"I fought the law (and I cold won!): Hip-hop in the mainsteam

College Literature, Winter 1999 by Wahl, Greg

INTRODUCTION

The appearance of objectionable subject matter-seeming glorifications of crime, violence, misogyny, or greedin hip-hop music, especially "gangsta" rap, has become a determining factor about the genre for critics. Due to the campaigning and lobbying efforts of groups such as the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC), and to the media hype that has surrounded such incidents as the violent deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., rap has become, for many parents, politicians, and church leaders, a destructive influence, a site of practically pure anti-social values, of "negativity." Because of vocal and continued protests, it seems that cultural critics dealing with rap must now always address the form's "controversial" nature. In mounting both attacks and defenses, critics have had to decide just where and how to locate the debate, and there has been some confusion about how to go about the task. Most commonly, this entails merely drawing a connection in one direction or another between the artist and the consumer. This is primarily done in two ways: (a) through textual readings of the content of hiphop music, lyrics, and culture which are said to have a negative effect on consumers, especially children; or (b) by explaining or excusing violent content as a reflection of unequal American race relations and socioeconomics.

Of the recent critics from the former school, Ronin Ro is perhaps the most vociferous, writing that "Hip hop lives under the oppressive shadow of a handful of gangsta rappers with meager skills, drug-addled worldviews and far-reaching effects on American youth." This faction of artists, he asserts "is fast on its way to casting its shadow-projecting the artists' drug abuse, misogyny and selfhate-over this generation" (1996, 2-3). Critics from the latter school will point out that rap draws upon culturally specific narrative modes such as "playing the dozens," in which violence functions (merely) symbolically. For instance, Robin D. G. Kelley asserts that gangsta rap is almost purely symbolic, has become a straw man for other American problems, and is in fact best understood as mere "sonic force" (1996, 158). Tricia Rose and Houston A. Baker, Jr., have also asserted that rap's sometimes violent content is a confrontational response to privileged America's desire to close the already disenfranchised out of public space. Rose devotes a chapter to the relatively small group of "Black women rappers [who] articulate the fears, pleasures, and promises of young black women whose voices have been relegated to the margins" (1994, 146). Russell Potter goes further, asserting that hip-hop violence is a post-colonial phenomenon resulting in a "moral panic" which functions as "ideological broadcasting" (1995, 85-89): "Behind the moral panics which deploy the word 'violence' to attack rap music is a culture that already sanctions all kinds of violence" (Potter 1995, 86).

Still, all of these critics often succumb to the temptation to enter the debate on the terms of rap's "opponents," pointing to the "good" rappers in order to deflect attention from the "bad." William Eric Perkins, for example, contrasts the negative effects of gangsta rap to the potential of "message" rap, which could become "a vehicle for a regenerative anti-authoritarianism (so necessary in an age of growing right-wing cultural fanaticism) in youth culture and black youth culture in particular" (1996, 19). In the response most representative of these moves, Houston Baker asserts that "if one concentrates on what I call the positive sites of rap . . . one realizes how signally creative, important, and varied rap is as a generational form" (1993, 52). It should be noted that there are many successful rap artists who avoid, and even protest, violent, misogynist, or racist subject matter. It should also be noted that as catalysts for social change, these artists seem to fail to fulfill their revolutionary potential at the moment in their careers at which increasing commercial success allows them access to "the mainstream," that amorphous middle-class majority that consumes entertainment in staggering quantities and never strays far from the middle of the political spectrum. If this great "mass" could be swung just a little to the left by entertainers, one imagines, it might be prompted to political action. Time and again, though, the potential for politically committed positive rap acts to enter the mainstream and jar it out of its political complacency seems to fail.

Too often, the role of the specific socioeconomic system of the music and entertainment industry, with its simultaneous and conflicting constructions of rebellious resistance and commercial stardom, is minimized, simplified, or ignored by critics in making sense of this failure. Usually, the role of the recording industry is seen as an either-or proposition: either propagating controversy for the sake of profit (Ro), or giving voice to the disenfranchised (Baker). If, however, we see the problems of the marketplace as primary in relation to the moral content of entertainment, a more complex picture emerges, one in which it is not so easy or useful to differentiate rappers' social production from their marketing strategies, or indeed from the uses made of rap by consumers. Of particular importance in the nebulous relationship between the marketplace and moral content is the dichotomy between enter tainment that is seen to comprise an "authentic" threat to deep-seated inequality, and is therefore doomed to embrace commercial and popular obscurity; and entertainment that does not threaten the socioeconomic status quo and so may become "mainstream," commercially successful on a mass scale. As a critical model for such an examination, bell hooks's "Gangsta Culture-Sexism and Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap" might serve usefully. In this work, hooks also argues for a shift of emphasis from the moral content of rap to its commercial context, which she terms "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (1994, 115-24). The scope of this context is very broad, but hooks is right to include the music industry as a part of the social context of rap. The analysis below will make a similar move, but will focus more specifically on the popular music marketplace. In addition, rather than moving strictly from social context as cause to lyrical content as effect, it will explore the shifting dynamics between the two as a means to find a more appropriate scholarly use of rap music. Perhaps no historical moment in the music industry has illuminated the negotiations surrounding these subtle dynamics of socioeconomics, race, and power in a consumer society as thoroughly as the emergence of hip-hop into the mainstream during the years 1986 to 1989.