Wha Wha What?
Posted on 07/29/2003 7:53:54 AM PDT by bedolido
Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. Since 1) it was 1:30 on a school day, 2) they were carrying book bags, and 3) they seemed to be in no hurry, I assumed they were skipping school. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor.
Black people ran the restaurant and made up the bulk of the customers, but it was hard to see much healthy “black community” here. After repeatedly warning the boys to stop throwing food and keep quiet, the manager finally told them to leave. The kids ignored her. Only after she called a male security guard did they start slowly making their way out, tauntingly circling the restaurant before ambling off. These teens clearly weren’t monsters, but they seemed to consider themselves exempt from public norms of behavior—as if they had begun to check out of mainstream society.
What struck me most, though, was how fully the boys’ music—hard-edged rap, preaching bone-deep dislike of authority—provided them with a continuing soundtrack to their antisocial behavior. So completely was rap ingrained in their consciousness that every so often, one or another of them would break into cocky, expletive-laden rap lyrics, accompanied by the angular, bellicose gestures typical of rap performance. A couple of his buddies would then join him. Rap was a running decoration in their conversation.
Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn’t be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.
The venom that suffuses rap had little place in black popular culture—indeed, in black attitudes—before the 1960s. The hip-hop ethos can trace its genealogy to the emergence in that decade of a black ideology that equated black strength and authentic black identity with a militantly adversarial stance toward American society. In the angry new mood, captured by Malcolm X’s upraised fist, many blacks (and many more white liberals) began to view black crime and violence as perfectly natural, even appropriate, responses to the supposed dehumanization and poverty inflicted by a racist society. Briefly, this militant spirit, embodied above all in the Black Panthers, infused black popular culture, from the plays of LeRoi Jones to “blaxploitation” movies, like Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which celebrated the black criminal rebel as a hero.
But blaxploitation and similar genres burned out fast. The memory of whites blatantly stereotyping blacks was too recent for the typecasting in something like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song not to offend many blacks. Observed black historian Lerone Bennett: “There is a certain grim white humor in the fact that the black marches and demonstrations of the 1960s reached artistic fulfillment” with “provocative and ultimately insidious reincarnations of all the Sapphires and Studds of yesteryear.”
Early rap mostly steered clear of the Sapphires and Studds, beginning not as a growl from below but as happy party music. The first big rap hit, the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1978 “Rapper’s Delight,” featured a catchy bass groove that drove the music forward, as the jolly rapper celebrated himself as a ladies’ man and a great dancer. Soon, kids across America were rapping along with the nonsense chorus:
I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie,
to the hip-hip hop, ah you don’t stop
the rock it to the bang bang boogie, say
up jump the boogie,
to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.
A string of ebullient raps ensued in the months ahead. At the time, I assumed it was a harmless craze, certain to run out of steam soon.
But rap took a dark turn in the early 1980s, as this “bubble gum” music gave way to a “gangsta” style that picked up where blaxploitation left off. Now top rappers began to write edgy lyrics celebrating street warfare or drugs and promiscuity. Grandmaster Flash’s ominous 1982 hit, “The Message,” with its chorus, “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” marked the change in sensibility. It depicted ghetto life as profoundly desolate:
You grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate.
The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way.
You’ll admire all the numberbook takers,
Thugs, pimps and pushers, and the big money makers.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Good God Gertrude, isn't that the truth! The proof's in the puddin'!
I agree with your point--we listened to scary music to scare our elders and appear hip. I recently bought a few CD's of music I listened to in my early twenties--a live Motorhead album and Black Sabbath w/ Ronnie James Dio (Heaven and Hell). It was hilarious! I couldn't believe I listened to this crap, let alone took it so seriously!
Wha Wha What?
Dude, he's only 37.
Well I never! Word to your mother, young man! ;^)
My best friend in HS wrote that in some sort of paint in my senior yearbook - it took up the WHOLE page... I posted that about punk to show that there was a lot of 'anger and hate' in music back in our day too.
However, I do believe that the media has helped it become more mainstream and "cool".
Thanks for mentioning this! I'm black, but I'm a rock and roller and these are my peeps! Now you're talkin' music! : )
As for rap, my son (an un-named FReeper) listens to it sometimes. When he was younger, I monitored what he listened to very carefully. Personally, for all the drugged-out, anti-authority lyrics of the 60s and 70s, I have never heard anything as hateful as some of this rap music and I did not want him to listen to it.
As he got older (as in over 18) and bought his own music, I noticed some of it was more hardcore. I still don't like it, but I think I am bound by my own experiences with 'hard' rock. I didn't go out and become antisocial because I listened to Ozzy, I don't think my son will become a gang banger because he listens to some of the harder rap.
I do hold the line at cop-killing lyrics, but he says that that was pretty much a phase that's played out. I don't know. What's more important in the long run is that he likes a variety of music and isn't always filling his head with rap.
BTW - rap is nothing new. blacks were doing these long rhymes for years. When my mother taught the primary grades 40 years ago, it was not unusual for her to have kids who didn't know their colors or even their correct names, but they could spout whatever 'rap' was current at the time. Sad. The parents thought it was cute. I'm sure the same is true today.
Tull rules!
Remember that episode of Quincy where Klugman blamed all of society's ills on Punk?
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