Image and Authenticity in Popular Music

The Shrinking Market Is Changing the Face of Hip-Hop (NY Times)

2007-12-29T16:08:00.000-08:00

New York Times
December 30, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/arts/music/30sann.html?ref=arts

By KELEFA SANNEH

UNTIL a few weeks ago it seemed like one of the few happy stories to emerge from an otherwise difficult year in hip-hop. UGK, the Port Arthur, Tex., duo that influenced a generation of Southern rappers, returned after a five-year hiatus. They came back bearing a sublime single, “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You).” And they came back bearing a great double album, “Underground Kingz” (Jive/Zomba), which made its debut atop Billboard’s album chart.

Then, on Dec. 4, the news arrived: Pimp C — the duo’s flamboyant half, a slick drawler and an even slicker producer — had been found dead in his hotel room. His bereaved musical partner, Bun B, gave a handful of eloquent interviews, trying to explain what he had lost, what fans had lost.

“I appreciate the concern,” he told Vibe. “But I wouldn’t ask anyone to stop their life, because Pimp would’ve wanted us all to keep grinding.”

If you’re looking for a two-word motto for hip-hop in 2007, you could do worse than that: “Keep grinding.” This was the year when the gleaming hip-hop machine — the one that minted a long string of big-name stars, from Snoop Dogg to OutKast — finally broke down, leaving rappers no alternative but to work harder, and for fewer rewards. Newcomers arrived with big singles and bigger hopes, only to fall off the charts after selling a few hundred thousand copies, if that. Hip-pop hybrids dominated the radio, but rappers themselves seemed like underground figures, for the first time in nearly two decades.

Sales are down all over, but hip-hop has been hit particularly hard. Rap sales slid fell 21 percent from 2005 to 2006, and that trend seems to be continuing. It’s the inevitable aftermath, perhaps, of the genre’s vertiginous rise in the 1990s, during which a series of breakout stars — Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. — figured out that they could sell millions without shaving off their rough edges. By 1997 the ubiquity of Puff Daddy helped cement hip-hop’s new image: the rapper as tycoon. Like all pop-music trends, like all economic booms, this one couldn’t last.

This was a bad year for hip-hop sales, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad year for the genre. The scrappy New York independent Koch flourished, releasing a couple of great CDs by major-label refugees: “Return of the Mac,” by Prodigy from Mobb Deep, and “Walkin’ Bank Roll,” by Project Pat. (Koch also released “We the Best,” a sanctioned mixtape by DJ Khaled that produced a couple of hip-hop hits, and “The Brick: Bodega Chronicles,” the well-received debut album from Joell Ortiz.)

And then there is Turf Talk, a loudmouthed upstart from Vallejo, Calif., who made arguably the year’s most exciting hip-hop album, “West Coast Vaccine (The Cure).” It came out through Sick Wid’ It Records, which is run by his cousin, the rapper E-40. (The album was released through a distribution deal with Navarre, which sold its music distribution business to Koch in May.) And despite Turf Talk’s flamboyant rhymes, the album has pretty much remained a secret. Without a national radio hit or even a proper music video, Turf Talk has promoted the CD mainly through West Coast regional shows, from San Diego to Tacoma, Wash.

Reached by telephone at his home in Concord, Calif., Turf Talk tried to put the best spin on a mixed-up year. “The independent game is starting to shine again,” he said. But when pressed, he said he would love to cross over to the mainstream, speaking in the third person: “Turf Talk wants to be known all across the world.”

A few years ago that might have seemed like a reasonable goal, and an attainable one. During the boom the industry was flooded with scowling optimists: small-time hustlers with dreams of big-time success. And some dreams came true. In 1998 Juvenile went from a New Orleans secret to a pop radio staple, selling five million copies of “400 Degreez”; two years later, Nelly came from nowhere (actually St. Louis) to sell six million copies of “Country Grammar.” Overall CD sales peaked in 2000, and by then even second-tier major-label rappers were routinely earning gold plaques for shipping half a million CDs.

Because hip-hop is so intensely self-aware, and self-reflexive, it came to be known as big-money music, a genre obsessed with its own success. If we are now entering an age of diminished commercial expectations, that will inevitably change how hip-hop sounds too.

How bad are the numbers? Well, no rapper was more diminished by 2007 than 50 Cent, who challenged Kanye West to a sales battle and lost. His solid but not thrilling recent album, “Curtis” (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope), has sold about 1.2 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan; considering that he’s supposed to be the genre’s biggest star, that’s a disaster. (His 2005 album, “The Massacre,” sold more than five million.) In fact “Curtis” has sold about the same as T. I.’s “T. I. vs. T. I. P.” (Atlantic), the underwhelming and underperforming follow-up to his great 2006 album, “King,” which sold about 1.6 million.

This year veterans like Jay-Z and Wu-Tang Clan also returned, pleasing old fans but not, for the most part, making new ones. And Lil Wayne released another slew of great mixtapes — available for free download, not for sale. Meanwhile Mr. West’s “Graduation” (Roc-A-Fella/Island Def Jam), which stands at 1.8 million sold and counting, is the only hip-hop album of the year that really seems like a hit, although he loves to portray himself as outside the hip-hop mainstream. Only one problem: After a year when the hitmaker Fabolous and the bohemian Common sold about equally, as did the BET favorite Yung Joc and the indie-rap alumnus Talib Kweli, it’s not clear that there’s still a hip-hop mainstream to be outside.

And eager newcomers discovered that the definition of success has changed. Rich Boy, Shop Boyz, Plies, Hurricane Chris and Soulja Boy Tell’em all released major-label debuts, buoyed by big, lovable hits: “Throw Some D’s,” “Party Like a Rockstar,” “Shawty,” “A Bay Bay” and “Crank That (Soulja Boy).” But of those only Soulja Boy has managed to sell half a million CDs. Hurricane Chris’s disappointing CD, “51/50 Ratchet” (Polo Grounds/J Records), has sold only about 80,000 copies. To a major label that number is almost indistinguishable from zero. (Despite the hit the No. 1 chart debut and the half-decade of anticipation, UGK’s triumphant double album hasn’t reached the half-million mark either.)

Hip-hop has always had a complicated relationship with full-length albums. They’re both too long (for impatient hit lovers) and too short (for ephemera- obsessed mixtape listeners). And even though the South has been hip-hop’s most fertile region since the 1990s, the industry, based in New York and Los Angeles, harbors a lingering anti-Southern bias. Southern rappers are often viewed as one-hit wonders, and that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time Rich Boy, from Mobile, Ala., tried to drum up interest in his excellent fourth single, “Let’s Get This Paper,” it seemed everybody had already moved on.

At least independent-label rappers have no one to blame. Turf Talk knew from the start that he would have to fight for his album, which he released in June. “I had a lot of hopes for ‘West Coast Vaccine,’ that’s why I’m still pushing it now,” he said, adding that he was finalizing plans for a video. The song he chose was “Popo’s,” a sleek and infectious collaboration with E-40, who adds a memorable touch: a thunderous “Oooh!” In his mesmerizing verses, Turf Talk raps about selling drugs and avoiding the police. His breathless rhymes — “I’m tryna stack every dollar,” he pants — evoke not a kingpin’s confidence but a survivor’s tenacity.

It’s easy to romanticize Turf Talk’s grass-roots approach: his do-it-yourself video shoot, his evident pride in how much he has accomplished on his own, his commitment to the family business. But for him the promise of exposure and the long shot at stardom are too tempting to reject.

“I love the independent money,” he said. “I’m living good, I drive nice cars. But right now, if you asked me, I’d say, ‘Turf Talk wants to go major.’ Because you can always come back to independent.”

That’s what Prodigy discovered. Last year his duo, Mobb Deep, flopped with “Blood Money,” a misconceived CD on 50 Cent’s label, G Unit, an Interscope imprint. This year he went independent for “Return of the Mac,” a hallucinogenic, willfully obscure solo album that evokes the grimy old New York, and the grimy old Prodigy too. (It sold about 130,000 copies.) He has a new album scheduled for next year, though he pleaded guilty in October to gun possession and was sentenced to three and a half years. His new single, “ABC’s,” begins with a halfway defensive boast: “It don’t matter who poppin’ for the moment/P is forever.” If you’re not making hits, why not claim to be making history?

Like Prodigy, Project Pat is a major-label refugee. He emerged from Memphis in the late ’90s and swiftly took advantage of the hip-hop boom. “Chickenhead,” his memorable but medium-sized hit (it peaked at No. 24 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart), helped his 2001 major-label album, “Mista Don’t Play: Everythangs Workin,” sell nearly 1.1 million copies. (Five years ago, in other words, Project Pat sold about as well as 50 Cent sells today.)

After a prison sentence and an underperforming major-label comeback, Project Pat made his Koch debut with “Walkin’ Bank Roll.” The boast in the title track is a defiant (and typically absurd) response to his diminished commercial success: “I’m a walkin’ bank roll/You can rubber-band me,” he keeps shouting, and his glee is infectious. It’s a weird, funny little album; though it has sold only about 40,000 copies, it feels triumphant.

Is it possible to hear a shrug over the phone? Project Pat, when asked about his newfound independence, seemed profoundly unimpressed. “It’s the same old, same old,” he shouted, over the roar of a Mortal Kombat game, though he conceded, “People say they liked it better.” He said he was planning his next album and gearing up for more live dates, which are crucial for independent acts. “Alaska — yessirrr, Anchorage,” he said, sounding a bit like the eccentric rapper from the CDs. “They asked for me per-son-al-ly.”

Under-the-radar releases, weird tour schedules, modest sales figures: none of this is new. The success of Southern hip-hop in the last decade was built on a foundation of independent and independent-minded rappers, many of whom worked with the scrappy regional distributor Southwest Wholesale, which is now closed, like many of the little shops it used to serve. In an earlier era these regional scenes were farm teams for the industry, grooming the top players and then sending them up to the big leagues. But what if there are no big leagues anymore? What if there’s no major label willing or able to help Turf Talk get his platinum plaque? Would his next album sound as brash? Will his musical descendants be as motivated? The mainstream hip-hop industry relies on a thriving underground, but isn’t the reverse also true?

Eventually, a (new?) group of executives will find a business model that doesn’t depend on shiny plastic discs, or digital tracks bundled together to approximate them. But for now the major league is starting to look a lot like the minor one. And in ways good and bad and utterly unpredictable, rappers may have to reconsider their place in the universe, and their audience. Some will redouble their commitment to nonsense, like Project Pat. Some will wallow in their misery, like Prodigy. Some will merely revel in their own loudmouthiness, like Turf Talk, hoping someone will pay attention. But if sales keep falling, more and more rappers will have to face the fact that they aren’t addressing a crowd, just a sliver of one.

On Oct. 14, less than two months before Pimp C’s death, there was another death in the Houston hip-hop family. His name was Big Moe, and he died of a heart attack. He was a much more local figure than Pimp C: a crooner turned rapper and an associate of DJ Screw, who popularized the art of remixing records by slowing them down. (DJ Screw died in 2000.) Big Moe’s best tracks are sublime and disorienting. His was a huge, wobbly sing- rapping voice, often paired with slowed-down drums and lyrics extolling the pleasures of cough syrup.

Big Moe eventually got himself a deal, but his odd and entertaining 2002 major- label debut, “Purple World” (Priority/Capitol), quickly disappeared, and soon he was back to independent releases. It’s no slight to his legacy to say that when news of his death arrived in October, even most hip-hop fans didn’t know who he was. That’s all right. Music that seems lost — there’s a head-spinning selection on “Big Moe Classics Volume One” (Wreckshop) — will be found, over and over again. And after this dispiriting year, it’s not hard to admire Big Moe’s little career. He made secrets, not hits, but so what? He kept grinding.

My 33 Black Angels

2007-10-31T06:06:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Bryan F. for the tip on this band, My 33 Black Angels.

They self-released a vinyl only LP this spring called Lonely Street, which was praised by Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Fricke in October.

Check them out on their myspace page: www.myspace.com/your33blackangels

Jeff Chang in Mother Jones

2007-10-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

Fight The Power: A New Movement for Civil Rights
Can hip-hop get past the thug life and back to its radical roots?

Jeff Chang
November , 2007, Mother Jones

jerry quickley, hip-hop poet, performance artist, and war correspondent, has seen hell. It is a post-"liberated" Baghdad street, jammed with beat-up Brazilian and Czech sedans spewing trails of carbon monoxide, clouds of dust thickening in the 125-degree heat. He is riding shotgun in an Iraqi friend's car. "You have no traffic lights because there's no electricity," he says. "You have no police because they'd just be shot or blown up. You can barely breathe." U.S. soldiers fire into the air to clear traffic and scare off would-be bombers, and Iraqi drivers ram into each other as they scramble to get out of the way. "And while this is all going on," Quickley says, "this friend of mine is playing songs by 50 Cent."

The top-selling do-ragged and body-oiled rapper—whose smash debut was entitled Get Rich or Die Tryin' and whose 2005 album The Massacre occasioned a book, a feature movie, a bloody video game, a bling-encrusted line of watches, shoe and "enhanced water" endorsements, not to mention tabloid headlines about a beef with a former protégé culminating in real-life shootings—warbles through the busted car stereo in a nasal drawl: "Many men wish death upon me."

"Sartre was right," thought Quickley. "This is No Exit."

For many, this is what hip-hop has become: an omnipresent, grisly, übermacho soundtrack. Don Imus unleashed the latest hip-hop backlash when he noted that in calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" he was using an argot popularized by rappers. The frenzy of finger-pointing that followed culminated with the spectacle of Bill O'Reilly lecturing hip-hop advocates on sexism and the "n-word" while Oprah berated Russell Simmons and other industry executives.

The talk show circus aside, there's plenty of evidence that people are weary of corporate rap. Only 59 million rap albums were sold in the United States last year, down from 90 million in 2001. According to a University of Chicago study, most youths—whether black, white, or Hispanic—believe that rap videos portray women of color in a negative light. Once a cacophony of diverse voices, the genre now looks like a monoculture whose product, like high-fructose corn syrup, is designed not to nourish but simply to get us hooked on other products, from McDonald's to Courvoisier.

Quickley, though, remains a true believer in hip-hop's transformational potential. For him, it goes back to the summer of 1976, three years before the Sugarhill Gang's breakthrough hit "Rapper's Delight." He was 12 and sitting on a scorching nyc stoop when someone popped in a cassette tape featuring a DJ mixing up bombastic rhythms on two turntables. It rocked his young world. He started visiting block parties to hear DJs spin and rappers rap, and soon learned how to mix. He jumped the subway turnstiles and became a graffiti bomber. After poetry overtook doodling in his sketchbooks, he became a rapper.

To Quickley and to millions of others, the new genre's appeal was visceral. It was a true counterculture, skirting legality and authority with a smirk. It broke down social barriers. DJs mixed Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith with James Brown and the Meters. By the mid-'80s hip-hop looked like the most significant youth movement since the '60s. It expanded beyond the original "four elements"—rap, DJing, graffiti writing, and b-boying (also known, incorrectly, as break dancing)—into virtually every art form and became the lingua franca for an increasingly connected, polycultural world.

Back then, "media assassin" and Public Enemy collaborator Harry Allen coined the phrase "hip-hop activism" to describe the movement's potential to spur social change. But as industry execs began to capitalize on hip-hop's popularity, its renegade spirit was largely suppressed by displays of conspicuous consumption and gratuitous machismo.

But now, with the industry on the ropes and the political sphere energized, the transformative power of hip-hop may finally be reemerging. Over the past decade, hip-hop-based community groups have recharged the social justice movement and launched get-out-the-vote campaigns in neighborhoods most candidates and parties wouldn't touch. (Full disclosure: I have been active in two of these groups, serving on the board of the League of Young Voters and organizing for the National Hip-Hop Political Convention.) Even moguls such as Jay-Z, Simmons, and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs have thrown their weight behind voter outreach. And while the results are hard to track case by case, one massive shift is undeniable: In 2004, half of the 4 million new voters under 30 were people of color—a demographic watershed largely overlooked by the media.

"It's one of the wonders of the world that this little neighborhood thing, that when I started vibing on it was maybe 10,000 kids running around the city, has completely changed the face of the planet," Quickley says. "All the corporations and commercial interests try to tell you otherwise, but I've seen it go down like that in my lifetime."

Bronx Beats to Suburban Streets
Hip-hop began in the Bronx, a borough ripped in two by Robert Moses' Cross-Bronx Expressway. Stranded by deindustrialization, half the Bronx's white residents fled; the borough was left for dead by city officials. Slumlording and arson reduced housing stock by four blocks a week. In the abandoned tenements, gangs replaced families.

But an unprecedented 1971 gang peace treaty unleashed the creative explosion that became known as hip-hop. It didn't start out as an explicitly political movement—more like a set of pastimes poor kids devised to celebrate their survival. They spray-painted aliases on walls and subways, rapped Jamaican-style over funky Afro-Latin-influenced groove records, and danced to the percussive breaks. "To go from running down the block to escape a gang to being able to walk any block freely, that's one of the greatest joys," says Tony Tone, a gang member who quit and became part of the pioneering rap group the Cold Crush Brothers. "Hip-hop saved a lot of lives."

This Bronx scene spread across the country, remixed and revitalized in each community, and by the late '80s, hip-hop was articulating an emerging post-civil rights worldview. Rap artists like Chuck D and KRS-ONE spotlighted the effects of crack and violence on inner-city youths and openly questioned why black community leaders were neither addressing these urgent issues nor mentoring young leaders. Carmen Ashhurst was a filmmaker who, in 1988, went to work for Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons (whose brother is DJ Run from RUN D.M.C.). To her, the motivation to switch genres was clear: "Getting control of our images," she says. "This was young people who at that time weren't being listened to by anybody. Rap became a de facto voice of black America." Or, more accurately, voices. A 1991 Public Enemy tour included acts as disparate as L.A. gangsta pioneer Ice T, style maestros A Tribe Called Quest, and future actors Queen Latifah and Will Smith.

By then, every pundit and politician had an opinion about rap, whether they'd listened to it or not. Some commentators valued rap's truth-telling, but not all understood its shit-talking. Battle-rhyming—boasting about yourself and denigrating your competitor—has been a source of vitality and innovation for the genre. And as far back as the Sugarhill Gang, the braggadocio included brand-name dropping and talk of having "more money than a sucker could ever spend"; there was always an aspirational aspect to this poetry born of poverty.

But songs like N.W.A.'s 1988 "Fuck tha Police"—a prescient condemnation of the racist lapd—scared people. In the wake of the 1992 L.A. riots, a rising tide of anti-rap sentiment cohered into a full-blown culture war as conservatives like Bob Dole joined Tipper Gore, civil rights leaders like C. Delores Tucker, and key Democrats like Carol Moseley-Braun and Joe Lieberman in an alliance to stamp out so-called "gangsta rap." Lobbies like the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Rifle Association forced record labels to drop "politically sensitive" acts like Paris, Kool G. Rap, and Intelligent Hoodlum.

The plan backfired completely. As with rock and roll a generation before, being attacked by a bunch of parents was the quickest way for hip-hop to gain cred with a wider audience of kids. By 1995, rap was one of music's best-selling genres.

For entrepreneurs like Simmons, rap's new crossover appeal represented an enormous business opportunity. "He sold the concept to the mainstream that hip-hop was a lifestyle, not just a music," says Ashhurst, who became president of Def Jam in 1990. By 1999, Simmons sold his share of Def Jam to concentrate on "the urban aspirational lifestyle" market, where, he told me, "there's always room for growth."

The Rap Monoculture
As hip-hop became a big business, the major labels went on a buying spree, making instant fortunes for indie-minded artist/entrepreneurs like Percy "Master P" Miller, Earl "E-40" Stevens, Bryan "Baby" Williams, and Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter. But the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act massively increased economies of scale and put pressure on companies to reduce risk. Six major labels merged into four, laid off hundreds of employees, and sharply narrowed the range of voices, styles, and stories with access to global distribution. At the same time, radio giants like Clear Channel limited playlists, video and radio budgets skyrocketed, and payola thrived.

The rich boil of rhyme spinners, sweet-tongued slick talkers, streetwise corner boys, high-minded race men and women, my-block griots, kente-clothed Afrocentrists, and chest-thumping Alis gave way to a bland array of hosts and hostesses for the Bling Shopping Network. Corporate hip-hop's monoculture made icons of synergy-friendly male acts, pushed women back to the margins, and shut out emerging gay and lesbian voices completely. If it wasn't "Gin and Juice" or "Baby Got Back," it didn't get corporate love. "It's really gotten to the point where the only acceptable public image for young black men is some variation on thuggery," says Ashhurst, who quit the music industry in 1996 over its rising tide of sexism and violence and is now writing a memoir called Selling My Brothers.

Paul Porter, cofounder of the media-justice think tank Industry Ears, saw these changes firsthand as bet's hip-hop video program director. "We used to see the same storyboard of sex, drugs, rims, and attitude," he says. "We used to vote out some of these videos all the time, and up to 2000, there was a point when we used to blur out champagne bottles. And then it came down to the line where—I'll never forget when [then-bet owner] Bob Johnson called me—this is 1999—I was having some issues with Def Jam executives, and he said, 'Play the video. Def Jam spent $3 million. Just play the video.' And that's when I knew it had gone haywire." As Jay-Z, who is now Def Jam's ceo, famously rapped, "I dumb down for my audience and double my dollars. They criticize me for it, yet they all yell 'Holla.'"

In Beyond Beats & Rhymes, documentary filmmaker Byron Hurt's "loving critique" of hip-hop's misogyny and homophobia (which aired on pbs), Hurt asks unsigned rappers gathered outside an industry event to audition for him. Their clichéd battle rhymes are predictably bloody, sexist, and homophobic. When Hurt challenges them, they lament that this is the only rap that gets record deals. "The expectations are so well known that the artists conform to them," says Hurt.

As Hurt notes, by embracing the image of black men as oversexed thugs, corporate rap perpetuates age-old stereotypes. There is, Simmons acknowledges, "a streak of negativity on the part of some executives. There are some opportunities for short-term success on stereotypical ideas. But that shakes itself out. Artificial artists lose their footing."

Porter is less optimistic. "If this is the only thing the public hears, that's what they're gonna want," he says. "It's common sense. If McDonald's is on every corner, eventually you go into a McDonald's. Don't tell me that because it sells, it's good. Crack sells."

Superpredators to Super Tuesday
What created the dominance of "thug rap"? Was it rappers "keeping it real," a cynical industry, or the politics of fear? It's worth noting that the hip-hop generation came of age as America's attitudes toward urban youths morphed from "benign neglect" to "lock 'em all up." It was John DiIulio, President George W. Bush's first director of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who argued in the early 1990s that rising numbers of youths of color meant Americans would be facing a generation of "superpredators." Juvenile crime was well on its way to historical lows, but politicians on both sides of the aisle raced to pass draconian policies that packed prisons and jails with small-time drug and "anti-loitering"offenders. Is it any wonder that thuggery sold?

If government seemed to be writing off young people, they responded in kind. After helping to elect Bill Clinton in 1992, the year of Rock the Vote, youth turnout plunged. This has been misread as apathy. But a growing body of evidence suggests otherwise. Rates of volunteerism and activism are twice as high among those under 25 as they are among boomers. In 2006, a longitudinal national survey of college freshmen run by ucla found that half of those polled had participated in a demonstration during the past year—three times more than in '66, at the peak of the civil rights movement. And that University of Chicago study found that a majority of today's black and Hispanic youths felt that government cared very little about them. Yet more than three in four also believed they could make a difference by participating in politics.

And in 2004, they did. Together, Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and P. Diddy's Citizen Change Campaign, grassroots groups like the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and League of Young Voters, and a number of anti-Bush and antiwar hip-hop anthems and videos by artists ranging from Kanye West to Eminem all urged youths to vote. Exit polls documented 4 million new voters under 30, the biggest youth surge since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1972. More than half were people of color. Similar polls in 2006 confirmed these trends. What's more, in '06 voters under 30 went Democratic by a nearly 3-to-2 margin. The numbers weren't the result of concentrated party efforts like, say, Karl Rove's work with evangelical voters. In fact, not until after the elections did Democratic strategists Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira gush in a white paper that 18- to 24-year-olds at the tip of an 80-million-strong "millennial" boomlet are "an enormous asset for progressives going forward." (See "The 50-Year Strategy," page 62.)

Big electoral trends aside, some of the most interesting work in hip-hop politics has been done at the local level, where militant skepticism and passionate pragmatism have quietly built a network of visionary, rough-and-ready organizations. The most innovative—such as Boston's Youth Organizing Project, Brooklyn's Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Chicago's Southwest Youth Collaborative/University of Hip-Hop, Cincinnati's Elementz, and Selma's 21st Century Youth Leadership Project—blur the lines between politics and culture, using art, dance, rap production, or turntablism to leverage kids into fierce political action.

As Jakada Imani of Oakland's Ella Baker Center for Human Rights notes, "Hip-hop is primarily about reshaping the world in our image. It's the same in social change. That means figuring out how to tell the truth and get heads to nod at the same time."

In the past five years, hip-hop organizers have stopped construction of juvenile detention facilities in California and New York City, helped can environmental deregulation legislation in New Mexico, passed a college debt-forgiveness initiative in Maine, created networks for Katrina survivors across the South, and helped elect dozens of local candidates. Organizations such as Oakland's Youth Media Council and New York City's R.E.A.C.Hip-Hop and hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa's Balance the Airwaves Campaign have prodded radio monopolies such as Clear Channel and Emmis Communications to play more local music and feature more progressive voices. After convincing the city of Oakland to fund a Green Job Corps training program for inner-city youths, the Ella Baker Center got Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) and Nancy Pelosi to insert language into a House energy bill creating a $25 million Green Jobs Act.

And from Oakland to Newark, hip-hop organizations are taking on the old issues of poverty and gun violence. In Milwaukee, where 28 shootings were reported last Memorial Day alone, the three-year-old hip-hop organization Campaign Against Violence deals with these demons every day; a brother of one of the organizers was killed in late 2006.

"Milwaukee is so much further down the [conservative] path than other cities," says the campaign's 29-year-old political director Rob "Biko" Baker. "They got rid of welfare here first. They privatized schools here first. On the coasts, there are still resources; there's a professionalization of the organizing. Here it's just straight raw and uncut. So what do we do so that people don't die?"

Milwaukee officials have mostly offered more tough-on-crime measures. By contrast, the campaign, which has a staff of 7 and a volunteer force of 20, has trained thousands of youths in conflict resolution. Key to its work are poetry workshops in schools and juvenile detention facilities, where kids are asked to complete the sentences "The truth is..." and "Where I'm from..." They then read their answers aloud to each other—"The truth is I don't want to go to jail" or "Where I'm from people get killed."

"After they release that," says 31-year-old education director Carey "C.J." Jenkins, "they're ready for the business. They're ready to organize."

By combining "soft" cultural work and "hard" door-to-door organizing, the campaign has built a sizable base. When police officers were acquitted in the brutal beating of a biracial man in 2004, its protests helped make it a federal case. In 2006, the group turned out 15,000 mostly first-time voters. Recently, Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle made the campaign's proposal to close a loophole used by unlicensed gun dealers the centerpiece of his anticrime initiative.

"Organizing the community, it's really not so much about votes," says Jenkins, who himself never voted before getting involved with the campaign in 2005. "It's about maturity and understanding that politics play a part in your everyday life."

Hip-Hop Is Dead; Long Live Hip-Hop
In 2006, when Nas released Hip-Hop Is Dead, no rap albums were among the year's top 10 best-sellers. Former bet executive Porter says, "I blame the record companies. They're sticking with the same formula. Hip-hop's 30 years old now, and they've been stuck on stupid for 10 years."

In the wake of the Imus debacle, Simmons and Dr. Ben Chavis of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network called a meeting of industry big shots to address sexism in rap. Gathered at the home of Warner Music Group head Lyor Cohen, the execs couldn't reach consensus—some worried about censorship, others wanted to let the issue blow over—so a week later, Chavis and Simmons called for a voluntary ban on "nigger" and "bitch." That wasn't enough to stop a new round of congressional hearings, though Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), the former Black Panther who called for them, said he was hoping not to use "regulatory solutions." By the end of the summer, the rap game seemed somehow more...civil. When 50 Cent first heard that Kanye West's record was dropping the same day as his, he did make threats—but only to quit the game. And by September the two were sharing a Rolling Stone cover; blogs circulated pictures of them hugging after the photo shoot. And if hip-hop activists emerged in part to scream at their elders, now they seem eager to collaborate. "Young people certainly need to be at the forefront of any movement," says Nicole Lee, political director of the Ella Baker Center. "But we can't do it by ourselves. Any movement for peace has to have reconciliation as a core commitment. We're making a shift from the politics of complaint to the politics of possibility."

Can hip-hop grow into its potential? Can rap sell activism as well as it has $150 sneakers, bottle service, and grill work? Can the very people who've made vast fortunes off selling stupid help reform the industry? "The thing I love about hip-hop," says Chavis, "is that it is evolutionary. It replenishes itself. I get in trouble all the time for saying this, but hip-hop is doing what the civil rights movement was only dreaming about."

The Trouble With Indie Rock - Carl Wilson, Slate.com

2007-10-19T04:53:00.000-07:00

The Trouble With Indie Rock

It's not just race. It's class.

By Carl Wilson
Posted Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007, at 5:53 PM ET

New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones has often indicated boredom and annoyance with a lot of the critically acclaimed, music-blog, and/or NPR-approved "indie rock" of this decade. This week, in an article, a couple of blog entries, and a podcast, he tries to articulate why. His answer? It's not black enough; it lacks "swing, some empty space and palpable bass frequencies"; it doesn't participate lustily in the grand (and problematic) tradition of musical "miscegenation" that's given American music, especially rock 'n' roll, its kick.

To give bite to the accusation, Frere-Jones names a few names, beginning with the Arcade Fire and adding Wilco, the Fiery Furnaces, the Decemberists, the Shins, Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear, and Devendra Banhart, plus indie-heroes past, Pavement. He contrasts them with the likes of the Clash, Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Public Image Ltd., Bob Dylan, the Minutemen, Nirvana, and even Grand Funk Railroad as examples of willful, gleeful, racial-sound-barrier-breaching white rockers of yore.

As indicated in his pre-emptive blog post, the piece is a provocation, as is Frere-Jones's M.O., and that is welcome at a time when musical discussion revolves numbingly around which digital-distribution method can be most effectively "monetized." (Current champ: Radiohead.) But many commentators have pointed out his article's basic problems of consistency and accuracy: Frere-Jones' story is that the rise of Pavement as role models and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg as rivals in the 1990s marked a quick indie retreat from bluesiness and danceability. Yet the conscious and iconoclastic excision of blues-rock from "underground" rock goes back to the '70s and '80s origins of American punk and especially hardcore, from which indie complicatedly evolved.

While it's possible to cherry-pick exceptions ever since, Frere-Jones does so selectively, overlooking the likes of Royal Trux or the Afghan Whigs in the 1990s, or more recently, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Spoon, Battles and the dance-punks LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, and Junior Senior, all of whom appear on his own best-of-the-year list in progress. Last March, in direct contradiction to what he says in this week's New Yorker essay, Frere-Jones wrote in an LCD Soundsystem review: "About five years ago, indie rockers began to rediscover the pleasures of rhythm." Where are those indie rockers now? Vanished, because they would mess with his thesis. He isn't really talking about all of indie rock, but a folkier subset that's hardly trying to be rock at all. But to say so would be less dramatic.

The article also tends troublingly to reduce "black music" to rhythm and sexuality, and to elide the differences between, say, funk, soul, disco, folk-blues, Caribbean, and African influences in white rock. While he justifiably frames the issue as an American one, at least half of Frere-Jones' lauded precedents are British, a context in which appropriating black American music has vastly different connotations. His lead example, the Arcade Fire, is likewise un-American, hailing from Montreal (one of its leaders, Régine Chassagne, has family roots in Haiti). The piece also switches at its convenience between mainstream rock history and the "underground" genealogy of indie, while never balancing the scales by addressing current hit-making rockers like Fall Out Boy or the White Stripes, who remain heavier on groove.

One could go on playing "gotcha" at the expense of Frere-Jones' intended thrust, which mainly indicates that this piece needed another draft or two. This is odd, because "indie whiteness" is a subject he's been banging on about in many forums for several years. (Frere-Jones is also a sometime white-indie-rocker himself.) His consistent mistake seems to be to talk about musical issues as if they were nearly autonomous from larger social dynamics. It's the blind spot of a genuine music lover, but it grants music culture too much power and assigns it too much blame.

For instance, the separation of racial influences in American music arguably begins with the 1970s demise of Top 40 radio, which coincided with the Black Power movement and the withering of the integrationist ideals of the civil rights era. Frere-Jones nods in this direction when he talks about "political correctness," but he reduces the issue to an "academic" critique rather than a vast shift in racial relations and, more importantly, expectations. The brands of "authenticity" that both punk and hip-hop came to demand, which tended to discourage the cross-pollination and "miscegenation" of musical forms, are in keeping with the identity politics that became dominant in the 1980s as well as the de facto resegregation of black and white communities that began in the Reagan era. This is the counternarrative to the cultural-level "social progress" that Frere-Jones rightly points out, in which explicit racism has retreated and black entertainers have come to dominate the mainstream.

It's not just because Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre were such great artists that white people were afraid to imitate them—they're no better than John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Muddy Waters, and dozens of others whom white artists have happily mimicked in the past. Rather it's that this kind of "theft" became a capital cultural crime, and not just in the academy (how many '90s indie rockers knew by heart the verses in "Fight the Power," where Public Enemy calls Elvis a "straight-up racist, simple and plain"?). If gangsta rap marked a break, it was because hip-hop became coded to reflect the retrenchment of the "Two Americas" and the resultant combative, near-separatist mood among African-Americans. It was deliberately made less assimilable, a development reinforced by the marketplace when white suburban kids turned out to love its more extremist voice.

You could argue that it's always incumbent on the artists to come back swinging by presenting an alternative vision. Some have tried—unfortunately, often in the form of jam bands and rock-rap groups—but the diminished street-level faith in an integrationist future means there's not as much optimism about integrationist music. What's more, racial lines in the United States no longer divide primarily into black and white. When "miscegenation" does happen in music now, it's likely to be more multicultural than in Frere-Jones' formula, as in rainbow-coalition bands such as Antibalas and Ozomatli.

Ultimately, though, the "trouble with indie rock" may have far more to do with another post-Reagan social shift, one with even less upside than the black-white story, and that's the widening gap between rich and poor. There is no question on which side most indie rock falls. It's a cliche to picture indie musicians and fans as well-off "hipsters" busily gentrifying neighborhoods, but compared to previous post-punk generations, the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it.

With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded "creative" college towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young "knowledge workers" in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire. (Many rap MCs juggle symbologies just as deftly, but it's seldom their main point.) This doesn't make coffeehouse-indie shallow, but it can result in something more akin to the 1960s folk revival, with fretful collegiate intellectuals in a Cuban Missile Crisis mood, seeking purity and depth in antiquarian music and escapist spirituality. Not exactly a recipe for a booty-shaking party. While this scene can embrace some fascinating hermetic weirdos such as Joanna Newsom or Panda Bear, it's also prone to producing fine-arts-grad poseurs such as the Decemberists and poor-little-rich-boy-or-girl singer songwriters who might as well be James Taylor. This year even saw several indie bands playing in "Pops" concerts at summer symphony programs; that's no sin (and good for the symphonies), but it's about as class-demarcated as it gets.

Among at least a subset of (the younger) musicians and fans, this class separation has made indie more openly snobbish and narrow-minded. In the darkest interpretation, one could look at the split between a harmony-and-lyrics-oriented indie field and a rhythm-and-dance-specialized rap/R&B scene as mirroring the developing global split between an internationalist, educated comprador class (in which musically, one week Berlin is hot, the next Sweden, the next Canada, the next Brazil) and a far less mobile, menial-labor market (consider the more confining, though often musically exciting, regionalism that Frere-Jones outlines in hip-hop). The elite status and media sway that indie rock enjoys, disproportionate to its popularity, is one reason the cultural politics of indie musicians and fans require discussion in the first place, a point I wish Frere-Jones had clarified in The New Yorker; perhaps in that context it goes without saying.

The profile of this university demographic often includes a sojourn in extended adolescence, comprising graduate degrees, internships, foreign jaunts, and so on, which easily can last until their early 30s. Unlike in the early 1990s, when this was perceived as a form of generational exclusion and protested in "slacker"/grunge music, it's now been normalized as a passage to later-life career success. Its musical consequences might include an open but less urgent expression of sexuality, or else a leaning to the twee, sexless, childhood nostalgia that many older critics (including both Frere-Jones and me) find puzzling and irritating. Female and queer artists still have pressing sexual issues and identities to explore and celebrate, but the straight boys often seem to fall back on performing their haplessness and hyper-sensitivity. (Pity the indie-rock girlfriend.)

Yet this is a problem having to do with the muddled state of white masculinity today, and it's not soluble by imitating some image of black male sexuality (which, as hip-hop and R&B amply demonstrate, is dealing with its own crises). Are we supposed to long for the days when Zeppelin and the Stones fetishized fantasies of black manhood, in part as a cover for misogyny? If forced to choose between tolerating some boringly undersexed rock music and reviving the, er, "vigorous" sexual politics of cock rock, I'll take the boring rock, thanks—for now.

If class, at least as much as race, is the elephant in this room, one of the more encouraging signals lately might be the recent mania for Bruce Springsteen—as if a dim memory suddenly has surfaced that white working-class culture once had a kind of significant berth in rock 'n' roll, too. (It's now moved to Nashville.) I was unexpectedly moved by the video of Win and Régine from the Arcade Fire playing "Keep the Car Running" (Frere-Jones' No. 15 song of the year so far) live with the Boss onstage Sunday in Ottawa. The performance itself aside, their presence in front of an arena audience that mostly had no idea who the hell they were shows the chutzpah it takes to resist niche-market fragmentation. (And sure, I'd be at least as happy if they'd been doing it with Stevie Wonder, and even more if they were sharing the stage with Dr. Dre.)

My armchair sociology may be as reductive as Frere-Jones' potted rock history, but the point is that the problem of style segregation can't be solved by calling upon Sufjan Stevens to funk up his rhythm section. I'm as much a devotee of genre-mixing as Frere-Jones, when it works (I've even used the loaded term "miscegenation" in articles for years), but I've noticed that when indie musicians do grapple with hip-hop rhythms, using their own voices and perspectives (my friends in Ninja High School in Toronto, for instance), they're usually lambasted by critics who fancy themselves arbiters of realness for being an insulting joke. The culture-crossing inhibitions exist for reasons beyond mere timidity, and snorting "get over it" is not enough.

The impetus may have to come from the currently dominant side of the pop market—and increasingly that is what we're seeing. Kanye West doesn't much care about the race of the people he samples, while Justin Timberlake cares very much what race his producer is (African-American, please), and OutKast and Gnarls Barkley play teasing, Prince-like crossover games. If it's going to be re-established that such moves are legit, it will happen on the charts for a while before the more cautious and self-conscious rock-in-decline types feel free to do it too. Which, as a turnabout, seems rather like fair play.

http://www.slate.com/id/2176187

For Thursday...

2007-08-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

Please spend some time looking at one of the punk links on this blog (down on the left hand side), or find a new website related to punk, post-punk, emo, etc. Post the link to the site as a comment and come to class prepared to discuss what you found interesting about the site.

For Thursday...

2007-07-25T07:57:00.001-07:00

In addition to the "Is Hip Hop Dead?" handout, please read the following pieces on the web:

1) http://www.mp3.com/news/stories/9464.html
This is an interview with KRS-1 from Boogie Down Productions. You can read the whole thing, but the important part starts about half way through with a question from the moderator that starts: "MP3: I wanted to ask -- you've been lecturing in schools for years now..."

2) Read Jeff Chang's thoughts on the interview here: http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/blog/2007_05_01_cantstopwontstop_archive.cfm

3) Also read Jeff Chang's thoughts on Eric Michael Dyson here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/23/DDG3GR3PHK1.DTL

4) And read this interview with Common from Pitchfork:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/44176-common-talks-new-album-gap-ad-spirituality

For Tuesday...

2007-07-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

Why was the shift from DJs to Rappers as the focal points of Hip-Hop/Rap important?

There is no single answer, so don't be afraid to offer your own thoughts...

For Thursday...

2007-07-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Thanks for your first posts. For Thursday I would like to hear what you've found the most interesting/surprising about country music so far. You can talk about the Jensen or Peterson readings or the photo exhibit. Remember to read everyone else's posts...

Welcome!

2007-07-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome to AC901-3B and Brown Summer Studies. We'll use this blog to continue our discussions after class. I'll post different topics, but you should also feel free to raise any issues and questions for the group to consider.

For Tuesday I'd like your thoughts on any or all of the following questions: What music do you listen to currently? What role does the image of the artist/group/music play in your relationship with the music? Would you describe your favorite performers as "authentic"?

Make sure you read other students' posts and try to make connections among the different ideas.

Stanley Fish on Country Music

2007-07-02T05:19:00.000-07:00

Stanley Fish
NYTimes.com

July 1, 2007

Country Roads

“I’d like to check you for ticks.”

I was taking three days to drive from Florida to upstate New York last week when I heard that line coming out of the radio on the second day. On the first day I had done the respectable thing and searched the dial for NPR and classical music; but they were nowhere to be found after I left Savannah behind, and I was free to go where I always wanted to go anyway – to a country music station. You’re not going to come across a line like “I’d like to check you for ticks” anywhere else, and the same goes for an earlier line in the same Brad Paisley song, “You press that bottle to your lips and I wish I was your beer.”

At first I had an academic thought: this is Petrarchanism updated, a modern day turn on the convention – perfected by Francis Petrarch and passed on to John Donne and many others – of putting yourself in the place of an inanimate object that enjoys an envied proximity to your beloved. But I shook off the pseudo-intellectualism (at least for the moment) and surrendered to a pleasure that gets along quite nicely without the support of hallowed antecedents.

What is the pleasure? First of all, there is the sheer delight – self-indulgent, but earned – in the cleverness of the lyrics: “If I said you have a beautiful body, will you hold it against me? (It’s hard to imagine a neater instance of a purposefully ambiguous pronoun.) Where I’d like to be is “sitting next to you sitting next to me.” (The repetitions and alliterations mime the closeness the singer desires.) “I turn your picture to the wall when I’m lying next to her.” (Lying and lying.)

The lyrics, arresting as they are, do not stand alone. Usually they anchor a story – the motto of one station I had on was “A story in every song” – and that story typically unfolds in a three act drama marked at the end of each act by a refrain that changes meaning with every repetition. A recent example is Emerson Drive’s “Moments.”

In Act 1, the speaker tells us that at the end of a long walk, he was about to cross a bridge when an old homeless man asks him for change. He complies – he wouldn’t need it anyway, he remarks in an aside – and, clearly ashamed, the recipient of his charity declares, “I haven’t always been this way/ I’ve had my moments” — some of which he then recalls in a longish verse.

In Act 2, it becomes clear (although it is never explicitly stated) that our narrator wasn’t going to cross the bridge; he intended to jump. But the homeless man, recognizing “that look in my eyes” just “kept hanging around”; and it is now the singer’s turn to be ashamed and to say, “You know I haven’t always felt this way / I’ve had my moments.”

In Act 3, the singer, who has obviously lived to tell his tale, imagines the old man sitting “‘round a trash can fire” and once again rehearsing his moments … to which has now been added the moment “When a young man almost ended it / I was right there, wasn’t scared a bit / And I helped him to pull through / … I’ve had my moments.”

Not startlingly original, and a bit O’Henryish, but nicely satisfying. After all, where else can you get wordplay, narrative structure, pathos, morality and a small dose of social consciousness in three minutes or less?

You also get an entire culture or, rather, two. There is the culture of the country music industry itself, complete with a capitol city (Nashville), a famous venue (the Grand Ole Opry), a roster of legends, several dynasties, celebrity marriages, nasty divorces, innumerable rags to riches stories, ostentatious displays of wealth – clothes, cars, jewels, mansions, theme parks. Then there is the culture country music describes and from which its stars all claim to have emerged – hardscrabble, hard-drinking, hard-playing and hard-praying.

The emphasis is on family values and also on the many ways family values are eroded – by neglect, cheating, crime, poverty, illness, death. The dominant tone is an unapologetic celebration of country - life virtues (honesty, loyalty, friendship, piety) in the company of a nostalgia for the days, now vanished, when those virtues really flourished: She’s gone, “gone like a ‘59 Cadillac, like all the good things that ain’t never coming back.” (You could say, if you were of a mind, that country music is a version of pastoral, a genre that foregrounds a landscape that is understood no longer to exist.)

But if you enter, if only vicariously, into the country music culture, you have to swallow along with your enjoyment some stances and attitudes that might give you pause (or might not, depending on who you are).

It’s a man’s world, even though a large number of the stars and superstars are women. In this world it is men who have the responsibilities and therefore the opportunities to default on them and then write a song about it. In those songs women, especially wives and mothers, are venerated, but it is the kind of veneration reserved for forms of behavior – patience, forbearance, steadfastness, chastity – the singer can’t quite get the hang of. Songs sung from the perspective of a woman are often angry; they are about betrayal and the hard road every woman will inevitably travel: “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman” (Tammy Wynette); “Here’s to the liars and the cheaters and the cold mistreaters” (Danielle Peck).

It’s a Christian world (and for “Christian” read “low Church Protestant”), where invocations of Jesus come as naturally as waking up in the morning. Think of it as Christian radio with all the sin left in. The religion is fierce and deep, and its consolations acknowledge the pain and trouble to which they are a not always adequate response: “God is great, but sometimes life ain’t good.”

It’s a white world. Not racist; there is no minority bashing; there are just no minorities. (Yes, I know about Charlie Pride and Cowboy Troy. Point made.)

It’s a patriotic world, given to flag-waving militarism, and distrustful of foreigners and their ways of life.

It’s a world without ethnicity (except for the southern trailer-trash kind), and everyone’s name sounds like two or three bitten-off anglo-saxon syllables: George Strait, Clint Black, Travis Tritt, Johnny Cash, Randy Travis, Vince Gill, Trent Tomlinson. Many of the names could be reversed and they’d still work fine: Travis Randy, Tritt Travis, Paisley Brad, Gill Vince, Tomlinson Trent.

It’s a “classist” world, with the favored class being lower middle, and the disfavored class being any with pretensions. “They raised her up a lady / But there’s one thing they couldn’t avoid, / Ladies love country boys” (Trace Adkins, or is it Adkins Trace?).

And it is a world that knows everything I have just said about it, revels in it, and puts it all into the songs. Never has a popular music scene been so self-referential. The singers caress the history they spring from, rehearsing the litany of the great singers – Hank, Dolly, Patsy, Waylon, Loretta, Willie, Tammy – whose ranks they hope to join. (Another link to the pastoral; a pastoral poet always begins by invoking a long list of predecessors.)

Of course, I wasn’t thinking about any of this while I was driving. I was listening to the music and accepting its pleasures, one of which was hearing Vince Gill and Dolly Parton sing Parton’s gloriously sentimental “I Will Always Love You” just as I crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

Stagecoach music festival

2007-05-08T04:31:00.000-07:00

May 8, 2007

In the Desert, a Festival of Country and Its Kin

By KELEFA SANNEH

INDIO, Calif., May 7 — What does country music sound like in 2007? Well, around 3:15 on Sunday afternoon here in the California desert it sounded like a Chinese folk song struggling to be heard over a Guns N’ Roses medley.

That medley (“Paradise City” into “Sweet Child o’ Mine”) was the work of Jason Aldean, a rising star who has become a fixture on country radio. The Chinese folk song was the work of Abigail Washburn, a singer and banjo player who traces roots music across two continents. And the occasion was the inaugural Stagecoach country music festival, held on Saturday and Sunday.

Some five dozen acts played four stages on the fields of the Empire Polo Club, a location familiar to many noncountry fans. Stagecoach is a production of Goldenvoice, which produced the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival the previous weekend at the same site; Stagecoach is partly an attempt to squeeze more use (which is to say, money) out of the Coachella infrastructure. About 30,000 fans showed up each day: fewer than Coachella (which drew 50,000 to 60,000 a day), but more than enough to make this well-run weekend feel like a success.

The strong turnout was largely a testament to the drawing power of the four headlining acts. On Saturday night on the main stage the wily veterans Alan Jackson and George Strait played extraordinary sets, each drawing from his deep catalog of hits. And on Sunday night the top-selling duo Brooks & Dunn cranked out a string of elegant country-rock songs (including a lovely version of “Neon Moon”) before ceding the stage to the affable — and apparently tireless — young star Kenny Chesney, who must be one of America’s most popular singers in any genre.

The other three stages were full of cult acts, bluegrass virtuosos and cowboy storytellers; the performers included Kris Kristofferson, Neko Case, Garrison Keillor and many more. But not even Willie Nelson, appearing on the alt-country Palomino Stage, could draw a crowd to compete with the hit makers on the main one; no matter where you went, it was hard to escape the pull — or the thumping bass — of the main stage. Lots of people complain about it, but the Nashville system is still pretty good at finding and promoting credible stars and infectious songs. (Unlike many other genres, country music still sells well too.) Everywhere you looked this weekend, someone was singing along.

Unlike the usual Coachella crowd, this one was well equipped for a weekend outdoors: 2,200 recreation vehicles turned a nearby lot into a small and unusually festive temporary town; in front of the main stage folding chairs outnumbered cowboy hats, which is saying something. Instead of dashing from stage to stage, many fans simply picked a spot near the main stage and stayed put, happy to wait the seven hours, say, until Mr. Strait’s arrival. The crowd skewed older too: Coachella probably doesn’t draw this many parents, and it definitely doesn’t draw this many grandparents.

There were similarities too. Like the Coachella crowd, this one apparently believes that drinking beer is an effective substitute for sunblock. You could tell the time of day by examining the redness of fans’ torsos or, if you were willing to get that close, the glassiness of their eyes.

Between the big stage and the smaller ones it was possible to detect evidence of a continuing argument about the identity of country music. The small-stage acts generally went deep, emphasizing the genre’s history. The old-school bluegrass hero Del McCoury led his band through a cheerful, sprightly set then accepted requests; Emmylou Harris sang “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby,” which she described as a cross between a field holler and a lullaby.

On Saturday Mr. Nelson sung Mr. Kristofferson’s classic ballad “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” or rather talked it, reciting the lyrics like a bartender listing what’s on tap. On Sunday Mr. Kristofferson took the song back, adding some melody (though not a lot) by growling the words instead. He also sang an updated version of “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” taking time to grumble about the Iraq war; that earned him some mild applause, though it might not have gone over so well on the main stage, where Brooks & Dunn brought down the house by bringing out some marines.

The combination of mainstream and nonmainstream acts is part of what sets Stagecoach apart from more established country music festivals: Country USA (in Wisconsin), CMA Music Festival (in Nashville, and formerly known as FanFair), MerleFest (in North Carolina), and many others. But sometimes this combination worked better in theory; judging from the turnout, your average Stagecoach attendee isn’t much interested in Ms. Case, who was (to be fair) up against Mr. Strait; despite her steel guitar player, she seemed out of place.

On the main stage, by contrast, many of the crowd favorites went wide instead of deep, de-emphasizing country music’s history in order to acknowledge its cultural associations. The popular duo Sugarland specializes in bubblegum rock with a Southern accent. Jennifer Nettles, the lead singer, recently won a Grammy for her appearance on Bon Jovi’s “Who Says You Can’t Go Home,” which was a No. 1 country hit. In a recent radio interview Ms. Nettles excitedly talked about meeting 50 Cent on Grammy night. These days country culture is often pop culture.

And the dominant sound of country music, as one after another main-stager proved, is upbeat Southern rock. Eric Church paid tribute to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”; Gary Allan played his hit cover of Vertical Horizon’s post-grunge ballad “Best I Ever Had”; Mr. Chesney warmed up the crowd with AC/DC. Mr. Aldean’s current single is called “Johnny Cash,” but don’t be fooled: it’s a beefy rock song that name-checks a country legend (“Blastin’ out to Johnny Cash, heading for the highway”) without reviving his style.

No disrespect to the pickers and raconteurs in the tents, but this crowd probably would have preferred a rock ’n’ roll stage: say, Third Eye Blind, Poison and some reconstituted version of Lynyrd Skynyrd. By now, all that stuff — bar-friendly rock from across the decades — is part of country’s heritage too.

In that sense Mr. Jackson and Mr. Strait — Alanandgeorge, in Stagecoachese — were glorious exceptions to the rule: flexible traditionalists who get their country-radio spins the old-fashioned way. Mr. Strait’s set was a tour de force: He’s a stoic crowd-pleaser (his big gesture is a faint smile) who has regularly been sending songs up the country chart for about a quarter-century. From Western swing (a tribute to his surroundings) to rowdy honky-tonk to stately love songs (including the gorgeous “Amarillo by Morning,” a trucker’s lament) to radio staples (like “Wrapped,” which is on the charts now), Mr. Strait showed why country music fans don’t always have to choose between an old favorite and a current hit maker.

Mr. Jackson’s set was shorter but even more impressive. He’s sly enough to amuse frat boys and fogies alike (as he did with “Pop a Top,” a fizzy drinking song), subtly hinting to each constituency that he’s really one of them. His version of “Like Red on a Rose,” the title track from his excellent 2006 album, might have been the festival’s highlight: a slow-motion love song, ascending into the desert sky.

And yes, he did “Don’t Rock the Jukebox,” an early hit that makes a tongue-in-cheek case for country purism. (“I don’t feel like rocking, since my baby’s gone/So don’t rock the jukebox, play me a country song.”) It might have sounded like a rebuke to country’s current rock ’n’ roll fixation, except that it was preceded by a snippet of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.”

While Mr. Jackson found subtle ways to give people what they wanted, Mr. Chesney saw no need for subtlety. His Sunday night performance, which ended the festival, began with five easygoing, upbeat country-rock songs in a row, affirming the country-rock consensus he has helped create.

Festivals like Stagecoach strive to be singular, but part of what’s interesting about them is how typical they are: Get 30,000 country fans together and you’ll get a rough sense of what country music is like these days. Sure, the old mountain music still has a following, but it’s not hard to see why so many listeners (and the stars who aim to please them) want to hear the electric guitars turned up loud. As Mr. Chesney put it, “I’ve been livin’ in fast forward/Hillbilly rock star, out of control.” You can argue with just about every word in that couplet, but not “rock” or “star.”

Don't Blame Hip Hop

2007-04-25T04:16:00.000-07:00

New York Times
April 25, 2007

Music

Don’t Blame Hip-Hop

By KELEFA SANNEH

Hip-hop has been making enemies for as long as it has been winning fans. It has been dismissed as noise, blamed for concert riots, accused of glorifying crime and sexism and greed and Ebonics. From Run-D.M.C. to Sister Souljah to Tupac Shakur to Young Jeezy, the story of hip-hop is partly the story of those who have been irritated, even horrified, by it.

Even so, the anti-hip-hop fervor of the last few weeks has been extraordinary, if not quite unprecedented. Somehow Don Imus’s ill-considered characterization of the Rutgers women’s basketball team — “some nappy-headed hos” — led not only to his firing but also to a discussion of the crude language some rappers use. Mr. Imus and the Rev. Al Sharpton traded words on Mr. Sharpton’s radio show and on “Today,” and soon the hip-hop industry had been pulled into the fray.

Unlike previous hip-hop controversies, this one doesn’t have a villain, or even a villainous song. The current state of hip-hop seems almost irrelevant to the current discussion. The genre has already acquired (and it’s fair to say earned) a reputation for bad language and bad behavior. Soon after Mr. Imus’s firing, The Daily News had Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, splashed on its cover alongside the hip-hop producer Timbaland, whose oeuvre includes some Imusian language. He had helped arrange a fund-raiser for her and apparently was now a liability. Oprah Winfrey organized a two-show “town meeting” on what’s wrong with hip-hop — starting with the ubiquity of the word “ho” and its slipperier cousin, “bitch” — and how to fix it. The hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons, who appeared on the show, promised to take action, but last Thursday a planned press conference with hip-hop record label executives was canceled at the last minute, with scant explanation.

On Monday, Mr. Simmons and Ben Chavis, leaders of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, released a statement that said, in part, “We recommend that the recording and broadcast industries voluntarily remove/bleep/delete the misogynistic words ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ ” and a third term, a common racial epithet. (That already happens on the radio; it seemed the two were suggesting that all albums be censored too.) Mr. Simmons helped create the hip-hop industry, and he has always spoken as a rap insider. Monday’s statement was remarkable partly because he was speaking as a hip-hop outsider, unable (so far) to persuade the executives to go along with him.

A different sort of criticism was voiced in this Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes”: Anderson Cooper was the host of a segment arguing that hip-hop culture had popularized an anti-snitching ethos that was undermining the police and allowing criminals to operate with relative impunity. The rapper Cam’ron, who was shot in 2005, cheerfully told Mr. Cooper that cooperating with police would hurt his professional reputation and run counter to “the way I was raised.” Asked what he would do if he were living next door to a serial killer, Cam’ron merely shrugged and said he would move. The segment said remarkably little about the fear and anger that might help create such an anti-police culture. Even if Cam’ron is just doing what sells, the question remains: Why is this what sells?

None of these complaints are new exactly. Few rappers have used the words “ho” and “bitch” as enthusiastically — or as effectively — as Snoop Dogg, who has spent 15 years transforming himself into cuddly pop star from a menacing rapper, while remaining as foul-mouthed as ever. And rappers’ hostility toward the police has been a flashpoint since the late 1980s, when the members of N.W.A. stated their position more pithily than this newspaper will allow.

Nowadays, as all but the most intemperate foes of hip-hop readily admit, this is not a debate about freedom of speech; most people agree that rappers have the right to say just about anything. This is, rather, a debate about hip-hop’s vexed position in the American mainstream. On “Oprah,” Diane Weathers, the former editor in chief of Essence magazine, said, “I think Snoop should lose his contract — I don’t think he should be on the Jay Leno show.”

On “60 Minutes,” Mr. Cooper kept reminding viewers that hip-hop was “promoted by major corporations,” and he mentioned anti-snitching imagery on album covers. What he showed, though, was a picture taken from a mixtape, not a major label release.

That’s a small quibble, perhaps, but a telling one. In the wake of Mr. Imus’s firing, some commentators talked about a double standard in the media, though “double” seemed like an understatement. Like MySpace users and politicians and reality-television stars and, yes, talk-radio hosts, rappers are trying to negotiate a culture in which the boundaries of public and private space keep changing, along with the multiplying standards that govern them. This means that mainstream culture is becoming less prim (or more crude, if you prefer), and it’s getting harder to keep the sordid stuff on the margins.

This also means that just about nothing flies under the radar: a tossed-off comment on the radio can get you fired, just as a fairly obscure mixtape can find its way onto “60 Minutes” as an exemplar of mainstream hip-hop culture.

You can scoff at Mr. Simmons’s modest proposal, but at the very least, he deserves credit for advancing a workable one, and for endorsing the kind of soft censorship that many of hip-hop’s detractors are too squeamish to mention. Consumers have learned to live with all sorts of semi-voluntary censorship, including the film rating system, the F.C.C.’s regulation of broadcast media and the self-regulation of basic cable networks. Hip-hop fans, in particular, have come to expect that many of their favorite songs will reach radio in expurgated form with curses, epithets, drug references and mentions of violence deleted. Those major corporations that Mr. Cooper mentioned aren’t very good at promoting so-called positivity or wholesome community-mindedness. But give them some words to snip and they’ll diligently (if grudgingly) snip away.

It’s not hard to figure out why some people are upset about the way Mr. Simmons’s three least-favorite words have edged into the mainstream. One of hip-hop’s many antecedents is the venerable African-American oral tradition known as toasting; those toasts are full of those three words. Hip-hop took those rhymes from the street corner to the radio, and those old-fashioned dirty jokes are surely meant to shock people like Ms. Winfrey. Once upon a time, such lyrics (if they had been disseminated) might have been denounced for their moral turpitude, but now they’re more likely to be denounced for their sexism. Both verdicts are probably correct, and each says something about mainstream society’s shifting priorities and taboos. Maybe dirty jokes never change, only the soap does.

Mr. Imus has one thing in common with rappers, after all. Like him, many rappers have negotiated an uneasy relationship with the mainstream: they are corporate entertainers who portray themselves as outspoken mavericks; they are paid to say private things (sometimes offensive things) in public. It’s an inherently volatile arrangement, bound to create blow-ups small and big. Mr. Simmons’s proposal could buy some rappers a few years’ reprieve. But it wouldn’t be surprising if the big record companies eventually decided that brash — and brilliant — rappers like Cam’ron were more trouble than they were worth. (Cam’ron’s last two albums haven’t sold well.) Why not spend that extra money on a clean-cut R&B singer, or a kid-friendly pop group?

The strangest thing about the last few weeks was the fact that hardly any current hip-hop artists were discussed. (All these years later, we’re still talking about Snoop Dogg?) Maybe that’s because hip-hop isn’t in an especially filthy mood right now. It sounds more light-hearted and clean-cut than it has in years. Hip-hop radio is full of cheerful dance tracks like Huey’s “Pop, Lock & Drop It,” Crime Mob’s “Rock Yo Hips,” Mims’s “This Is Why I’m Hot” and Swizz Beatz’s “It’s Me, Snitches.” (The title and song were censored to exclude one of the three inflammatory words — proof that this snipping business can be tricky.)

On BET’s “106 & Park,” one of hip-hop’s definitive television shows, you can watch a fresh-faced audience applaud these songs, cheered on by relentlessly positive hosts. For all the panicky talk about hip-hop lyrics, the current situation suggests a scarier possibility, both for hip-hop’s fans and its detractors. What if hip-hop’s lyrics shifted from tough talk and crude jokes to playful club exhortations — and it didn’t much matter? What if the controversial lyrics quieted down, but the problems didn’t? What if hip-hop didn’t matter that much, after all?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/arts/music/25hiph.html

More on Don Imus and Hip Hop

2007-04-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

Reflections on "Is Rap Racist" from critics and scholars...

http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/2007/04/18/rap_roundtable/index.html

Imus shouldn't give hip-hop a bad rap - Todd Boyd

2007-04-17T04:50:00.000-07:00

Imus shouldn't give hip-hop a bad rap

By Todd Boyd
ESPN.com Special to Page 2

Now that disgraced radio talk-show host Don Imus has been booted, can we finally get down to some "real talk" about the multiple issues embedded in this racial theater? There is a lot to sort through here, but after a week of debate centered around "nappy-headed hos," half-assed apologies, cries of censorship, and a curmudgeonly shock jock's lame attempt at being funny, many pundits have moved beyond the core issue and now are talking about the perceived double standard they feel exists between what Imus said and what often comes from the mouths of rappers.

Yet Imus and hip-hop really don't have much in common. Imus was host of a radio show that focused on the real news of the day, while hip-hop is a fictionalized form of cultural expression. Imus is real, featuring real guests and humor based on real topics. However loudly hip-hop might claim to be real, it is not real; it is a form of representation. This is why so few rappers use the names on their birth certificates when performing. Rappers are in essence characters performing a fictional life. Though the culture is rooted in the notion and style of authenticity, it is decidedly fictional. If not, the cops could arrest every rapper who talks about selling drugs or killing someone in his or her lyrics. So we should be judging hip-hop the same way we judge a novel, a movie, or a television show, and to do so means we have to afford hip-hop the same latitude we afford any other form of artistic expression.

Over the years, hip-hop has taken a lot of words -- "diss," "pimp," and "bling," for example -- that were once the exclusive domain of black street culture and put these words into widespread circulation. In many ways, one could say hip-hop took a private conversation and made it public. As hip-hop has grown from being a New York subculture into a global phenomena over the last 30-plus years, the language of the culture has come to present a number of complicated scenarios for a public that never really learned how to talk about race in the first place. There are times when I'm not even sure if we know what constitutes racism, really, short of someone getting beheaded while being dragged behind a pickup truck.

On this point, many in America feel that with the end of legalized segregation in the 1960s, racism ended as well. Thus, racism is often viewed as something confined to the PBS "Eyes on the Prize" documentary series from the 1980s. The fact that someone like Barack Obama is currently mounting a serious challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination further complicates matters for those who subscribe to this "racism is dead" thesis. How could a black man be considered for the presidency if racism still existed, they ask ever so discreetly?

Then there are those who seem to think racism potentially lurks around every corner. Any untoward gesture, remark, or idea, however slight or incidental, is thought to reflect America's problematic racial history rearing its ugly head once again. A good example of this type of paranoid thinking can be found in the 1992 film "Boomerang" where Martin Lawrence does a hilarious analysis of the racial symbolism of the colored balls on a pool table. In this line of thought, even the game of billiards has a racist undertone.

While neither of these extremes is ultimately relevant, extremes often draw the most attention. This means that those who feel there is no racism and those who feel everything is racist tend to get all the airtime, while the thoughtful and logical tend to get short shrift.

I thought about all of this while watching Imus and Al Sharpton on the latter's syndicated radio show. If ever there were two people who deserved each other, it would have to be Imus and Sharpton. While I am certainly not a supporter of Imus, I wish there had been a way to "fire" Sharpton as well. Sharpton needs Imus as much as Imus thought he needed Sharpton. Unless there are idiots like Imus who spout vile nonsense, then clowns like Sharpton wouldn't have anything to do. Sharpton and his race-baiting kin need public displays of racism in order for them to seem relevant. Racial opportunists like Sharpton are like ambulance chasers in this regard. So when the Imus train crashed, Sharpton was "Johnny-on-the-spot," ready to exploit fully every possible angle of this controversy for his own self-interest.

As the curtain closes on this most recent performance of racial theater, though, hip-hop culture and the controversial use of language has now moved to center stage. Does the Imus firing represent a racial double standard with regard to hip-hop? For those who believe the firing does indicate bias, their evidence would be that rappers use such language all the time and they seemingly get away with it. In this case, these people conclude that there is a censoring of free speech when it comes to white people and their discussion of racial issues.

This sentiment of a racial double standard goes back to the days of the landmark 1978 Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke, which helped to float the idea that came to be known as "reverse discrimination." Alan Bakke was a white male applicant to the medical school at the University of California, Davis, who had been denied admission several times. Bakke was regarded in some circles as a victim of reverse discrimination, because he had been denied admission, though several black students had been admitted under a quota system the school had used. In the end, the Supreme Court ruled quota systems unconstitutional and Bakke was admitted to the school. In the ensuing years, there were many who believed that the integration of black people into mainstream society came at the expense of whites.

Rappers have long been held accountable because of their speech. For people who do not really pay attention to hip-hop, but only focus on stereotypes of the culture, this is something they might not be aware of. Here are but a few examples: In 1990, The 2 Live Crew was arrested, taken to court and eventually acquitted on obscenity charges. In 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton blasted rapper Sista Souljah and her lyrics, comparing Souljah's words to that of former Klansman David Duke. Ice T's single "Cop Killer" was deleted from the album "Body Count" and his band bearing the same name as the album was dropped by Time Warner because of the controversial song. William Bennett and the late C. Delores Tucker prompted congressional hearings on the impact of gangsta rap music in 1994, hearings that eventually lead to Time Warner selling its shares in Interscope Records and its rap subsidiary Death Row Records. Jennifer Lopez came under fire for her use of the n-word in the remix to her song "I'm Real" in 2001. A Nelly concert planned for Spelman College in 2004 was canceled because some of the women at this historically black woman's college felt his video for the song "Tip Drill" was demeaning to black women. Jadakiss received a great deal of heat for his rhetorical question "Why did Bush knock down the towers?" on his 2004 single "Why? "

The point is, hip-hop history is replete with examples of the culture being challenged over its lyrical content, in the court of public opinion as well as in the real halls of justice. To say that hip-hop has received a free pass on its language and sexual politics is simply uninformed and ignores the ongoing heated debate that has been raging for some time now on hip-hop's societal impact. I mean, who hasn't heard about Bill Cosby's senile rants against hip-hop the past few years? Critics of hip-hop are a dime a dozen these days.

In hip-hop, the widespread use of terms like "bitch" and "ho" is often interestingly set against the overwhelming admiration of the mother figure. A good example of this was the late Tupac Shakur, whose love anthem to the plight of single mothers, "Dear Mama," was getting much airplay at the same time that he was in court on sexual-assault charges. While many rappers have disparaged women in general, many of these same rappers often celebrate their own mothers as role models of feminine virtue. This contradiction exposes hip-hop's at its weakest, most indefensible point. Sexism in hip-hop works to undermine the culture's strength and overall message of racial and economic empowerment.

Though the culture has been progressive on a number of issues, when it comes to the representation of women, hip-hop is stuck in the 1950s. In order to address this, hip-hop must recondition its mind about women and their roles or else it will remain an easy target for those who want to see it shut down. Further, when rappers use these contested terms, it is often in relationship to women in general, as opposed to specific women. I guarantee you if a rapper was to single out the U.S. Olympic women's figure skating or gymnastics team by calling them the white equivalent of what Imus said, there would be a similar firestorm of protest and actions would be taken accordingly. The difference being that as one moves from the general to the specific, the stakes are raised accordingly.

Ultimately, the fact that rappers are now being held accountable for something Imus said shows the bias many people have against hip-hop culture. Hip-hop is often the scapegoat of everything gone wrong in America, but hip-hop didn't slander the Rutgers women's basketball team, Don Imus did, so let's stay on point here.

Let me add that if we are going to censor hip-hop, then let's not stop there. David Mamet has made a career in theater using similarly vulgar language like that in hip-hop, while Martin Scorsese has done the same in cinema. Are they not to blame, too? Should we be talking about canceling "The Sopranos" because of Tony's cursing? Perhaps Dick Cheney should have been impeached for his use of foul language toward a U.S. senator?

The point is, hip-hop didn't invent cursing, slurs, bad language, sexism or misogyny, though hip-hop like so many other fictional forms of the culture uses this type of language as a form of expression, however problematic it might be. This expression represents the way people in the streets talk. It might not be pretty or politically correct, but it is a unique form of fictional expression that emerges from the minds and mouths of young black men.

Censorship is a slippery slope. Once you start, it's not so easy to stop. Hip-hop is most certainly guilty of sexism in many cases. This is a point that cannot be denied. But the purpose of art is often to provoke, to shock, to annoy, to agitate, to say things that might not otherwise be permissible in real life. It might not always be appropriate, but it fulfills a purpose in a society that prides itself on free expression.

Which leads me to my final point. I'm not so sure that firing Imus was the best course to take. Don't get me wrong, I am not losing any sleep over this, nor have I or will I shed a tear. Imus has made a lot of money over the years being a crude, obnoxious, insensitive bigot. At least that's the persona he projected. He was like Archie Bunker, only not nearly as funny. His firing will lead many to regard him as a martyr, which he most certainly is not. I'm sure he already has begun negotiating another radio deal. Make no mistake about it, just like Trent Lott, Imus will be back in some form or another.

I have never spent five minutes listening to Don Imus. Why? Because I don't have to. I have choices. What is really great about America is there are choices. Haters of hip-hop don't have to listen to it, either. I don't particularly care for heavy metal or country music, but I'm not trying to censor it simply because I don't like it. They wave Confederate flags at NASCAR events all the time, but considering that NASCAR is not on my TiVo list, I could care less.

Let's be real about this. Again, context is important. What Imus did was insult a group of innocent young women for no apparent reason. At the end of the day, this was slanderous. It was the equivalent of a verbal drive-by shooting. One of the main reasons Imus ultimately was fired was because once people saw the poise and class of the Rutgers woman's basketball team, Imus' unprovoked comment came across as that much more egregious. Imus likely would not have used the same phrase to describe a team of white women, so he was being racially specific with his otherwise sexist comment.

Had Imus used the same phrase to describe, let's say someone like Star Jones, I doubt the furor would have been as strong. I'm not saying he would have gotten away with it, but Star Jones is someone who has generated enough public animosity that the insult would have seemed justified to many people. It also would have been personal. But considering Imus had no personal knowledge of the Rutgers team beforehand, and the fact the players simply were minding their own business after a great run to the NCAA finals, his unprovoked comments represented his own prejudiced view, not only of the team, but of black women in general.

The bottom line here is we should hold Imus accountable for Imus, and not use this as an excuse to censor hip-hop culture, because, at least as it pertains to the Rutgers women's basketball team, hip-hop is innocent of all charges.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=boyd/070416&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab4pos1

El-P - Indie Rapper Reseizes the Brooklyn Moment

2007-03-18T05:25:00.000-07:00

New York Times

March 18, 2007

Music

Indie Rapper Reseizes the Brooklyn Moment

By WILL HERMES

WRITERS and musicians often fixate on certain landscapes at certain times. For Thoreau in the 1840s it was Walden Pond. For Madonna in the 1980s it was her body. For the rapper-producer El-P (birth name Jaime Meline) in the ’00s it’s post-9/11 New York.

“I wanted to capture something I felt was unspoken,” he said last month, chopping garlic at his apartment cum home studio in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “There’s a shroud that’s enveloped this city since 9/11 that everyone is pretending isn’t there, and it’s affecting me. I’m not trying to make heavy-handed political records. I’m just trying to make sense of this. And make something good to listen to.”

An intense, stocky 32-year-old with gray-blue eyes and close-cropped reddish hair, El-P seems consumed with dark thoughts. Making things helps to distract him — like music or, at this moment, an elaborate lunch of tortellini with sausage and pesto. Another result of this impulse is “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead,” a CD to be released Tuesday, El-P’s first in nearly five years. (He performs Thursday at the Bowery Ballroom.)

The CD arrives at a time when the Brooklyn music scene he predates has exploded, making him a veteran both literally and — in his embrace of funk, noise and electronics — aesthetically. He commands respect in rock as well as rap circles. TV on the Radio and Cat Power, who both made critically acclaimed records last year, have employed him to remix their material. And coincidentally the return of El-P, who is of Irish-Cajun-Lithuanian descent, comes as the “white rapper” is back on the cultural radar, between VH-1’s well-received “Ego Trip’s (White) Rapper Show” and Jason Tanz’s newly published “Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America” (Bloomsbury USA).

“I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” feels simultaneously futuristic, anachronistic and of the moment. Rhymes flash back to Sept. 11, flickering amid surreal scenes of city life witnessed by a strung-out narrator who finds himself awake at 5 a.m., sitting on his stoop smoking a Newport and waiting for the bodegas to open, writing breathless rhymes like:

Fell asleep late
Neon buzz
PTS stress
We do drugs
City air strange
Sticky lungs
Mayor Doomburg
Gives no funds
And I’m cryin.

The futuristic tinge comes from frequent science fiction allusions and especially to the music undergirding the words. Unlike many peers El-P doesn’t refashion old soul hits or other familiar songs, although he will sample old records for raw sounds. He adds these to gritty synthesizer tones, distorted voices and machine beats to create data-overload collages. The effect can conjure classic Public Enemy, as if that famed rap group drew inspiration more from Philip K. Dick’s future-dystopian fiction than from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

“I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” is also a throwback to the indie-underground rap scene of the ’90s, when a certain kind of rap held sway for connoisseurs and critics: music often defined by abstract or bookish rhymes, unconventional music and anti-mainstream attitude, as opposed to radio-friendly bragging and dance-floor fodder. And that’s entirely appropriate, since El-P helped pioneer the indie-rap movement, first with his revered group Company Flow and later with his record label Definitive Jux — “jux” connoting both artful juxtaposition and, per street slang, artful thievery.

He grew up near the Fulton Mall, walking distance from where he lives now. His parents split early on, and he became in his own words “an unbridled capsule of teenaged rage and delinquency.” After being kicked out of two high schools in rapid succession (one being St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights), he got an equivalency degree at 16 and finagled his way into the Center for Media Arts in Manhattan, where he studied audio engineering. “I pretty quickly made the decision that since school wasn’t working, music would have to,” he said.

It did, beginning with Company Flow, a rap group consisting of the D.J. Mr. Len, the rapper Bigg Jus and the rapper-producer El-P (a spinoff of his moniker Lyrical Punisher, or LP, which became El Producto, El-P through rap wordplay). The group self-released the “Funcrusher” EP in 1995, and before long El-P quit his job in the Tower Records mail-order department “because, y’know, I was a rap star.”

Though clearly speaking with tongue partly in cheek — by rap-star standards El-P lives, now as then, a modest existence — the group was a hit among cognescenti for its fiercely anti-almost-everything wordplay and aggressive, near-industrial sound. (The current issue of Vibe magazine calls “Funcrusher Plus,” the expanded 1997 version of their EP, “the defining document of ’90s hip-hop dissent.”) And before Eminem was a household name — and when the embarrassing one-hit wonder Vanilla Ice was still fresh in people’s minds — El-P was singled out as one of the few respected white rappers.

“I think he’s what a lot of kids struggle to be,” said Sacha Jenkins, co-creator of the cheeky “American Idol”-style “Ego Trip’s (White) Rapper Show,” which has contestants vying for “ghetto credibility,” among other things. Mr. Jenkins recalled meeting the 16-year-old El-P at a Manhattan performance space, “making beats and surrounded by black people.” And while El-P says that his race is no longer a big issue these days, Mr. Jenkins sees him as the prototype of the white rapper. “He’s not trying to be anything he’s not, and I think that’s what hip-hop has always been about.”

When Company Flow disbanded, El-P went solo and started Definitive Jux, which cultivated a stable of progressive hip-hop acts including Mr. Lif and RJD2. El-P’s 2002 debut, “Fantastic Damage,” was widely praised, and “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” addresses some similar themes: modern-day paranoia, rappers mistaking thuggery for artistry and the corruption of love. It also gathers prominent friends and fans.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails contributes to the grinding “Flyentology,” whose narrator discovers religion on a crashing airplane. And members of the prog-rock group Mars Volta add frenetic guitars and vocals to “Tasmanian Pain Coaster,” about meeting a troubled, bloodied friend on the A train. El-P said the character represents both himself and his traumatized hometown: “I feel like New York needs therapy, man. And I’m one of the people.”

By modern hip-hop standards his rhymes are remarkably self-analytical. The CD’s finale, “Poisenville Kids No Wins,” relates a struggle with what sounds like a fearsome drug problem, while Chan Marshall — who performs as Cat Power and suffered a publicized struggle with alcohol abuse last year — sings the redemptive coda. Is the character autobiographical? “It’s an amalgamation of me and other things,” El-P said. He declined to be more specific but said he had indulged in “self-destructive” behavior.

Marketing his record may also be a fight. Independents like Definitive Jux are feeling the same crunch as media conglomerates amid illegal downloading and falling sales. And their aesthetic, underdog by definition, seems to have lost some cultural traction lately, as critics and taste-making bloggers appear more dazzled by drug-dealing, true-crime narratives of major label acts like Clipse and Ghostface Killah. Even El-P has moderated his anti-mainstream stance. “Just because I run an indie label doesn’t mean I don’t think Jay-Z is nice,” he said.

But he remains optimistic. His label’s Web site, definitivejux.net, offers its own downloads, and he says their “secret weapon” is, simply enough, quality.

“I strongly believe in the art form of the album,” he said, contrasting the concept with the current hegemony of the hit-singles-plus-filler formula that rules commercial hip-hop. “If you have your artists in the right mind-state, it’s possible they’ll make important records, beautiful records, records in the classic sense of what they meant when we fell in love with music as kids.”

Hip-Hop Is Rock ’n’ Roll, and Hall of Fame Likes It

2007-03-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

New York Times
March 13, 2007

Hip-Hop Is Rock ’n’ Roll, and Hall of Fame Likes It

By JON PARELES

It’s official: Hip-hop is rock ’n’ roll.

Last night at the Waldorf-Astoria, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who proved that hip-hop was more than party music with their 1982 hit “The Message,” became the first hip-hop group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Joseph Saddler, better known as the disc jockey and producer Grandmaster Flash, said backstage, “It opens the gates to our culture.”

Jay-Z, the rapper who is chief executive officer of Def Jam Records, handed the awards to the group. Reading his speech from a personal digital assistant, he said, “The shot heard ’round the world was fired from the South Bronx.”

When Melle Mel, the rapper on “The Message,” stepped up to speak, he urged the music executives in the audience to “make hip-hop the culture that it was, instead the culture of violence it is right now.”

Joining the rappers as new members of the Hall of Fame were the poet-turned- punk-rock-pioneer Patti Smith, the three-member girl group the Ronettes, the hard-rock band Van Halen and the Georgia college-town rockers R.E.M.

It was the hall’s first awards ceremony to be broadcast live, on both the cable channel VH1 Classic and on the Web by America Online. VH1 will broadcast an edited version of the ceremony on Saturday at 9 p.m.

On the stage, strong women’s voices dominated the music. Aretha Franklin swooped through “I Never Loved a Man,” singing in tribute to the hall’s founder, Ahmet Ertegun, who died in December. Ronnie Spector belted “Be My Baby” with the Ronettes, and Ms. Smith brought an idealistic fervor to her songs.

Accepting her award, Ms. Smith recalled a kitchen table argument with her husband, Fred Smith, shortly before he died in 1994. “He said to me, ‘Tricia, one day you’re going to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “He asked me to accept it like a lady and not say any curse words and to make certain to salute new generations. Because it is the new generations that will redefine the landscape of rock ’n’ roll.”

Still, the epithets arrived when Ms. Smith tossed off her jacket, untucked her shirt and belted a punk anthem about being “outside of society.” She said it was her mother’s favorite song. The night’s closing all-star jam was also one of her songs, “People Have the Power.”

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam paid tribute to R.E.M., saying he had, by his calculations, listened to their album “Murmur” 1,260 times in the summer of 1984. Referring to R.E.M.’s hard-to-understand singer, Michael Stipe, he said, “One of the reasons I was listening so incessantly was I had to know what he was saying,” Mr. Vedder said. “He can hit an emotion with pinpoint accuracy or he can be completely oblique, and it all resonates.”

R.E.M. performed with its original drummer, Bill Berry, who had retired after suffering a brain aneurysm. Mr. Vedder joined R.E.M. onstage to sing “Man on the Moon,” and Ms. Smith joined them for the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” It was a reminder that Iggy Pop and the Stooges, whose music was a cornerstone of punk-rock, have not been elected to the Hall of Fame.

Old feuds were not left behind. The Ronettes, whose hits were triumphs of their producer Phil Spector’s “wall of sound,” pointedly didn’t mention him in speeches that thanked a lifetime of other supporters, including Mr. Spector’s songwriting collaborators and the Ronettes’ arranger, Jack Nitzsche.

Introducing the Ronettes, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones described hearing the group warming up backstage when they shared touring bills in the 1960s. “They could sing all their way right through a wall of sound,” he said. “They didn’t need anything.”

Ms. Spector, who was married to Mr. Spector from 1968 until 1974, recalled the days of “our dresses slit up the side and our beehives up to here,” pointing well over her head. “All my life, all I ever wanted to do was sing rock ’n’ roll.”

The omission of Mr. Spector’s name reflected a 15-year court battle between the producer and the group. The Ronettes were paid less than $15,000 when they signed with Philles Records in 1964, and never saw another payment. In 1987, the Ronettes sued Mr. Spector — who also wrote their songs and owned their label — for royalties. They won an award of $2.6 million in 2000, but it was overturned on appeal.

After the Ronettes performed last night, Paul Shaffer of “Late Night With David Letterman” — who led the stage band — read a brief congratulatory message from Mr. Spector in which he said, “I wish them all the happiness and good fortune the world has to offer.”

Mr. Spector, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989, meanwhile, is about to go on trial for the 2003 killing of an actress, Lana Clarkson, at his Los Angeles mansion; jury selection is to start on Monday.

Van Halen, which planned and then canceled a tour this summer with its original singer, David Lee Roth, couldn’t manage a reunion for the Hall of Fame. Its guitarist, Eddie Van Halen, entered a rehabilitation center last Thursday, according to a statement on the band’s Web site, and negotiations over which songs Mr. Roth might perform broke down. Only Van Halen’s bassist, Michael Anthony, and its second lead singer, Sammy Hagar, attended the ceremony. They performed the 1986 hit “Why Can’t This Be Love” with the stage band.

Velvet Revolver, which includes members of Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots, handed the members of Van Halen their awards and performed two additional Van Halen songs.

Mr. Hagar, accepting his award, said, “I couldn’t tell you how much I wish everyone was here tonight. It’s out of our control.” He also thanked the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for including him as a Hall of Fame member, although he did not join Van Halen until 1985, after Mr. Roth left.

“They didn’t have to do that,” Mr. Hagar said. He added that while he regretted the full band wasn’t at the ceremony, “You couldn’t get me from here with a shotgun.”

Is Hip-Hop Really Dead? - DaveyD, San Jose Mercury News

2007-03-04T14:18:00.000-08:00

Is Hip-Hop Really Dead?

By DaveyD , San Jose Mercury News
Posted on March 3, 2007, Printed on March 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/48693/

Hip-hop icon Nas made the provocative statement, "Hip-hop is dead,'' in September and set off a firestorm of controversy. It was intensified by the January release of his album bearing the same title.

Many questioned why Nas would say hip-hop -- a worldwide phenomenon that has generated billions of dollars -- could be "dead.'' After all, more hip-hop albums are being released then ever before, and the music's influence extends to movies, corporate marketing and theater. That it's dead seems absurd -- until you realize Nas was looking beneath the surface.

He was speaking of the corporate side of the music and the mentality of executives more interested in turning a quick buck than nurturing rap culture. Nas realized sex, violence and bling, as themes for the music, had pretty much run their course. Album sales had plummeted, and ratings at hip-hop radio stations in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere had hit all-time lows.

A number of people, including this writer, also had spoken out about mediocre product coming from some of the genre's biggest stars. Yet such talk was rebuffed by so-called industry experts, who blamed digital downloading and satellite radio.

We critics, however, were vindicated by a study published earlier this year by the University of Chicago. Data from the "Black Youth Project'' indicated that while 58 percent of blacks between ages 15 and 25 listen to hip-hop daily, most are dissatisfied with it. They find the subject matter is too violent, and women too often portrayed in offensive ways.

Such feelings hint at a dirty little secret of the music business: Blacks are used largely to validate musical themes being marketed to the white mainstream. In other words, while 90 percent of commercial rap artists on TV and radio are black, the target audience lies outside the black community.

Paul Porter, a longtime industry veteran and former music programmer at BET and Radio One, is now with the watchdog organization Industryears.com. He says the University of Chicago findings offer proof positive that commercial hip-hop has become the ultimate minstrel show, and rap artists are pushed by the industry to remain perpetual adolescents.

As a result, we watch Diddy, Cam'ron, DMX and others brag about wealth and throw bills at a camera while bikini-clad women gyrate in the background. Should these artists attempt to break out of the mold, they'd risk having their work questioned by record and radio executives.

In our conversation, Porter also pointed to something more sinister: payola. He claimed hip-hop is dead only because payola is rampant at labels intent on investing in songs with sexual and violent themes.

During a separate conversation, Questlove of the Roots supported Porter's allegation with his own story about the process behind the group's Grammy-winning hit with Erykah Badu, "You Got Me.'' He said the Roots had to pony up close to "a million dollars'' to a middle man who "worked his magic'' at radio stations.

Initially, the overtly positive song had been rejected, he explained, so palms were greased with the promise that key stations countrywide would get hot "summer jam'' concert acts in exchange for airplay. According to Questlove, more than $1 million in cash and resources were eventually laid out for the success of that single song.

In the documentary "Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,'' shown recently on the PBS series "Independent Lens,'' filmmaker Byron Hurt confronts Stephen Hill, BET's senior vice president for programming, to ask why the cable network plays so many videos with misogynist and otherwise degrading themes. The fortysomething Hill walks away without answering. This is the same executive who refused to broadcast videos by the group Little Brother, because he considered their material "too intelligent'' for the BET audience.

With thinking like that, no wonder commercial hip-hop appears dead. It's the ideas of the gatekeepers that are dead.

Hyphy - hip-hop

2007-02-15T05:38:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-13T08:12:00.001-08:00

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

2007-02-13T08:11:00.001-08:00

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

2007-02-13T08:07:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

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.’ ”

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By DaveyD , San Jose Mercury News
Posted on March 3, 2007, Printed on March 4, 2007
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