Week 2: The Hip Hop Wars

 Our readings and film for this week introduce some of the key debates (in the public sphere and in academic hip hop studies) related to the popularization of hip hop culture, especially the commercialization of rap.  

 

Reading guide

Please keep these questions in mind as you work through the texts.

• What historical facts do the authors (or participants in the Google debate) rely upon to construct hip hop’s history?
• What are the political stakes of hip hop? Why does a critical discussion of hip hop matter?
• What do the two assigned readings share in common?

 

Readings & Film

▢ Complete readings and answer discussion questions by Wed @ noon. 

(UPLOAD)

  

(Write down how you feel in this debate) Here is the link for Film.

Here is the questions:

 

To begin our discussion this week, I’d like you to think critically about how the authors (Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Tricia Rose) approach writing the history of hip hop and answer the following questions.

• What historical facts do they rely upon to write this history?
• What are the political stakes of hip hop, according to each author?
• What do the two pieces share in common?

Both of our authors are professors, so after you’ve named them initially, you can either call them Dr. Gates, Jr. or Dr. Rose (or Professor instead of Dr.) Also, I am not asking you to pit these two writers against one another or to declare one easier to read than the other, etc. It’s not necessarily a compare and contrast (though a little bit of that is fine). I’m asking you to be observant of their writing styles and each writer’s overall approach to chronicling the history of hip hop.

For this hw, you have two things to do. One is read what I upload and answer those questions. 

Second watch the debate, and write down you thought.

Edited by

ADAM BRADLEY
ANDREW DUBOIS

Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Afterwords by Chuck D and Common

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Haven and London

Copyright © 2010 by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois.

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,

in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US. Copyright Law

and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional

use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (US. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk(UK.

office).

Designed by Mary Valencia

Set in Minion, Nobel, American Typewriter, and Franklin Gothic type by Technologies ‘N

Typography.

Interior art and photography by Justin Francis

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The anthology of rap / edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois; foreword by Henry Louis

Gates, Jr.; afterwords by Chuck D and Common.

p. em.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-14190-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Rap (Music)-History and criticism.

2. Rap (Music)-Texts. I. Bradley, Adam. II. DuBois, Andrew (Andrew Lee)

ML3531.A57 2010

782.42164909-dc22 2010023316

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
The first person I ever heard “rap” was a man born in 1913, my

father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr. Daddy’s generation didn’t call the

rhetorical games they played “rapping”; they signified, they

layed the Dozens. But this was rapping just the same, rapping

y another name. Signifying is the grandparent of Rap; and Rap

s signifying in a postmodern way. The narratives that my fa-

her recited in rhyme told the tale of defiant heroes named

hine or Stagolee or, my absolute favorite, the Signifyin:g Mon-

ey. They were linguistically intricate, they were funny and

pirited, and they were astonishingly profane.
Soon the stories became familiar to me and I started

memorizing parts of them, especially striking couplets and

ometimes an entire resonant stanza. But every time my dad re-

a version of one of these tales, he somehow made it new

reminding me of all that a virtuosic performer possessed:

an excellent memory, a mastery of pace and timing, the capac-

‘ty to inflect and gesture, the ability to summon the identities of

ifferent characters simply through the nuances of their voices.

My father and his friends called their raps “signifying” or

‘playing the Dozens;’ a younger generation named them

Toasts, and an even younger generation called it “rapping:’ But

regardless of the name, much about the genre remained the

ame. Since anthropologists tend to call them “Toasts;’ we will

mploy that term here. Toasts are long oral poems that had

emerged by World War I, shortly after the sinking of the Ti-
tanic, judging by the fact that one of the earliest surviving ex-
amples of the genre was called “Shine and the Titanic.” And the
act that the French words for “monkey” and “sign” are a bit of

a visual pun (singe and signe, respectively) also points to a World War I ori-
gin of the genre as it would have been revised by returning black veterans

from the European theater of war. (My father recalls meeting southern

black soldiers at the beginning of World War II at Camp Lee, Virginia,

who were barely literate but who could recite “acres of verses” of “The Sig-

nifying MonkeY;’ underscoring the role of the military and war as a cross-

pollinating mechanism for black cultural practices. And of these various

forms, none would be more compelling, more popular, more shared than

signifying.)

xxiii

All of these sub genres emerged out of the African American rhetorical

practice of signifying. Signifying is the defining rhetorical principle of all

African American discourse, the language game of black language games,

both sacred and secular, from the preacher’s call-and-response to the irony

and indirection of playing the Dozens. These oral poets practiced their arts

in ritual settings such as the street corner or the barbershop, sometimes en-

gaging in verbal duels with contenders like a lingUistic boxing match. These

recitations were a form of artistic practice and honing, but they were also

the source of great entertainment displayed before an audience with a most

sophisticated ear. And though certain poems, such as “Shine and the Ti-
tanic” and “The Signifying MonkeY;’ had a familiar, repeated narrative con-
tent, poets improvised through and around this received content, with im-

provised stanzas and lyrics that might address a range of concerns from

social and political issues to love, loneliness, heartbreak, and even death.

The Dozens and the Toasts were, first and foremost, forms of art, and ev-

eryone on the street or sitting around the barbershop knew this. Rapping

was a performance, rappers were to be judged, and the judges were the peo-

ple on the corner or in the shop. Everyone, it seemed to me as I watched

these performances unfolding even as a child, was literate in the fine arts of

signification.

As I listened to my father delighting us in the late fifties with tales of

the Monkey and old Shine, I knew at once that there was something sub-

lime, something marvelous and forbidden and dangerous about them. And

it was easy to recognize variations on rapping that started emerging in

rhythm and blues and soul music in the sixties. I am thinking of James

Brown’s nine-minute rendition of “Lost Someone” on his Live at the Apollo
album in 1963, or Isaac Hayes’s paradigm-shifting version of “By the Time I

Get to Phoenix” from his Hot Buttered Soul album of 1969. And H. Rap
Brown’s emergence as one of the leaders of the younger black militants of

the Black Power movement brought the word “Rap” and the lyrics of the

xxiv
Dozens to a generation of black students because he included his most

original raps, as a point of pride in his own artistry, in his autobiography,

Die, Nigger, Die. (Unfortunately, Mr. Brown did not write as well as he

rapped!)
A few years later, I would hear echoes of all of these formal antecedents

in the early Rap songs hitting the airwaves in the late seventies and early

eighties. Melle Mel’s verse on “The Message”:

A child is born with no state of mind

Blind to the ways of mankind

God is smiling on you but he’s frowning too

Because only God knows what you’ll go through

echoes across the decades back to these lines from the toast called “Life’s a

Funny Old Proposition”:

A man comes to birth on this funny old earth

With not a chance in a million to win

To find that he’s through and his funeral is due

Before he can even begin

Despite all that is different about them, these two verses are bound to-

gether by both sound and sense. They each insist upon an unstinting and

unflinching confrontation with reality, while somehow staving off despair.

Great art so often does this, offering expiation and transcendence all at

once. As an art form, Rap is defined, like the Toasts before it, by a set of for-

mal qualities, an iconoclastic spirit, and a virtuosic sense of wordplay. It ex-

tends the long-standing practice in the African American oral tradition of

language games. Simply put, Rap is a contemporary form of signifying.

By the time I began my first job teaching at Yale while still a graduate

student in the mid-1970s, I began to hear about a new music coming out of

the Bronx. It was simply called Rap-an old word for those familiar with

black slang, but a new form that combined rhythm and rhyme in a style all

its own. Like all art-vernacular or high art-it took the familiar and made

it unfamiliar again. Rap’s signature characteristic is the parody and pastiche

of its lyrics, including “sampling;’ which is just another word for intertextu-

ality. Rap is the art form par excellence of synthesiS and recombination. No

one could say that Afrika Bambaataa or Grandmaster Flash was not creat-

, ing something new, but each would be quick to acknowledge his forIP.-al

debts to other artists, especially to old school musicians from the past.

xxv
As we have seen, Rap is the postmodern version of an African Ameri-

can vernacular tradition that stretches back to chants, Toasts, and trickster

tales. It connects through its percussive sensibility, its riffs, and its penchant

for rhyme, with a range of forms including scat singing, radio DJ patter, and

Black Arts movement poets like Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Jayne

Cortez. Its sense of musicality, both in voice and beat, owes a great deal to

performers like Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, as well as to funk and

soul artists like James Brown, Isaac Hayes, George Clinton, and Sly Stone.

Rap is, in other words, a multifarious, multifaceted tradition imbedded

within an African American oral culture that itself shares in the rich history

of human expression across the ages.

At its best, Rap, though a most serious genre, doesn’t take itself too self-

consciously or try to overburden its lines with rehearsed wisdom, or the

cant of ideology. It complicates or even rejects literal interpretation. It de-

mands fluency in the recondite codes of African American speech. Just like

the Dozens before it, Rap draws strength by shattering taboos, sending up

stereotype, and relishing risque language and subject matter.

I learned this last lesson firsthand more than two decades ago. In the

spring of 1990, after I had published an editorial on the case in the New
York Times, I was called to testify as an expert witness before a Florida
court in the obscenity trial of the 2 Live Crew. The group’s 1989 album, As

Nasty as They Wanna Be, with its provocative single “Me So Horny;’ had in-
spired such heated response from civic leaders that copies were burned in

the streets. At stake was not simply the songs of one group of young black

men, but the very freedom of expression at the core of all artistic creation.

In my testimony, I stated that in the very lyrics that some found simply

crass and pornographic, “what you hear is great humor, great joy, and great

boisterousness. It’s a joke. It’s a parody and parody is one of the most vener-

ated forms of art:’

Rap has always been animated by this complexity of meaning and in-

tention. This is by no means to absolve artists of the ethics of form, particu-

larly in the artist’s capacity as a role model for young people, but rather to

point out that there’s an underlying value worth fighting for in defending

Rap-or any other form of art for that matter-against those who would si-

lence its voice. One of the hallmarks of a democratic society should be en-

suring the space for all citizens to express themselves in art, whether we like

what they have to say or not. After all, censorship is to art as lynching is to

justice.

As we have seen, it is not difficult to trace a straight line between the

xxvi
marvelously formulaic oral tales like “Shine and the Titanic” and “The Sig-
nifying Monkey” and Rap, and, in terms ofliterary history, it is a short line,

too. Rappers often make direct allusions to vernacular culture, as we see on

songs like Schoolly D’s “Signifying Rapper” and Devin the Dude’s “Briar-

patch:’ Even when the connection is less explicit, it is no less apparent. It’s

impossible not to hear echoes of H. Rap Brown’s signifYing virtuosity when
reading the lyrics to Smoothe da Hustler and Trigga da Gambler’s “Broken

Language:’ And there is undoubtedly something of that swaggering folk

hero Stagolee in someone like 2Pac, or of that trickster the Signifying Mon-

key in someone like 01′ Dirty Bastard.

Given Rap’s close connection to the African American oral tradition, it

should come as no surprise that it also carries with it much of the same

baggage. Misogyny and homophobia, which we must critique, often mar

the effectiveness of the music. But as with practices like the Toasts and the

Dozens, these influences are by no means absolute. Perhaps one of the most

bracing things about reading this anthology is the way that it complicates

our assumptions about what Rap is and what Rap does, who makes it and

who consumes it. In this anthology, we see Yo-yo going head to head

against Ice Cube in a battle of the sexes, or female MCs like Eve and Jean

Grae calling attention to issues like domestic violence and abortion that of-

ten get left out of Hip-Hop discourse, and artists often associated with

gangsta personas or “conscious” perspecti~es revealing the full range and
complexity of their subjectivity.

The Anthology of Rap is an essential contribution to our living literary
tradition. It calls attention to the artistry, sense of craft, and striking origi-

nality of an art form born of young black and brown men and women who

found their voices in rhyme, and chanted a poetic discourse to the rhythm

of the beat. This groundbreaking anthology masterfully assembles part of a

new vanguard of American poetry. One of its greatest virtues is that it fo-

cuses attention, often for the first time, upon Rap’s lyrics alone. This is not a

rejection of the music, but rather a reminder that the words are finally the

best reason for the beat.

One finds in this anthology many lyrics that complicate common as-

sumptions about Rap music. And as we might expect, the reader encoun-

ters the brutal diction of Gangsta Rap, but also its leavening humor and

parody. One finds instances of sexism and homophobia, but also resistance

to them. One finds words seemingly intended to offend, but also, some-

times, the deeper meanings of and motives for this sort of conscious provo-

cation. Rap’s tradition is as broad and as deep as any other form of poetry,

but like any other literary tradition, it contains its shallows, its whirlpools,

and its muddy waters. Our task as active, informed readers is to navigate

through the tributaries of Rap’s canon, both for the pleasure that comes

from the journey as readers, but also for the wisdom born of traveling to

any uncharted destinations of the mind. Adam Bradley and Andrew

DuBois’s superbly edited, pioneering anthology makes such a journey
possible.

xxvii

Copyright © 2008 by Tricia Rose
Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address
BasicCivitas Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Books published by BasicCivitas are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in
the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more infor-
mation, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group,
2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (SOO) 810-4145, ext.
5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rose, Tricia.

The hip hop wars: what we talk about when we talk about hip hop / Tricia Rose.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-00897-

1

(alk. paper)
1. Hip-hop-Social aspects- United States. 2. Rap (Music) – Social aspects- United

States. 3. Social change-United States. 4. Subculture-United States. 5. African
Americans-Social conditions. 6. United States-Social conditions. 1. Title.

HN59.2.R682008
305.S96’07301732-dc22

10987654321

2008031637

THE

HIP
HOP
WARS

What We Talk About When
We Talk About Hip Hop

– and Why It Matters

TRICIAROSE

8
CIVITAS
ilCX)KS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

New York

Introduction

I’d like to say to all the industry people out there that control
what we call hip hop, I’d like for people to put more of an effort
to make hip hop the culture of music that it was, instead of the
culture of violence that it is right now. There’s a lot of people
that put in a lot of time, you know the break-dancers, the graf-
fiti artists, there’s people rapping all over the world . … All my
life I’ve been into hip hop, and it should mean more than just
somebody standing on the corner selling dope-I mean that
mayor may not have its place too because it’s there, but I’m
just saying-I ain’t never shot nobody, I ain’t never stabbed
nobody, I’m forty-five years old and I ain’t got no criminal
record, you know what I mean? The only thing I ever did was
be about my music. So I mean, so, while we’re teaching people
what it is about life in the ghetto, then we should be teaching
people about what it is about life in the ghetto, me trying to
grow up and to come up out of the ghetto. And we need every-
body’s help out there to make that happen.

-Melle Mel, lead rapper of and main songwriter for the
seminal rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious
Five, in an acceptance speech during the group’s
induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, March
2007

HIP HOP IS IN A TERRIBLE CRISIS. Although its overall fortunes have risen sharply, the most commercially promoted and fi-
nancially successful hip hop-what has dominated mass-media out-
lets such as television, film, radio, and recording industries for a
dozen years or so-has increasingly become a playground for carica-
tures of black gangstas, pimps, and hoes. Hyper-sexism has increased

1

2 THE HIP HOP WARS

dramatically, and homophobia along with distorted, antisocial, self-
destructive, and violent portraits of black masculinity have become
rap’s calling cards. Relying on an ever-narrowing range of images and
themes, this commercial juggernaut has played a central role in the
near-depletion of what was once a vibrant, diverse, and complex pop-
ular genre, wringing it dry by pandering to America’s racist and sexist
lowest common denominator.

This scenario differs vastly from the wide range of core images, at-
titudes, and icons that defined hip hop during its earlier years of pub-
lic visibility. In the 1980s, when rap’s commercial value began to
develop steam, gangsta rappers were only part of a much larger
iconic tapestry. There were many varieties of equally positioned
styles of rap-gangsta as well as party, political, afrocentric, and
avant-garde, each with multiple substyles as well. However, not only
were many styles of rap driven out of the corporate-promoted main-
stream, but since the middle to late 1990s, the social, artistic, and po-
litical significance of figures like the gangsta and street hustler
substantially devolved into apolitical, simple-minded, almost comic
stereotypes. Indeed, by the late 1990s, most of the affirming, creative
stories and characters that had stood at the defining core of hip hop

had been gutted. To use a hip hop metaphor, they were driven un-
derground, buried, and left to be dug up only by the most deeply in-
vested fans and artists.

Gangstas, hustlers, street crimes, and vernacular sexual insults (e.g.,
calling black women “hoes”) were part of hip hop’s storytelling long
before the record industry really got the hang of promoting rap music.
Gangstas and hustlers were not invented out of whole cloth by corpo-
rate executives: Prior to the ascendance of corporate mainstream hip
hop, these figures were more complex and ambivalent. A few were in-
teresting social critics. Some early West Coast gangsta rappers-
N.W.A., and W.C. and the Maad Circle, for example-featured
stories that emphasized being trapped by gang life and spoke about
why street crime had become a “line of work” in the context of
chronic black joblessness. Thwarted desires for safe communities and

meaningful work were often embedded in street hustling tales. Even-

Introduction 3

tually, though, the occasional featuring of complicated gangstas, hus-
tlers, and hoes gave way to a tidal wave of far more simplistic, dispro-
portionately celebratory, and destructive renderings of these
characters. Hip hop has become buried by these figures and “the life”

associated with them.
This trend is so significant that if the late Tupac Shakur were a

newly signed artist today, I believe he’d likely be considered a socially
conscious rapper and thus relegated to the margins of the commer-
cial hip hop field. Tupac (who despite his death in 1996 remains one

of hip hop’s most visible and highly regarded gangsta rappers) might
even be thought of as too political and too “soft.” Even as he ex-

pressed his well-known commitment to “thug life,” his rhymes are
perhaps too thoughtful for mainstream “radio friendly” hip hop as it
has evolved since his death.

This consolidation and “dumbing down” of hip hop’s imagery and
storytelling took hold rather quickly in the middle to late 1990s and

reached a peak in the early 2000s. The hyper-gangsta-ization of the
music and imagery directly parallels hip hop’s sales ascendance into
the mainstream record and radio industry. In the early to middle
1990s, following the meteoric rise of West Coast hip hop music pro-
ducer Dr. Dre and of N.W.A., widely considered a seminal gangsta
rap group, West Coast gangsta rap solidified and expanded the al-
ready well-represented street criminal icons-thug, hustler, gangster,

and pimp-in a musically compelling way. This grab bag of street
criminal figures soon became the most powerful and, to some, the

most “authentic” spokesmen for hip hop and, then, for black youth

generally.
For the wider audience in America, which relies on mainstream

outlets for leaming about and participating in commercially distrib-
uted pop culture, hip hop has become a breeding ground for the most
explicitly exploitative and increasingly one-dimensional narratives of
black ghetto life. The gangsta life and all its attendant violence, crimi-
nality, sexual “deviance,” and misogyny have, over the last decade es-
pecially, stood at the heart of what appeared to be ever-increasing hip
hop record sales. Between 1990 and 1998, the Recording Industry

4 THE HIP HOP WARS

Association of America (RIM) reported that rap captured, on average,
9-10 percent of music sales in the United States. This figure in-
creased to 12.9 percent in 2000, peaked at 13.8 percent in 2002, and
hovered between 12 and 13 percent through 2005. To put the impor-
tance of this nearly 40 percent increase in rap/hip hop sales into con-
text, note that during the 2000-2005 period, other genres, including
rock, country, and pop, saw decreases in their market percentage. The
rise in rap/hip hop was driven primarily by the sale of images and sto-
ries of black ghetto life to white youth: According to Mediamark Re-
search Inc., increasing numbers of whites began buying hip hop at
this point. Indeed, between 1995 and 2001, whites comprised 70-75
percent of the hip hop customer base-a figure considered to have re-
mained broadly constant to this day. j

I am not suggesting that all commercial hip hop fits this descrip-
tion, nor do I think that there is no meaningful content in commer-
cial hip hop. I am also not suggesting that commercially successful
gangsta-style artists such as Jay-Z, Ludacris, 50 Cent, T.I., and Snoop
Dogg lack talent. It is, in fact, rappers’ lyrical and performative tal-
ents and the compelling music that frames their rhymes-supported
by heavy corporate promotion-that make this seduction so powerful
and disturbing. They and many others whose careers are based on
these hip hop images are quite talented in different ways: musically,
lyrically, stylistically, and as entrepreneurs. The problems facing
commercial hip hop today are not caused by individual rappers
alone; if we focus on merely one rapper, one song, or one video for
its sexist or gangsta-inspired images we miss the forest for the trees.
Rather, this is about the larger and more significant trend that has
come to define commercial hip hop as a whole: The trinity of com-
mercial hip hop-the black gangsta, pimp, and ho-has been pro-
moted and accepted to the point where it now dominates the genre’s
storytelling worldview.

The expanded commercial space of these three street icons has
had a profound impact on both the direction of the music and the
conversation about hip hop-a conversation that has never been just

Introduction 5

about hip hop. On the one hand, the increased profitability of the
gangsta-pimp-ho trinity has inflamed already riled critics who per-
ceive hip hop as the cause of many social ills; but, on the other, it has
encouraged embattled defenders to tout hip hop’s organic connec-
tion to black youth and to venerate its market successes as examples
of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. The hyperbolic and polarized
public conversation about hip hop that has emerged over the past
decade discourages progressive and nuanced consumption, participa-
tion, and critique, thereby contributing to the very crisis that is facing
hip hop. Even more important, this conversation has become a pow-
erful vehicle for the channeling of broader public discussion about
race, class, and the value of black culture’s role in society. Debates
about hip hop have become a means for defining poor, young black
people and thus for interpreting the context and reasons for their
clearly disadvantaged lives. This is what we talk about when we talk
about hip hop.

The State of the Conversation on Hip Hop

The excessive blame leveled at hip hop is astonishing in its refusal to
consider the culpability of the larger social and political context. To
many hot-headed critics of hip hop, structural forms of deep racism,
corporate influences, and the long-term effects of economic, social,
and political disempowerment are not meaningfully related to rap-
pers’ alienated, angry stories about life in the ghetto; rather, they are
seen as “proof” that black behavior creates ghetto conditions. So
decades of urban racial discrimination (the reason black ghettos exist
in the first place), in every significant arena – housing, education,
jobs, social services-in every city with a significant black popula-
tion, simply disappear from view. In fact, many conservative critics of
hip hop refuse to acknowledge that the ghetto is a systematic matrix
of racial, spatial, and class discrimination that has defined black city
life since the first half of the twentieth century, when the Great Black
Migration dramatically reshaped America’s cities. For some, hip hop

6 THE HIP HOP WARS

itself is a black-created problem that promotes unsafe sex and repre-
sents sexual amorality, infects “our” culture and society, advocates
crime and criminality, and reflects black cultural dysfunction and a
“culture of poverty.” As hip hop’s conservative critics would have it,
hip hop is primarily responsible for every decline and crisis world-
wide except the war in Iraq and global warming.

The defenses are equally jaw-dropping. For some, all expression

in commercialized hip hop, despite its heavy manipulation by the
record industry, is the unadulterated truth and literal personal ex-
perience of fill-in-the-blank rapper; it reflects reality in the ghetto;
its lyrics are the result of poverty itselrz And my favorite, the most ag-
gravating defense of commercial hip hop’s fixation on demeaning
black women for sport- “well, there are bitches and hoes.” What
do fans, artists, and writers mean when they defend an escalating,

highly visible, and extensive form of misogyny against black women
by claiming that there are bitches and hoes? And how have they
gotten away with this level of hateful labeling of black women for so

long?
The big media outlets that shape this conversation, such as

TimelWarner, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric,
and Viacom, do not frame hip hop’s stories in ways that allow for a
serious treatment of sexism, racism, corporate power, and the real
historical forces that have created ghettos. When well-informed,
progressive people do get invited to appear on news and public af-
fairs programs, they wind up being pushed into either “pro” or
“con” positions-and as a result, the complexity of what they have
to say to one side or the other is reduced. Although the immaturity
of “beef” (conflict between rappers for media attention and street

credibility) is generally considered a hip hop phenomenon, it actu-
ally mirrors much of the larger mainstream media’s approach to is-
sues of conflict and disagreement. Developing a thoughtful,
serious, and educated position in this climate is no easy task, since
most participants defend or attack the music – and, by extension,
young black people-with a fervor usually reserved for religion and
patriotism.

Introduction 7

Why We Should Care About Hip Hop

The inability to sustain either a hard-hitting, progressive critique of
hip hop’s deep flaws or an appreciation for its extraordinary gifts is a

real problem, with potentially serious effects that ripple far beyond
the record industry and mass-media corporate balance sheets. We
have the opportunity to use the current state of commercial hip hop
as a catalyst to think with more care about the terms of cross-racial
exchanges and the role of black culture in a mass-mediated world.

Indeed, we should be asking larger questions about how hip hop’s
commercial trinity of the gangsta, pimp, and ho relates to American
culture more generally. But, instead, we have allowed hip hop to be
perceived by its steadfast defenders as a whipping boy (unfairly
beaten for all things wrong with American society and blamed as a
gateway to continued excessive criticisms of black people’s behavior)
and charged by its critics as society’s career criminal (responsible for
myriad social ills and finally being caught and brought to trial). Npt
much beyond exhaustion, limited, and one-sided vicious critique,
and nearly blind defense is possible in this context. Very little honest

and self-reflective vision can emerge from between this rock and

hard place.
Why should we care about hip hop and how should we talk about

it? Serial killer, whipping boy, whatever, right? It’s just entertain-

ment-it generates good ratings and makes money for rappers and
the sputtering record industry, but it doesn’t matter beyond that. Or
does it? In fact, it matters a great deal, even for those who don’t listen
to or enjoy the music itself. Debates about hip hop stand in for dis-
cussion of significant social issues related to race, class, sexism, and
black culture. Hip hop’s commercial trinity has become the fuel that
propels public criticism of young black people. According to some
critics, if we just got rid of hip hop and the bad behavior it supports
(so the argument goes), “they’d” all do better in school, and struc-
turally created racism and disadvantage would disappear like vapor.
This hyper-behavioralism-an approach that overemphasizes indi-
vidual action and underestimates the impact of institutionalized

8 THE HIP HOP WARS

forms of racial and class discrimination – feeds the very systematic
discrimination it pretends isn’t a factor at all.

The public debates about hip hop have also become a convenient
means by which to avoid the larger, more entrenched realities of sex-
ism, homophobia, and gender inequality in U.S. society. By talking
about these issues almost exclusively in the context of hip hop,
people who wouldn’t otherwise dare to talk about sexism, women’s
rights, homophobia, or the visual and cultural exploitation of women
for corporate profit insinuate that hip hop itself is sexist and homo-
phobic and openly criticize it for being so. It’s as if black teenagers
have smuggled sexism and homophobia into American culture,
bringing them in like unauthorized imports.

This conversation about the state of hip hop matters for another
reason as well: We have arrived at a landmark moment in modern
culture when a solid segment (if not a majority) of an entire gener-
ation of African-American youth understands itself as defined pri-
marily by a musical, cultural form. Despite the depth of young
black people’s love of the blues, jazz, and R&B throughout various
periods in the twentieth century, no generation has ever dubbed it-
self the “R&B generation” or the “jazz generation,” thereby tether-
ing its members to all things (good and bad) that might be
associated with the music. Yet young people have limited their cre-
ative possibilities, as well as their personal identities, to the perime-
ters established by the genre of hip hop. No black musical form
before hip hop-no matter how much it “crossed over” into main-
stream American culture-ever attracted the level of corporate at-
tention and mainstream media visibility, control, and intervention
that characterizes hip hop today. It is now extremely common for
hip hop fans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, especially black
fans, to consider themselves more than fans. They’re people who
“live and breathe hip hop every day.”

This level of single-minded investment, forged in the context of
sustained blanket attacks on hip hop music and culture, makes ob-
jective critique nearly impossible. Of course, this investment is itself
partly a response to the deep level of societal disregard that so many

Introduction 9

young, poor minority kids experience. As Jay-Z says in the remixed
version ofTalib Kweli’s “Get By,” “Why listen to a system that never
listens to me?” For anyone who feels this way about anything (reli-
gion, patriotism, revolution, etc.), critical self-reflection is hard to
come by. The more under attack one feels, the greater the refusal to
render self-critique is likely to be. But such fervor is also the result of
market manipulation that fuels exaggerated brand loyalty and con-
fuses it with black radicalism by forging bonds to corporate hip hop
icons who appear to be “keeping it real” and representing the ‘hood.
In turn, the near-blind loyalty of hip hop fans is exploited by those
who have pimped hip hop out to the highest bidder. Members of the
hip hop generation are now facing the greatest media machinery and
most veiled forms of racial, economic, sexual, and gender rhetoric in
modern history; they need the sharpest critical tools to survive and

thrive.
Another reason this conversation is important is that the percep-

tions we have about hip hop-what it is, why it is the way it is-have
been used as evidence against poor urban black communities them-
selves. Using hip hop as “proof” of black people’s culpability for their
circumstances undermines decades of solid and significant research
on the larger structural forces that have plagued black urban commu-
nities. The legacy of the systemic destruction of working-class and
poor Mrican-American communities has reached a tragic new low in

the past thirty years.
Since the early 1980s, this history has been rewritten, eclipsed by

the idea that black people and their “culture” (a term that is fre-
quently used when “behavior” should be) are the cause of their
condition and status. Over the last three decades, the public conver-
sation has decidedly moved toward an easy acceptance of black
ghetto existence and the belief that black people themselves are re-
sponsible for creating ghettos and for choosing to live in them, thus
absolving the most powerful segments of society from any responsi-
bility in the creation and maintenance of them. Those who deny the
legacy of systematic racism or refuse to connect the worst of what
hip hop expresses to this history and its devastating effects on black

10 THE HIP HOP WARS

community are leveling unacceptable and racist attacks on black
people.

The generalized hostility against hip hop impinges on the inter-
pretation of other visible forms of black youth culture. For instance,
black NBA players are tainted as a group for being part of the hip hop
generation stylistically, no matter their personal actions. The few
who have committed violent or criminal acts “prove” the whole lot of
them worthy of attack. In a league that has mostly black players and
mostly white fans, this becomes a racially charged (and racially gen-
erated) revenue problem. Such group tainting does not occur among
white athletes or fans. The National Hockey League, a league that is
predominantly white (in terms of both fans and players) and experi-
ences far more incidents of game-related violence (they take time-
outs to brawl!) is rarely described as problematically violent. Indeed,
no matter how many individual white men get in trouble with the
law, white men as a group are not labeled a cultural problem. At a
more local level, hip hop gear, while considered tame-even cute-
on middle-class white wearers, is seen as threatening on black and
brown youth, who can’t afford not to affiliate with hip hop style if
they are going to have any generational credibility.

In short, the conversation about hip hop matters a great deal. Our
cultural perceptions and associations have been harmful to black
working-class and poor youth-the most vulnerable among us. The
polarized conversation also provokes the increasing generation gap
in the black community-an age gap that, in past eras, was trumped
by cross-generational racial solidarity. But I wonder, too, if the effects
of corporate consolidation-and of the new generational and genre-
segregated market-niche strategies that dismantled the multigenera-
tional and cross-genre formats that defined black radio in the
past-have exaggerated, if not manufactured, the development of a
contentious generational divide in the black community.

Who is hurt by our misunderstandings of hip hop? Surely, all of
American society is negatively affected by both the antagonism lev-
eled against it and the direction that commercial hip hop has taken.
If we continue to talk about black people and race generally in near-

Introduction 11

parodic terms, our nation will not overcome its racial Achilles’ heel;
the American democratic promise, as yet unfulfilled, will end up an
irreparable, broken covenant. The current state of conversation
about hip hop sets destructive and illiterate terms for cross-racial
community building. The people most injured by the fraught, hos-
tile, and destructive state of this conversation are those who most
need a healthy, honest, vibrant (not sterile and repressed) cultural
space: young, poor, and working-class African-American boys and
girls, men and women-the generation that comprises the future of
the black community. They have the biggest stake in the conversa-
tion, and they get the shortest end of the stick in it.

In this climate, young people have few visible and compassionate
yet unflinchingly honest places to turn to for a meaningful apprecia-
tion and critique of the youth culture in which they are so invested.
The attacks on black youth through hip hop maintain economic and
racial injustice. Many working-class and poor black young people
have come up in black urban communities that have been disman-
tled by decades-long legacies of policy-driven devastation of such
communities. This devastation takes many forms, including urban
and federal retreat from affordable housing, undermining of anti-
discrimination laws that were designed to end structural racism, po-
lice targeting, racially motivated escalations of imprisonment, and re-
ductions in support for what are still mostly segregated and deeply
unequal public schools. Very little of this history is common knowl-
edge, and critics avoid serious discussion of these factors, focusing in-
stead on rappers and the ghettos they supposedly represent.

The defenses of hip hop are also destructive. The same media that
pump commercial hip hop 2417 fail to take the time to expose the
crucial contexts of post-civil rights era ghetto segregation for hip hop’s
development. Rappers and industry moguls who profit enormously
from hip hop’s gangsta-pimp-ho trinity defend their empires purport-
edly in the interests of black youth. The constant excuses made about
sexism, violence, and homophobia in hip hop are not just defenses of
black people via hip hop; they are hurtful to black people. Corporate
media outlets empower these businessmen-rappers, underpromote

12 THE HIP HOP WARS

the more sophisticated rhymes, and play down the vigorous and well-
informed analysis and criticism. Many fans consume lopsided tales of
black ghetto life with little knowledge about the historical creation of

the ghetto; some think the ghetto equals black culture. These deci-
sions not only dumb down the music but minimize fan knowledge
and constrain the conversation as a whole.

The public conversation is both an engine for and a product of the
current state of commercial hip hop. Driven by one-dimensional

sound bites from the polarized camps-a format designed to perpet-
uate a meaningless and imbalanced form of “presenting both
sides” – this conversation is not only contributing to the demise of
hip hop but has also impoverished our ability to talk successfully
about race and about the role of popular culture, mass media, and
corporate conglomerates in defining-and confining-our creative
expressiOns.

Versions of what has happened to hip hop that include both the
ways that hip hop reflects black and brown lived experience and cre-
ativity and represents market and racial manipulation have been,
thus far, destined for media obscurity. It is as if the real sport of our
conversation about hip hop is mutual denial and hostile engage-

ment. Intelligent, nuanced dialogue has been drowned out by the
simple-minded sound bites that sustain this antagonistic divide.

Advocates and supportive critics have made a valiant effort to par-
ticipate in this conversation in complex, subtle, and meaningful
ways. Many writers, journalists, poets, scholars, and activists have
made important contributions to the popular, literary, and scholarly
treatments of hip hop. Michael Eric Dyson, Davey D, bell hooks,
Mark Anthony Neal, Patricia Hill-Collins, Cornel West, Adam
Mansbach, Jeff Chang, Dream Hampton, Scott Poulson-Bryant,
Oliver Wang, Nelson George, Gwendolyn Pough, Imani Perry, Jef-
fery Ogbar, Paul Porter, Greg Tate, Marcyliena Morgan, Lisa Fager
Bediako, Angela Ards, Kevin Powell, George Lipsitz, Robin Kelley,
Bakari Kitwana, Joan Morgan, and Kelefah Sanneh have all offered
insightful reflections on and analyses of hip hop in their respective
fields. Several others have contributed blogs and other web commen-

Introduction 13

taries that try to sort through the current state of hip hop in a produc-
tive way. But these writers and scholars are not being relied upon to

frame the mainstream conversation.
The terms of this conversation need our direct attention because

they keep black youth and progressive thinkers and activists locked
into one-sided positions and futile battle. If we fail to address its con-
tradictions, denials, and omissions, we will become subjected to and
defined by the limits of the conversation rather than proactive partic-

ipants in shaping it. I want to delineate the key features-the broad-
est strokes-of this conversation, since the microstruggles in which
hip hop gets embroiled usually cover up the larger terms that perpet-

uate tiresome and disabling conflict.
This conversation is an integral part of the current state of com-

mercial hip hop. But to properly situate the conversation, we need to
account for the larger forces driving the changes in hip hop. Why has
the black gangsta-pimp-ho trinity been the vehicle for hip hop’s

greatest sales and highest market status? Why did a substyle based on
hustling, crime, sexual domination, and drug dealing become rap’s

cultural and economic calling card and thus the key icon for the hip
hop generation? Familiar answers like industry manipulation and
racism contain important truths but gloss over five key factors that
have worked synergistically to create these toxic conditions:

• New technologies and new music markets

• Massive corporate consolidation
• Expansion of illicit street economies
• America’s post-civil rights appetite for racially stereotyped enter-

tainment
• Violence and sexually explicit misogyny as “valued” cultural

products

Together, these five factors explain the complicated forces that have
grossly distorted the legacy of hip hop while also contributing to the
conversation about it. Whereas the final three are discussed in
the context of the various debates about hip hop that I examine in the

14 THE HIP HOP WARS

chapters that follow, the first two-the role of new technologies and
new music markets and the unprecedented impact of massive corpo-
rate consolidation – have a systemic effect on the entire field of dis-
cussion, and so their inclusion in this introduction is warranted. For
now, let us simply note that the debates that have played out in the
hip hop wars mask the full depth of the corporate and economic cir-
cumstances that redirected commercial hip hop, with an especially
dramatic turn taken in the middle to late 1990s.

New Technologies, New Music Markets

Hip hop came of age at the beginning of a new technological revo-
lution. Mter the late 1970s, when hip hop emerged onto the public
scene, all forms of media technology exponentially expanded. Net-
work television met stiff competition as cable televisions’ hundreds
of niche market-driven cable stations increased market share, espe-
cially as music became a predominantly visual medium (MTV and
BET served as major anchors for this shift). Our listening format
changed from records to CDs and computer technology. Advanced
recording and digital technology became widely accessible to inde-
pendent artists, producers, and consumers, changing the way music
was made, purchased, consumed, shared, distributed, and stolen.
Today, cell phones are MP3 players, with downloads and ringtones
representing yet another expansion of the music market. These
changes have made room for additional independent record labels
and more local music production and distribution (at less cost and
greater profits), thereby sustaining genres that might have been im-
possible to maintain solely with local support before this revolution
took place.

Hip hop, like nearly all black musical forms that preceded it, began
as a commercially marginal music that was subjected to segregated
treatment and underfunding. It was characterized by smaller produc-
tion and promotion budgets along with the assumption that the rap
audience would be a youthful segment of Mrican-Americans-an al-

Introduction 15

ready proportionately small consumer market-and an even smaller
percentage of whites and other ethnic groups. During the 1980s,
when rap artists were developing commercial appeal, traditional but
highly irregular sales measures were still being used-measures that
especially underrepresented fan interest in unconventional music. As
New York Times writer Neil Strauss described it: “Until 1991 the pop
music charts were notoriously unreliable. Paying off record store em-
ployees with free albums, concert tickets, and even vacations and
washing machines was the standard music-business method of manip-
ulating record sales figures. Even the Billboard magazine charts, con-
sidered the most prestigious in the business, were compiled from the
store managers’ oral reports, which were inaccurate to begin with and
easily swayed.”l

In 1991, Soundscan, a sales measurement system that tracks al-
bum purchases at their point of sale, was introduced. Although new
methods of sales figure manipulation were eventually developed by
record industry sales executives, new and explosive information
emerged with the advent of Soundscan: Two renegade genres, hard
rock and rap, came in at the top of the charts, showing the greatest
actual sales and outstripping mainstream pop acts. Two weeks after
the advent of Soundscan, Paula Abdul’s “Spellbound” was “replaced
at the top by the Los Angeles rap group N.W.A.’s ‘EfiI4zaggin’,’
which had appeared on the chart at No.2 the previous week.”4

Soundscan initiated a dramatic reconsideration of what the
record industry believed mainstream youth wanted to purchase; the
results indicated that large numbers of young white consumers
(whose consumption drove pop chart positions) wanted to hear
gangsta-oriented rap music and would support it heartily. This en-
couraged an increase in record label investment in hip hop produc-
tion, distribution, and promotion on radio, especially for gangsta
rap. Radio was considered the big breakthrough for hard-edged rap.
Veteran radio and music programmer Glen Ford-co-owner and
(from 1987 to 1994) host of Rap It Up, the first nationally syndicated
radio hip hop music program-draws crucial connections between

16 THE HIP HOP WARS

the new data about consumption and the new corporate strategy for
promoting gangsta rap:

By 1990, the major labels were preparing to swallow the independent

labels that had birthed commercial hip hop, which had evolved into a

wondrous mix of party, political and “street”-aggressive subsets. One

of the corporate labels (I can’t remember which) conducted a study

that shocked the industry: The most “active” consumers of Hip Hop,

they discovered, were “tweens,” the demographic slice between the

ages of 11 and 13. The numbers were unprecedented. Even in the

early years of Black radio, R&B music’s most “active” consumers were

at least two or three years older than “tweens.” It didn’t take a roomful

of PhOs in human development science to grasp the ramifications of

the data. Early and pre-adolescents of both genders are sexual-socially

undeveloped – uncertain and afraid of the other gender. Tweens revel

in honing their newfound skills in profanity; they love to curse. Males,

especially, act out their anxieties about females through aggression

and derision. This is the cohort for which the major labels would

package their hip hop products. Commercial Gangsta Rap was

born-a sub-genre that would lock a whole generation in perpetual
arrested social development. 5

In 1993, Bill Stephney, a well-respected musician, producer, and

promoter known for his ground-breaking work with political rap

group Public Enemy, saw older teens being targeted as well. “It’s a

function of the culture,” Stephney noted in connection with industry

decisions that had driven hard rap’s triumph over the FM airwaves.

“You now have the prime IS-to 24-year-old demographic people who

grew up only on rap music, whether they be black, Latino or white.

Radio has decided they want to target this generation, and that rap
music is the music they’re gonna program …. The radio stations

have had to play it; advertisers have had to deal with it; and corporate

America has understood it.”6 In the context of new technologies and

the expansion of media markets, this new interest in gangsta rap as a

Introduction 17

mainstream profit stream moved swiftly into a multitude of markets

and related products.

Massive Corporate Consolidation

During this same period, the consolidation of mass-media industries,

aided by ongoing government deregulation, began to pick up steam.

Regulations designed to prevent monopolization were overturned

and large-scale consolidation in and across various media industries

took place in a very short period of time. Consolidation within a

given industry (when one or two record companies merge) gave way

to single corporations with dominant holdings in all mass media,

from newspapers, television, and musical venues to publishing

hOllses, movies, magazines, and radio stations. As late as the early

19S0s, these industries operated relatively independent of one an-

other and encompassed many internally competitive companies.

Media scholar Ben Bagdikian put it like this:

In 1983, the men and women who headed the fifty mass media corpo-

rations that dominated American audiences could have fit comfort-

ably in a modest ballroom. The people heading the twenty dominant
newspaper chains probably would form one conversational cluster to

complain about newsprint prices … the broadcast network people in

another … etc. By 2003, five men controlled all these media once

run by the fifty corporations of twenty years earlier. These five, owners

of additional digital corporations, could fit in a generous phone

booth.7

Five conglomerates-TimeM’arner, Disney, Viacom, Newscorpo-

ration, and Bertelsmann (of Germany)-now control the vast major-

ity of the media industry in the United States. (General Electric is a

close sixth.) Viacom, for example, owns MTV, VHI, and BET, along

with CBS radio, which operates 140 radio stations in large radio mar-

kets. The four biggest music conglomerates (each made up of many

18 THE HIP HOP WARS

record companies) are Warner Music, EMI, SonyIBMG, and Univer-
sal Music Group. Together they control about 70 percent of the
music market worldwide and about 80 percent of the music market in
America. A multitude of artists have contracts with the companies that
fall within these vast media categories. While rappers seem to be on a
wide variety of labels and in different and competing camps and
groups of subaffiliated artists, in fact many artists labor underneath

one large corporate umbrella. For example, Warner Music (which
falls under Time Warner) has more than forty music labels including
Warner Brothers (where rappers such as Crime Mob, E-40, Talib
Kweli, and Lil’ Flip are signed); Atlantic (where rappers such as Flo
Rida, Webbie, Twista, Trick Daddy, Plies, Diddy, and TI. are signed),
Elektra, London-Sire, Bad Boy, and Rhino Records, to name just a
few. Even a high-profile “beef” such as the one between rappers The

Game and 50 Cent looks somewhat tamer when one considers that
The Game, whose music is distributed by Geffen, and 50 Cent,
whose music is distributed by Interscope, are both included under the
Universal Music Group parent company.8

Mass-media consolidation was rendered even more profound for the
record industry after the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Although it
enabled dramatic consolidation of ownership within the radio industry,
the music industry’s key promotional and sales-generating venue, the

Telecommunications Act was described by many of its supporters as a
telephone industry bill designed to allow Baby Bell phone companies
to get into long-distance service, spur competition, and deregulate ca-
ble rates. Included in this sweeping act, though, was a nearly buried

provision that lifted all ownership caps for radio-station broadcasters
across the nation and permitted companies to operate as many as eight
stations in the largest markets. Previously, broadcasters could own only
forty stations nationwide, and only two in a given market. But now,

with such limited restrictions, wealthy and powerfully connected in-
vestors were able to snap up a dizzying number of radio stations in an
incredibly short period of time. By the end of 1996, ownership of 2, 157
radio stations had changed hands. And as of 2001, 10,000 radio trans-
actions worth approximately $100 billion had taken place.9

Introduction 19

Until this point, a relatively large network of small- to medium-
sized local radio-station owners were accountable to the public and
its local musical, cultural, religious, newscasting, community, and

political needs. Now, our public airwaves are profoundly dominated
by a small number of very large national and international corpora-

tions. According to a study published by the Future of Music Coali-
tion, “Ten parent companies dominate the radio spectrum, radio
listenership and radio revenues …. Together these ten parent com-
panies control two-thirds of both listeners and revenue nationwide.”
Clear Channel is the mightiest of them all, owning a dramatic 1,240

radio stations nationwide, thirty times more than previous congres-
sional regulation allowed. With more than 100 million listeners,
Clear Channel reaches over one-third of the U.S. population. 1o

This consolidation has affected radio programming in many ways,
including a higher consolidation of playlists within and across for-

mats, higher levels of repetition of record industry-chosen songs, ho-
mogenized and in some cases automated programming, and the near
erasure of local, non-record-industry-sponsored artists. Large corpora-
tions profit from maintaining high levels of efficiency and consis-
tency, which help them maintain the widest possible market share.
Both efficiency and consistency of product encourage cuts in local

staffing as well as in idiosyncratic programming such as local acts and
news that cannot be packaged and rebroadcast elsewhere. Commer-
cially established major-label acts, because of their visibility and no-

toriety, are easily packaged for a national audience and easily
transportable across regions. Thus they dominate their genre-specific

playlists across the country.
Officially speaking, record stores are the primary sales venue for

recorded music; in reality, radio stations and music video programs
provide the bulk of music promotion and sales. Radio and music
video airplay are at the heart of artist visibility and record industry
profits. Record companies try to convince owners and radio and
music video program directors to play their artists’ music in elaborate
and ever-evolving ways. Consolidation of radio-station ownership fo-
cused and consolidated the record industry’s “promotional” contracts

20 THE HIP HOP WARS

with independent promoters, who do the radio-and television-station
schmoozing and bribing on behalf of the record companies to en-
courage them to add their clients’ songs to the stations’ playlists. In-
stead of having to develop promotional relationships with hundreds
of independent program directors, now record companies can negoti-
ate with fewer corporate program directors who determine the
playlists for dozens of stations around the country.

Industry-wide consolidation had a distinctive impact on black ra-
dio, and this in turn dramatically influenced the direction of com-
mercial hip hop. Counting just those formats that emphasize hip
hop/contemporary R&B (sometimes dubbed “hot urban” stations,
with a target demographic of 12- to 24-year-olds), we find that Clear
Channel, Radio One, and Emmis Radio have an astounding number
of major urban markets covered. “Urban” is a euphemism for black
music genres and markets. The stations listed below represent the
depth of corporate consolidation of stations dedicated to playing hip
hop on urban radio stations. Keep in mind that these lists comprise
only the names of “hot urban” !hip hop-focused stations; other black
urban music formats such as Rhythmic Adult Contemporary (with a
target demographic of 18- to 34-year-olds) and Urban Adult Contem-
porary (with a target demographic of 29- to 45-year-olds) feature
some hip hop but much more soul and R&B. Many of these other
formatted stations are controlled by the same key players, however.

Clear Channel owns stations with the “hot urban”!hip hop and
R&B format in nearly all major cities, many with large black popula-
tions, including Boston (94.5 WJMN), Chicago (107.5 WGCI),
Columbus (98.3 WBFA), Detroit (98 WJLB), Memphis (97 WHRK),
New Orleans (93.3 WQUE), New York (105.1 WWPR), Norfolk/
Virginia Beach (102.9 WOWI), Oakland/San Francisco (106 KMEL),
Philadelphia (99 WUSL), and Richmond (106.5 WBTJ). Emmis Ra-
dio owns 106 KPWR in Los Angeles and 97 WQHT in New York.

Radio One, the other major player in the hip hop radio market, is
black owned and controls at least fifty-three urban music stations in
sixteen markets, fourteen of which are hip hop focused. Radio One
founder Catherine Hughes, who began as the owner of a small black

Introduction 21

radio station, carried out the legacy of black radio as a local commu-
nity service operation – one among many of her roles and capacities.
Despite this legacy, Radio One-given its need to remain profitable
in the context of massive consolidation – has supported the record
industry’s drive to promote the consolidation of programming that in-
cludes destructive caricatures of black people. Radio One owns ma-
jor hip hop stations in Atlanta (107.9 WHAT), Baltimore (92.3
WERQ), Cincinnati (101.1 WIZF), Cleveland (107.9 WENZ),
Columbus (107.5 WCKX), Dallas (97.9 KBFB), Detroit (102.7
WHTD), Houston (97.9 KBXX) , Indianapolis (96.3 WHHH),
Philadelphia (100.3 (WPHI), Raleigh-Durham, NC (97.5 (WQOK),
Richmond (92.1 WCDX), St Louis (104.1 WHHL), and Washing-
ton, D.C. (93.9 WKYS).

Consolidation had an especially negative impact on black radio
news programming that went beyond the drastic reduction of news
on all radio stations. Historically, black radio news programs played a
powerful role in gathering and disseminating information about
black social-justice issues that were largely omitted from other radio
program formats. Such programs comprised a vital communication
network for the civil rights movement, for example. Bruce Dixon,
managing editor of the Black Agenda Report, describes the historical
role of black radio as “a transmitter and conveyor, as the very circula-
tory system of public consciousness in Mrican-American communi-
ties.” The deep reductions in local news programming and
journalism felt nationwide in commercial radio have cut into a cru-
cial form of black social activism not easily replaced by other news
media. Indeed, it could be argued that the absence of local news re-
ports on such activism, coupled with the expansion of destructive
and simple-minded fare, has negatively affected African-American
public consciousness-specifically, by reducing black community
knowledge about crucial issues. ll

The consolidation of radio-station ownership not only raised the
stakes for getting radio stations to play record companies’ designated
songs; it also resulted in greater airplay on a wider network of sta-
tions. The history of payola-paying to get your song played on the

22 THE HIP HOP WARS

radio – is long and storied. The refusal of most people in the industry
to publicly admit to it has rendered payola a shadowy but still power-

ful force, plied in sophisticated ways to evade payola-inspired laws. It
is a crime for a radio-station employee to accept any sort of payment
to playa song unless the radio station informs listeners about the ex-
change. Thus, record companies’ direct method of paying for airplay
has been replaced by the indirect method of payoff. Independent
promotion firms (called “indies”) are hired by record companies to

“do promotion” at radio stations. As reporter Eric Boehlert explains:
“In exchange for paying the station an annual promotion budget
($100,000 for a medium size market) the indie becomes the station’s
exclusive indie and gets paid by the record companies every time that
station adds a new song. (Critics say it’s nothing more than a sani-

tized quid pro quo arrangement-station adds a song, indie gets
‘d )”12 pal .
In the case of urban music, considered by some the wild west of an

industry widely perceived as corrupt and volatile, the money is less
likely to go toward the radio’s budget than to end up in the program
director’s hands-either as cash or in some other form of gifting. This
arrangement takes place in both radio and music video program-

ming, despite public denials from corporate executives. Reports that
the practice is prevalent have been made by many industry insiders,
nearly all of whom want to remain anonymous. In 2001, Eric
Boehlert asked an urban industry insider whether payoff-taking is
widespread. The latter replied: “What do you mean ‘widespread’? It’s
all the [urban] stations everywhere.”ll

Paul Porter-a former radio and BET video programmer who,
with Lisa Fager Bediako, cofounded Industry Ears, a nonprofit, non-
partisan, and independent organization that focuses on the impact of
media on communities of color and children – has spoken openly
about how payola works both at radio stations and at music video sta-
tions like BET:

During my first week as program director at BET, I set up the

playlist, deciding which videos would be played and how often. I cut

Introduction

the playlist from four hundred titles to a mere eighty because they

had been playing any videos a record company sent over. Some in-

dustry executives were elated because their videos got more airplay;

the others were furious. And if you were a record label executive,

you needed to make sure I was happy. Almost everybody in this in-

dustry takes money. If they have the power to put a song on the radio

or a video on television, they’ve been offered money to do it-and

they’ve taken it. Maybe it’s only been once or twice. But they’ve

done it. 14

23

Porter admits to taking cash payments for adding songs and videos
(which was standard operating procedure). He also reveals how the
high cost of music videos raised sales expectations and thus expanded

payoffs:

Videos became so expensive. I just started noticing all the pressure

when it came to adding videos, everybody wanted to be on BET since

MTV wasn’t playing anything black in those days. It started small,

with sending you and your girl to Miami for the weekend first class,

nice hotels, tickets to Knicks playoff games, offers to big ticket con-

certs in Europe. Then it just became money, flat-out straight money. I

went to work in New York for two years and when I came back to BET

in ’99 as program director, the second week I was there I was staying

in Hotel George and I got a call from the promoter who said, “Hey

man, I’m sending you this package,” it was for Arista records, right,

and I’m like “cool,” I’ve never met the guy blah blah blah-I got a

FedEx on Saturday, I got fifteen grand! In an envelopeP;

In this era of massive corporate mergers, corrupt record industry
promotional methods in collusion with radio stations are empowered
and consolidated while independent black local musical culture and
radio are subsumed or dismantled. Commercial hip hop is driven by

this Byzantine system; gangstas, pimps, and hoes are products that
promotional firms, working through record companies for corporate

conglomerates, placed in high rotation.

24 THE HIP HOP WARS

While the swift consolidation and hyper-marketing of the hip hop
trinity haven’t entirely killed off more diverse portrayals, they have
substantially reduced their space and their value. As a result, such
portrayals are now harder to see, less commercially viable, and less as-
sociated with prestige and coolness. Veteran “conscious rapper” Paris
was quoted as saying: “What underground? Do you know how much
good material is marginalized because it doesn’t fit white corporate
America’s ideals of acceptability? Independents can’t get radio or
video play anymore, at least not through commercial outlets, and
most listeners don’t acknowledge material that they don’t see or hear
regularly on the radio or on T.V”16

Throughout The Hip Hop Wars, when I use the phrase “commer-
cial hip hop,” I am not referring to any artist signed to a record com-
pany. In this market environment, nearly all artists who want to
survive have to sign up to one label or another. “Commercial hip
hop,” then, refers to the heavy promotion of gangstas, pimps, and

hoes churned out for mainstream consumption of hip hop. Powerful
corporate interests that dominate radio, television, record produc-

tion, magazines, and all other related hip hop promotional venues
are choosing to support and promote negative images above all oth-
ers-all the while pretending that they are just conduits of existing
conditions, and making excuses about these images being “reality.”

Challenges that emphasize the role of corporate power are on the
rise. In the face of sustained protests and opposition by individuals
and interest groups such as Al Sharpton, the Enough Is Enough cam-

paign, Spelman alum and Feminist Majority member Moya Bailey,
and Industry Ears, mass-media executives have remained remarkably
silent. In May 2007 Marcus Franklin reported in USA Today that
Universal chairman Doug Morris and president Zach Horowitz de-
clined repeated requests to discuss the issue, as did Warner chairman
and chief executive Edgar Bronfman, Sony chairman Andrew Lack,
chief executive Rolph Schmidt-Holtz, and EMI Group CEO Eric
Nicoli. 17

Cowardly silence aside, these executives could not have trans-
formed commercial hip hop into a playground for destructive street

Introduction 25

icons alone. Clearly, the corporate takeover of commercial hip hop
has also been facilitated, directly or indirectly, by artists (especially
those who have become moguls and entrepreneurs) who gleefully
rap about guns and bitches, liberal and conservative critics and aca-
demics, and journalists who uncritically profile these artists and hip
hop fans of all races, classes, and genders. This shift was not in-

evitable; it was allowed to happen. We must be more honest in think-
ing about how black ghetto gangsta-based sales are the result of
marketing manipulation and the reflection not only of specific reali-
ties in our poorest black urban communities but also of the exploita-
tion of already-imbedded racist fears about black people.

“Mainstream” white America, black youth, black moguls (existing

and aspiring), and big mass-media corporations together created hip
hop’s tragic trinity, the black gangsta, pimp, and ho-the cash cow
that drove the big mainstream crossover for hip hop. Unless we deal

with this part of the equation and see the dynamic as both new and
very old – unless we acknowledge that racialized and sexualized fan-

tasies and the money they generate for corporate mass media helped
elevate this trinity in hip hop-we’ll be back here again in no time,

to a different black beat.
In the following chapters, readers will find the Hip Hop Top Ten:

the top-ten arguments about hip hop, five from each side of the po-
larized debate. One way or another, the public debates about hip
hop always come back to these ten issues. In each chapter, I will ex-
plore one of these favorite claims against and defenses of hip hop,

challenging excesses, myths, denials, and manipulations as well as
identifying the elements of truth that each argument contains.

Hip Hop’s Critics

1. Hip Hop Causes Violence
2. Hip Hop Reflects Black Dysfunctional Ghetto Culture
3. Hip Hop Hurts Black People
4. Hip Hop Is Destroying America’s Values
5. Hip Hop Demeans Women

26 THE HIP HOP WARS

Hip Hop’s Defenders

6. Just Keeping It Real
7. Hip Hop Is Not Responsible for Sexism
8. “There Are Bitches and Hoes”
9. We’re Not Role Models

10. Nobody Talks About the Positive in Hip Hop

There are two kinds of traps set by these popular, polarized, and
partially true positions. I’ve already talked about their lack of com-
plexity. But there is another trap: the hidden mutual denials on op-
posing sides of the debate. Indeed, the fact that critics and defenders
share many underlying assumptions about hip hop only mires us
more deeply within this conversation. In Chapter 11, I explore these

mutual denials and discuss how they work to mask underlying atti-
tudes shared by both sides. They direct our attention away from the
ugly truths about ghetto fantasies and corporate influences, but also
away from the kinds of progressive solutions that could nourish hip
hop, open up opportunities for poor youth, and contribute to affirm-
ing multiracial vision.

Extraordinary creativity and possibility continue to come up
through the narrow spaces that still remain. Not only do some artists
find lyrically creative and community-affirming ways to make well-
worn stories about street life seem renewed, but many brilliant artists
and local community activists continue to write and perform rich, dy-
namic stories and trenchant political commentary, the likes of which
listeners almost never hear on commercial radio. I will identify these

marginalized but crucial artists and activists in Chapter 12. Among
them are filmmaker Byron Hurt, director of the extraordinary film
Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, who challenges fans as well as
hip hop artists and their corporate representatives in powerful and
progressive ways; Raquel Cepeda, whose fascinating film Bling: A
Planet Rock connects U.S. consumption of diamonds to exploitation
and violence and poverty in Sierra Leone; and rappers Lupe Fiasco
and Jean Grae, whose music is funky, lyrically sophisticated, vibrant,

Introduction 27

and progressive. These filmmakers and artists are rarely promoted.
They are given little airtime in mainstream media, and thus many
readers might think they simply don’t exist, might believe that the

mainstream corporate rappers, producers, and promoters who sup-
port and excuse hip hop’s most destructive elements are all there is to

hip hop.
Hurt, Cepeda, Fiasco, Grae, and many others are part of the solu-

tion because they are developing hip hop generation-based progres-

sive terms for the conversation about hip hop and encouraging
community-affirming terms of creativity. Equally important, they are

finding ways to critique hip hop without bashing the entire genre, to
support hip hop without nourishing sexist, homophobic, or racist
ideas or promoting economic exploitation of the communities from

which hip hop comes.
Finally, if my point about our being trapped in the false opposi-

tions sustained by our polarized conversation on hip hop has any
value, it will generate some version of the following questions: What
do we do next? How do we-those who have progressive visions and
appreciate hip hop’s gifts-participate, judge, critique, reject, and
support hip hop? How can we help hip hop’s youngest fans become

conscious of what they are being fed and of its impact on them and
their communities? How can we change the conversation and the
terms of play in hip hop itself? Which position should we take up vis-

a-vis hip hop, and on what should it be based?
To answer these questions, I conclude with six ideas for guiding

progressive hip hop creativity and participation. So many of us are
caught between rejecting hip hop and embracing it, while turning a
blind eye to what has become the genre’s greatest profit engines. The
terms of embrace and rejection we often settle on are not clear, nor
do they help us shape a progressive vision that can transform what we

have now into what we might want to see in the future.
These ideas represent community-inspired standards marked by a

balanced, loving, socially and politically progressive vision of creativ-
ity and black public thought, action, and reaction. Developing this
vision isn’t a repression of anger or sexuality or of artists telling their

28 THE HIP HOP WARS

truths. On the contrary, it is a vehicle for encouraging creativity that
does not revolve around hurling insults and perpetuating social injus-
tices. Countless times, in these hip hop wars, hip hop media mogul
Russell Simmons has defended the right of artists to “speak from
their hearts,” to tell their own truths. But do they tell all their truths
in hip hop? And to what ends, to serve whom? Surely, no one wants

artists to speak from a false place, but the heart is not a predeter-
mined place: It is a cultivated one.

Communities have always set limits on the depths of self-destructive
iconography, language, and action that will be allowed. This isn’t a

matter of invoking police or government action. It is about taking cul-
tural control of ourselves in a society that has long been involved in
the destruction of black self-love, dignity, and community survival.
Operating in the larger progressive interests of the black community-
and society at large – is the aim. But to fulfill this aim, we have to con-
solidate and illuminate the actions of those who are working toward

community-sustaining goals and promote the key principles about
how self-expression can be cutting-edge, angry, loving, honest, sexy,
meaningful, and empowering, no matter the subject. Black music has
always been a central part of this affirming, truth-telling process, but in
this so-called post-civil rights era, it is up against new pressures and re-
quires new strategies.

We cannot truly deal with what is wrong in hip hop without facing
the broader cultures of violence, sexism, and racism that deeply in-
form hip hop, motivating the sales associated with these images. Yet,
those of us who fight for gender, sexual, racial, and class justice also
can’t defend the orgy of thug life we’re being fed simply because “sex-
ism and violence are everywhere” or because corporations are largely
responsible for peddling it. We can explain and contextualize why
hip hop seems to carry more of this burden, but we can’t defend it.
Even if sexism and violence are everywhere (and, sadly, they are),
what I care most about is not proving that hip hop did or did not in-
vent sexism, or the gangsta figure, bitch, ho, thug, or pimp, but show-

ing how the excessive and seductive portrayal of these images among

Introduction 29

black popular hip hop artists is negatively affecting the music and the
very people whose generational sound is represented by hip hop.

The destructive forms of black, racist-inspired hyper-masculinity
for which commercial hip hop has become known make profound

sense given the alchemy of race, class, and gender in U.S. society.
But we shouldn’t sit idly by or celebrate the fixation with the black
pimp, his ornate pimp cup, and the culture of sexual, economic,
and gender exploitation for which this persona stands. Understand-

ing and explaining are not the same as justifying and celebrating,
and this is the crucial distinction we must make if we stand a fight-
ing chance in this perpetual storm. The former-understanding and
explaining-are an integral part of solving the problems with hip
hop; the latter-justifying and celebrating-are lazy, reactionary,

dangerous, and lacking in progressive political courage. Yes, hip
hop’s excesses will continue to be used as a scapegoat; but we must
develop our own progressive critique, not just stand around defend-
ing utter insanity because our enemies attack it. The mere fact that
our enemies attack something we do does not make our actions wor-
thy of defense.

We must fight for a progressive, social justice-inspired, culturally
nuanced take on hip hop-a vision that rejects the morally hyper-
conservative agenda and the “whatever sells works for me” brand of

hustlers’ neo-minstrelsy that have become so lucrative and accessible
for the youth in poor black communities today. The Hip Hop Wars is
a sometimes polemical, always passionate assessment of where we
are, what’s wrong with the conversation we are having about hip hop,
why it matters, and how to fix it. Too many people on both sides of
this debate seem to have lost their collective minds, taking a grain of
truth and using it to starve a nation of millions.

I hope this book will help galvanize progressive conversation and
action among the thousands of current and aspiring artists, fans, par-
ents, teachers, and cultural workers- black, white, Latino, Asian,
young and old, of all backgrounds, from all places and spaces. I am
even hoping that various industry workers and record and television

30 THE HIP HOP WARS

executives will read this book, see themselves as part of the solution,
and work harder to develop community-enabling ways to stay in busi-
ness. This book is for everyone who feels uneasy about commercial
hip hop-some who know that something is really wrong but can’t
name it; others who are working to make hip hop the kind of cultural
nourishment it can be but are getting very little help to fix it; and still
others who remain sidelined, worried that jumping into the fray
means being forced to take impossible sides in an absurdly polarized
battle.