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

College Literature, Winter 1999 by Wahl, Greg

CONCLUSION

More than anyone else at the time of rap's coming of age, these groups demonstrated the difficulties of underground passage into the mainstream, the constant tension between succeeding in a commercially driven art form and retaining the oppositionality that engendered the form's success in the first place. They also made it apparent that the music industry's "mainstream" functions as microcosm for a larger system of socioeconomic domination, one that has remained maneuverable by its powerful helmsmen in order to maximize their interests and ward off threats to their primacy. In hip-hop texts, and in the circumstances of its consumption and production, this industry influence is often conflated with the maintenance of violent systems of power and domination, especially racism in both obvious and subtle forms. As evidence of this maneuverability, all the artists discussed above have either faded into legend or abandoned their oppositional status. N.W.A. splintered into discrete solo artists and producers who defined the West Coast gangster sound of the mid1990s (a now already despised style that spawned the ill-fated Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.); Run-DMC have become born-again Christians who tour colleges as a nostalgia act; the Beastie Boys moved to California and began performing earnest and empty multicultural funk; Public Enemy has reinstated their resident anti-Semite and has not been well-received in years; and De La Soul, constantly complaining about the lack of money their underground status earns them, have perhaps recorded their last album.

Perhaps the most complicated 90s turn from these groups is Beastie Boy MCA's rise to power as the organizer of the hugely successful Tibetan Freedom Concerts, which gather a stable of currently popular "alternative" rap and rock artists for two-day charity festivals. "Freeing" Tibet is, of course, a worthy cause, but the focus and scale of this effort can also be said to mark an abandonment of attention to more immediate local, or even domestic, issues. As Marc Anderson, co-founder of the Washington, D.C. based punk rock community service group Positive Force, said to the Washington Post about the festival, "A lot of these folks [playing Free Tibet] are quite wealthy now, and it impinges on your own lifestyle if you're challenging the increasing concentration of the entertainment industry or the systematic destruction of the safety net for the poor." Anderson sees these celebrity activists as merely "representatives of large multinational corporations, an insidious, but very real, mechanism that co-opts people. I wish there were a D.C. Freedom Concert, but the folks engaged in this concert just don't want to address those questions" (Fisher 1998, Gf). On the level of the fan, such charges of "sellout" are often expressed more personally as a perception that underground stars who have broken through into the mainstream are punishing their early, and most loyal, fans by extorting hundred-dollar tickets from them in the name of charity.