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

College Literature, Winter 1999 by Wahl, Greg

Hence, on the surface, the video seems based on an assimilationist parable: "good music," regardless of genre and audience demographics, overcomes superficial differences and achieves a microcosm of the American melting pot. Inside this melting pot, the critical reading goes, minorities lose the ability to express themselves fully on their own terms, achieving success only on the terms of the already accepted white mainstream. Around the text of the video, though, the music fan's contextual narrative arises that, coming at an extremely low point of Aerosmith's career, the video may have rescued them from the 70s rock graveyard, a fact that diminishes their assumed dominant status in relation to Run-DMC. In the end, Aerosmith has no choice but to accept the power of rap simultaneously to corrupt and revitalize their song, just as traditional rhythm and blues was simultaneously corrupted and revitalized bv British and American hard rock and heaw metal in the 70s and 80s. In the video for "Walk This Way," underground or marginal musical practices are overlaid on Aerosmith's traditional musical virtuosity, and the conventions of contemporary black urban speech are layered over Aerosmith's updated rhythm and blues vocal style in a kind of reclamation of the black roots of American popular music. In the end, Run-DMC may be the ones who issue the command to assimilate-as chorus of the song, sung enthusiastically in unison by both groups, says, to "walk this way," and "talk this way." Such an outcome is a surprisingly counterintuitive manipulation of MTV as a commercial tool. At the time, the network was one of the worst offenders ever in an already historically regressive music industry: because the network had established its demographic as white suburban adolescent males, it actively refused to play videos by black artists for the first few years of its existence, capitulating only when it saw that Michael Jackson could be as big a cash cow as heavy-metal hair bands. In a kind of commercial judo move, RunDMC used Aerosmith's momentum of failure and MTV's momentum of regression in a way that propelled themselves into the mainstream.

THE FALSE DISGUISE OF SHOWBIZ: DE LA SOUL

De La Soul, another successful group of the late 1980s, attempted to construct its commercial oppositionality in a different way. The flagship band of the "Native Tongues" wing of rap, a loose network of groups including Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, Monie Love, and others, De La Soul epitomized the Native Tongues' emphasis on anti-fashion, Afrocentrism, and "peace." Where other groups positioned their particular variants of slang, lyrical meter, and rhyme as points on a spectrum of what could broadly be construed as "rap language," De La Soul members Posdnuos (Plug 1), Trugoy the Dove (Plug 2), and PA Pacemaster Mace (Plug 3) construed their own vocal style, "speak," as not merely a variation but a new language in itself, radically different from both mainstream speech and the stylings of other rappers. Combining this anti-conversational style with producer Prince Paul's mentoring and samples from across the commercial spectrum of musical genres (including Johnny Cash, whose "Five Feet High and Rising" was sampled for the album's title track), 1989's Three Feet High and Rising announced itself as the aesthetic of a new and better era, the D.A.I.S.Y. age (an acronym for "Da Inner Sound, Y'all"). On the album, the group includes some standard meditations on girls and the problems of ghetto life, but also breaks with tradition in its exposition of its own historical and cultural niche.