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

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

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

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

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

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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...

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...

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...

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...