Working both sides of street

Back in the early ‘90s, hip-hop artists took pride in being excluded from such mainstream venues as the Grammy Awards. Being part of the Academy Awards then was not even a consideration. That lack of recognition by the arbiters of the cultural establishment bolstered the genre’s rebel status and underscored hip-hop’s claim to authenticity. The Grammys, the Oscars and anything else mainstream were, in the words of hip-hop, “wack” -- a fate worse than death.

But as Dr. Dre once said, “Things done changed on this side.” Indeed!

There was the rapper-producer Kanye West, looming large this year at the Grammys. Chris Rock at the Oscars as MC. Hip-hop chanteuse Beyonce was there too on Oscars night, performing three musical numbers, with the ubiquitous P. Diddy serving as a presenter. Rock was right when he said that this year’s show was “kind of like Def Oscar Jam.”

Hard to believe that just nine short years ago Jesse Jackson staged a protest at the ceremony over what he saw as a lack of black nominees. I mean, look at best actor Jamie Foxx, with not only that Oscar for “Ray” but a supporting actor nomination for “Collateral.”

But all this mainstream success doesn’t come without raising suspicions within hip-hop. Hip-hop, some say, has potentially gained the whole world, but lost its soul.

How did hip-hop come to find its way into such an easy coexistence with these mainstream venues? Well, it’s been culturally bilingual for a long time now, and that’s one of the primary reasons it’s been so successful: The music has always been able to deliver different messages to different constituencies. Ever since hip-hop artists began recording clean and explicit versions of their albums, singles and videos in the early ‘90s, the culture’s ability to speak in multiple tongues has created a space that seems to offer something for everyone.

A good example of hip-hop’s bilingual skills is a Gap television ad from the late ‘90s featuring the rapper-actor Ladies Love Cool James, better known as LL Cool J. In the ad, LL wore a Gap sweatshirt while he “spit” a freestyle rap verse. He was also wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of FUBU, a hot hip-hop fashion label at the time.

In LL’s verse he dropped the lyrics “for us/ by us/ on the low,” a coded allusion to the meaning of FUBU’s acronym, “for us, by us,” which itself is an old black nationalist saying from the ‘60s. “On the low,” or “in secret,” as it were, was LL’s reference to the way he was using the apparel behemoth Gap to plug the fledgling hip-hop label FUBU -- in language that only someone attuned to the prose of hip-hop would understand. The mainstream simply saw a Gap ad, while FUBU used the boost provided by LL’s verse to establish its name.

This ability to speak to multiple audiences is on prominent display whenever Chris Rock takes the stage. What was really groundbreaking about Rock’s presence at the Oscars was hip-hop’s continued infiltration into places previously off-limits. Though Rock is not a rapper, his “amped-up” style represents hip-hop’s reach into all areas of the culture. His willful desire to be “real” in his comedy is at the foundation of hip-hop’s eternal quest for authenticity.

Rock took his game to a higher level back in 1996 with his HBO special “Bring the Pain,” whose title comes from a popular Method Man single: “I came to bring the pain/ hard core to the brain.” That is, Rock wanted to make you think and laugh so hard your brain hurt.

“Bring the Pain” touched a raw nerve when Rock made a distinction between “black people” and “niggas.” Many old-school African Americans found Rock’s comments inappropriate, like airing dirty laundry in public. Yet these same comments helped make Chris Rock a superstar.

By breaking the racial stranglehold that many civil rights-minded blacks had on open discussion around such issues, Rock infused the conversation with hip-hop’s edge and in so doing, suggested that anything and anyone was fair game in his comedy. His willingness to criticize his own people gave him the space to criticize everyone else and get away with it.

In the years since, Rock has been able to go places and do things that other social critics moonlighting as comedians -- people like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Richard Pryor -- could never have conceived of. Could you imagine any of them being allowed to host the Oscars, of all things?

What the mainstream hears in his comedy is quite different from what hip-hop hears when listening to him. In “Bigger and Blacker,” for instance, Rock jokes with his audience about the often unspoken dimensions of white privilege when he says that “there’s not a white person in here who would change places with me ... and I’m rich!” He goes on to refer to a white “one-legged busboy” who, when given the choice of abandoning his own miserable life in favor of being rich and black, decides to “ride this white thing out.”

While the absurd image of a one-legged busboy prompts outrageous laughter, the indicting statement about perceptions of white superiority goes over many heads.

And the same is true of Kanye West. His album “The College Dropout” is one of those rare occasions in hip-hop when both the squares and the “true heads” have found something of value in the same package. Many in the hip-hop nation regard Kanye’s lyrics as a return to a more conscious time in music’s evolution, which, as the argument goes, was before the culture went gangsta, then bling, and got all violent and materialistic in the process.

On “The College Dropout,” he raps about things that haven’t been heard in hip-hop since Michael Jackson was making music videos instead of court appearances. For instance, “college” has scarcely turned up on a rap record since DMC of Run-DMC said, “I’m DMC/ in the place to be/ I go to St. John’s University/ and since kindergarten I acquired the knowledge/ and after 12th grade I went straight to college,” on the B side of “Sucker MCs” in 1983.

Kanye’s raps are personal, but at another level, his everyday-people disposition is quite universal, from the self-consciousness of overt materialism in “All Falls Down,” to the ordeal of suffering a broken jaw in an auto accident without having any medical insurance in “Through the Wire.”

In each case, Kanye took elements of his own otherwise tedious personal experiences and wove them into captivating slices of life, backed by soulful beats.

Most of the attention about “Dropout” has centered on the single “Jesus Walks,” which won this year’s Grammy for best rap song. Here, in a twist, Kanye seems to support red-state paranoia about a covert liberal attempt to suppress religion in public life: “So here goes my single, Dog/ radio needs this/ they said you can rap anything except for Jesus/ that means guns, sex, lies, videotape/ but if I talk about God my record won’t get played.”

Well, in this age of faith-based initiatives, supposed moral values and lobbying by the religious right, this is clearly an overstatement. “Jesus Walks” is like the ultimate red-state song, from an otherwise blue-state genre.

Realism and sensationalism

More interesting, though, is the way the topical religiosity of “Jesus Walks” took the attention away from some of the more nuanced moments on “The College Dropout.” Kanye is probably at his most poignant when he raps about his own arduous road to a record deal on the album’s final track, “Last Call.” For 12 minutes and 40 seconds, Kanye goes step by step through eviction, rejection and a litany of broken promises on the way to a breakthrough.

What works so well here is that his path is familiar to most people who have struggled to make it in their chosen profession. This is not another tale from the dark side, in which the rapper survived that jungle known as the ‘hood. No, this is basically middle-class angst.

Hip-hop has often relied on the aesthetic of realism to express itself, and Kanye’s sense of realism is much more universal than the oft-repeated story of a rapper like 50 Cent, the hip-hop artist who dominated 2003 and whose personal narrative about surviving multiple gunshot wounds, though spectacular, speaks more to our desire for sensationalism than to our own humanity. Here 50’s appeal is like an Abel Ferrara movie, while Kanye comes across like “Sideways.”

Hip-hop’s roots are in the ‘hood, but Kanye reminds us that the hip-hop nation need not be an exclusively ghetto nation. If anything, what Kanye symbolizes most is the return of the middle-class rapper. His infectious beats and his stellar work as a producer earn him much-needed street cred, while his ruminations about middle-class existence attract a mainstream audience.

This ability to walk both sides of the street is a good marketing strategy, but it is also an effective means of connecting with listeners across boundaries, without necessarily diluting the impact of your material.

With this sort of appeal, it’s no wonder that hip-hop keeps annexing cultural territory. Here, artists like Rock and Kanye are very much like first-term Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who managed to impress both the Karl Roves of the world and his own Democratic base in a nation that is more fixated on red and blue than the Bloods and Crips.

So maybe if the Democrats continue to have trouble finding candidates who can play to both blue and red states, they should think about looking to hip-hop. It’s infiltrated the Grammys and the Oscars, so the White House can’t be too far out of range, right?

Todd Boyd is a media commentator and professor of Critical Studies at USC. His next book, “The Notorious Ph.D’s Guide to the Super Fly 70s,” will be published in 2006.

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