamps for “park jams” where the likes of Grandmaster Flash would spin.

They dreamed of something better, but it was all relative. “When we were starting out with Heavy D,” Mr. Farrell said, “I remember guys rapping about Jettas like it was this almost unattainable car.” Big Bank Hank of the Sugar Hill Gang, in the seminal “Rapper’s Delight,” boasted of having “a color TV, so I can see the Knicks play basketball.”

Can leafy suburbs and 21st-century mansions be equally conducive to that creative process? Mr. Farrell shrugged: “By the time you’re getting ready to make records, you’ve pretty much lived a whole lifetime of music culture. You’ve been in the streets, you’ve been in the clubs. So at the end of the day you can go into Sony studios in Manhattan or come to my place.”

In designing Mini Mansion Recording, he said, he attempted to bring the best aspects of several popular hip-hop recording spots to Bergen County, right down to the 1980s vintage Pac-Man video game in the studio lounge. And he modeled his mixing console on that of Greene Street Recording, where Hank Shocklee recorded Public Enemy.

But what about lyrical content? Can a rapper really stay true to his street roots when his neighbors are horseback-riding hedge-fund managers and wild deer are scampering across his dew-covered front lawn?

“First of all, when you talk about New Jersey, you’re not talking about Beverly Hills,” Mr. Harrell said. “The influence of the urban experience is 30 minutes away, but you don’t have to be in the noise all the time.” He added, “You have to have quiet as an artist to hear your inner voice.”

And Fabolous said he had not entirely isolated himself. “I still go back to Brooklyn all the time,” he said, “just to remind myself how far I’ve come and get inspiration from that. And I don’t think if I see a deer on my lawn, it will shake me too much.” He added, laughing, “If I do see a deer, it might be something funny I can put in a rhyme.”

Correction: February 11, 2007

Because of an editing error, the continuation of a front-page article in Arts & Leisure today about Alpine, N.J., and the hip-hop stars who live there, omits a passage at the bottom of the third column and also omits the final three words of the article.

The first passage should read: “Hip-hop is a culture that emerged amid urban deprivation. From the bombed-out wasteland of the South Bronx in the mid-’70s, a young generation created new beats from the breaks in old funk and disco records, often pirating power from street lamps for ‘park jams’ where the likes of Grandmaster Flash would spin.”

The last paragraph should read: “And Fabolous said he had not entirely isolated himself. ‘I still go back to Brooklyn all the time,’ he said, ‘just to remind myself how far I’ve come and get inspiration from that. And I don’t think if I see a deer on my lawn, it will shake me too much.’ He added, laughing, ‘If I do see a deer, it might be something funny I can put in a rhyme.’ ”