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

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

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

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.”

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

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

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/