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A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America
by Jason Tanz
—Todd Boyd, The New H.N.I.C.
Let’s start with a deceptively simple question: What is hip-hop?
If you’re a casual listener, or someone with a passive interest in popular culture, you probably think of “hip-hop” as a form of music, also known as “rap,” consisting of beats and rhymes. If you are a more serious fan, you may think of “hip-hop” as a collection of four elements: MCing (or “rapping”), DJing, graffiti, and breaking (that form of street dance also known as “b-boying,” “rocking” or “breakdancing”). If you are less doctrinaire, you probably think of “hip-hop” more as a culture, a collection of slang, fashion, music, marketing, art, and ethos.
And if you are deeply invested in hip-hop, you may not even think of it as a noun, but as an adjective that describes a mindstate, a confidence, a swagger, a commitment. It shows itself in the way you wear your clothes, and in the way that you walk, and in the attitude with which you slur your words. It is more than a music. More than a culture. It is a mode of being.
But however you think of hip-hop, you probably think of it as black. Ever since hip-hop—an umbrella term encompassing breakdancing, graffiti, and, most pressingly, rap music—first came barreling out of the Bronx a quarter-century ago, it has been seen as a unique vehicle to express the hopes, dreams, fears, and trials—the “reality,” to offer an oft-used buzzword—of African-American life. Hip-hop’s favored mode has been gritty social realism, a sometimes nihilistic, sometimes joyous, sometimes angry description of the inner city. White rock journalist Dave Marsh has said that when he heard hip-hop music, his first thought was “Finally, something white people can't steal.” Spin magazine agreed: “Hip-hop will not be consumed,” read a 1988 article in its pages. “This is a music that television, my parents, and any institution with a stake in protecting the old discourse simply cannot fuck with.”
Well, perhaps not. Spin was using “fuck with” as a synonym for “interact with,” and over the past couple of decades, just about every element of mainstream American culture has, one way or another, fucked with hip-hop. Our television shows are spiced with hip-hop humor, presidential candidates drop knowing references to the Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast, and gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg appears next to Lee Iacocca in advertisements for Chrysler automobiles. Just like previous paradigm-shifters before it—from jazz to rock to punk—hip-hop culture, which once felt alien and potentially revolutionary, has been fully integrated into American life.
It is, in a sense, an old story. White folks have been fascinated by the musical expression of black struggle since groups of slaves hollered their plights in the fields of plantations. The urge of sheltered suburban kids to turn to abrasive, foreign music—from rock to punk to techno—as an outlet for their own frustrations and fantasies is almost as old as the suburbs themselves. And every generation has discovered new technology by which to infuriate and befuddle its parents, a goal that rap music has proven singularly successful at achieving. But hip-hop is a unique phenomenon. Unlike rock, which did not gain a foothold in popular culture until Elvis Presley gave a white face to its potentially threatening rhythms, rap’s performers and narratives have remained defiantly black for more than two decades. Even more importantly, it is understood to be more than mere entertainment. More than any other musical form before it, hip-hop promises to provide insight into the lives and thoughts of an entire community of black Americans.
If our culture is an expression of our deepest fears, anxieties, and fantasies, then what does it say that hip-hop has become our national soundtrack? In 1970, Tom Wolfe coined the expression “radical chic” to describe a cadre of moneyed white elites that entertained itself by throwing dinner parties for the Black Panthers. Today, that prospect seems neither radical nor particularly chic. To an unprecedented degree, our popular culture consists of white people entertaining themselves with—and identifying with—expressions of black people’s struggles and triumphs. Racial dissonance has become an immutable fact of our everyday life. Rappers Method Man and Redman shill for Right Guard; soccer moms shout “you go, girl!” at one another; white kids wear FUBU, a black-owned label whose name stands for “For Us, By Us.” Other People’s Property examines how we got here, and what it means. It is a book about hip-hop’s mainstream white audience, the assumptions and subtexts and emotions that bubble just under the surface of our fandom.
In many ways, it is surprising that hip-hop has survived and thrived for so many years. It is no secret that Americans are a wildly anxious people when it comes to race. In our post-PC, post-welfare-reform age, the topic is deemed too sensitive or intractable to merit much discussion. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, civil rights activists sought political responses to the forces that segregated the country. Today we remain separated, but apart from an occasional affirmative action dustup or limp presidential commission, Capitol Hill and City Hall don’t have much to say about the matter. In universities and office buildings, racial matters are discussed only in the blandest terms; anything else can result in expulsion or lawsuits.
That conversation, however, has not ended; instead, it has been coded into beats and rhymes. Many of the most important race-related discussions of the last two decades have concerned hip-hop music directly: the controversy over Ice-T’s rock song “Cop Killer”; presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s critique of Sister Souljah; a member of rap group Public Enemy’s anti-Semitic statements; the flap over Harvard professor Cornel West’s rap CD. The crack epidemic, L.A. riots, inner-city gang warfare—even the semantics of the word “nigger”—have all been passionately analyzed and discussed through rap music. Small wonder that Public Enemy’s Chuck D memorably referred to rap as “black America’s CNN.” The old racial verities of the 1960s and ‘70s have metastasized; hip-hop—and white America’s reactions to it—provide a fruitful avenue through which to examine this new, complicated, and confusing world.
Hip-hop has also precipitated a radical shift in the racial self-image of America—providing a link between picket-fenced suburbia and the drive-by ghettoes of Compton. At its best, the desire of white teenagers to identify themselves with the African-American struggle represents an urge to connect. At its worst, it is a fantasy that equates garden-variety suburban alienation with the struggle of ghetto life, and that equates the black experience with the cartoonish swagger of paid entertainers. This book is about how hip-hop is consumed once it moves outside of the inner cities that birthed it, away from the black community that has provided the bulk of its inspiration and artists, and into the furthest reaches of suburbia. It is an outsider’s history, a look at how and why white people, and the white culture at large, have consumed, interacted with, and used the narratives of young African-American men.
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