Last Tuesday, I got the chance to see legendary Public Enemy emcee Chuck D speak. The theme of his lecture was billed as "Race, Rap and Reality," and amid standard motivational cliches on making it in America and the importance of getting an education (plus some more timely reactions to the rises of Barack Obama and Jeremy Lin), Mr. D had a few interesting thoughts about the state of contemporary hip hop. Though it seemed he was trying to sneak his opinions in by constantly framing them within a grander context, his thoughts were clear: commercial hip hop has a broken value system, and conscious hip hop is the only fully defensible rap subgenre.
In one particularly pointed bit of rhetoric, the rapper placed Drake, Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Jay-Z and Kanye West on one side of a divide and Lupe Fiasco, The Roots, Common and Nas on the other. The former acts sound slick and teach you how to be cool, he argued, but the latter will help you open your mind and think critically. "It's easy to watch the throne," Mr. D added, "but who will catch the thrown?" In essence, he presented hip hop as a wholly polar world in which two diametrically opposed groups rage against one another in perpetuity - those who get fucked up in Paris, and those who have a bigger, nobler mission.
Of course, this delineation grossly oversimplifies things. What of the blatantly commercial dance club pop-rap that dodges critical ears altogether, or the weed-fueled stoner hip hop movement typified by Wiz Khalifa? Where do the aggressively weird Das Racist, intentionally rabble-rousing Odd Future and Internet meme-generating Lil B fall? Today's hip hop scene is too nuanced to paint in Chuck D's convenient black and white. Still, if we eliminate all outlying factors and examine only the two groups he recognizes, it's pretty obvious that, in general, critical acclaim has swung wildly in favor of the dudes he doesn't respect as much - and it's easy to understand why this scares the shit out of him.
Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is perhaps the best hip hop album ever recorded. The cover portrays the effortlessly cool Chuck D and Flavor Flav behind bars. Chuck's lyrics are politically and socially charged, and despite the danceable beats and Flav's backing cries of "Yeah, boyee," the entire record's atmosphere channels its main lyricist's rage brilliantly and serves as a quintessential rallying cry for black America. It has also managed to sell nearly 2 million copies, and it is the highest ranking hip hop album on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Somehow, it seems unlikely that an album with "Night of the Living Baseheads" and "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" as singles would perform quite as well in a post-"Gold Digger" world.
Today, Public Enemy's spiritual successors like Black Star and Immortal Technique are critically marginalized, while mega-sellers like Jay-Z and Kanye's Watch the Throne and Drake's Take Care enjoy success in equal measure in the pages of noted tastemaker publications. This isn't inherently bad like Chuck D implies, but it does suggest that the way we receive and even hear hip hop has radically changed since Public Enemy's heyday. Conscious hip hop as a subgenre and as a concept has grown stronger than ever these past few years, but it's been forced deeper into the underground, too. The model for critical success in hip hop has finally caught up to the model for commercial success, but forces outside of music have had a bigger hand in that than music itself.
Another point Chuck D visited time and again during his lecture was the erroneous notion of a post-racial America. It's been a buzzy phrase since the ebullient atmosphere in this country after the election of our first-ever black president in November 2008, and for a while, it even seemed valid. The result of this ephemeral enthusiasm was a mass false assumption by many white Americans - even well-educated, racially sensitive ones - that the election of Barack Obama meant the end of significant challenges for black Americans. This illusion fell apart quickly, but generations of liberal Americans wracked by years of white guilt resisted. As long as the Obamas make their home at the White House, the misguided logic goes, reality can be pushed to the periphery.
This increasingly squeamish American relationship with race has been reflected in hip hop, a genre whose white fanbase grows larger every day. In an allegedly post-racial America, whose appropriation of the N-word is easier to stomach? Kanye West, who makes it feel almost playful, or Nas, who makes it sting like the lash of a master across his slave's back? The latter's scathing Untitled (titled thusly because Def Jam rejected his proposed title, Nigger) was his best since 1994's monumental Illmatic, but it barely registered as a ripple in the pool of hip hop criticism. Meanwhile, Mr. West teamed up with Jay-Z for the admittedly addictive but reductive "Niggas in Paris," which topped year-end singles lists with alarming regularity.
Right now, America needs rappers who make them comfortable, and critics have begun to realize this. The Roots backed off on controversial lyrical politics once they became the house band on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Flavor Flav now stars in VH1 reality shows and Pepsi commercials. We've gone from "Fight the Power" anchoring the race riot scene in Do the Right Thing to "No Church in the Wild" anchoring the trailer for Safe House. It's time to accept that worse things have happened.
Chuck D's list of throwaway rappers - Drake, Nicki, Ross, Jay, Ye - reads not only like a list of some of the best-selling hip hop artists working today but also like a list of some of the best. They could rap about race, politics, oppression or any number of other issues that would result in their being recategorized as conscious hip hop, and that material would probably be excellent. But they don't rap about those things, and they don't need to. There will always be an thriving underground, doing the trench work for those willing to listen.
We may never return to an era in which an album like Nation of Millions can go platinum, but that doesn't mean it's all doom and gloom in the hip hop world. The dichotomy between the two scenes Chuck D identified exists, but excellent music comes out in both camps on a regular basis. It's disappointing that the squeamishness generated by notions of post-racialism means a majority will never hear Immortal Technique's Revolutionary Vol. 2 or Dead Prez's Pulse of the People, but that doesn't make My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or Thank Me Later any less excellent. We simply must view them through a different lens.
Post by Brad Sanders; image courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan
