Within 10 Years: The Coming Decline of Hip-Hop and Gangster-Rap

I’m a self-made monster of the city streets, Remotely controlled by hard hip-hop beats.
These lines from 6’n The Mornin, by Los Angeles-based rapper Ice-T (1987), demonstrate the manner in which such a text represents the dominant Hip-Hop hegemony. The rapper is identified as an independent character who is divorced from mainstream culture and laws. He terms himself a ‘monster’ in order to preempt the audience’s assumed interpretation of a gangster-rapper. He continues to declare that he comes from the ‘city streets’ – an important identifier in Hip-Hop culture, which validates his authority with his peer-group, and serves to intensify the cultural identity of hip-hop – a ‘street’ culture of mainly poor African-American youths asserting their dominance through violent and aggressive lyrics, and trading in imagery of gangland drug-and-gun culture. He is ‘remotely controlled by hard hip hop beats’. This is to say that the music is ‘in charge’ – his performance is not merely inspired by his personal motives, but serves a higher cultural cause, contributing to the hegemony and cementing the rapper’s role as both product and prophet of his culture.
This type of reading of such a text was a dominant one in the 1980s, a time when the media did much to propagate and to develop the deeply suspicious and distrustful views of hip-hop which were held, or at least thought to be held, by middle-class Americans. Lisa Robinson said: ‘It’s [rap music] not something that they [middle-class America] really understand. It’s very black and urban, and people are scared of that’ (Fox, 1981). She highlights a problem that rap was to face for years to come – the Gangster-Rap hegemony dictates that the attitudes of the rap artists, or at least the way they are represented, and the content of the lyrics should be confrontational – a fact which whilst making the music seductively powerful, also serves to alienate large swathes of the audience. The media sought to answer the question of whether of not this so-called youth music was really representative of the ‘vast majority’ (Keynes, 2004, p.2). In doing so, they demonstrated that they tended to fall into the camp of the detractors, which is perhaps unsurprising given that the majority of the readership of most ‘serious’ publications were white, middle-class Americans. These attitudes in the media’s interpretation and representation of the texts were accentuated by the way in which they would pounce upon, report, and sometimes exaggerate ‘even the slightest disorderly conduct incident'(Copeland 1997, p.100). The media’s involvement had a significant effect upon the industry in the short term; proponents found insurance premiums increasing, and they encountered opponents within conservative right-wing politics, to which responses were made in the rap lyrics (Keynes, 2004).
Struggles with mainstream American culture and the Media continued well into the late 1980s. 2 Live Crew’s (1988) album As Nasty as They Wanna Be ran into serious trouble because of its sexually explicit content, when in June 1990 a judge in a Florida District Court found it to be obscene. Casualties of the episode included a record-seller who was arrested for continuing to sell the album, and two members of the Crew itself, who suffered the same misfortune after performing the material (Binder, 1993).
Ultimately, however, these criticisms and concerns were found not to be of critical importance to the survival of the industry or of the genre. Hip-Hop was still achieving the goal behind its existence, which was to maintain and develop a discrete contemporary youth culture, arguably necessitating non-acceptance or at least incomprehension by adult audiences in mainstream culture. Publicity was certainly not shunned, and in the 1980s was a healthy part of the burgeoning Hip-Hop scene. Film soundtracks such as those from The Lost Boys (Schumacher, 1987) and Colors (Hopper, 1988) reinforced the music’s association with criminal and violent activities (Keynes 2004, p.2). Whereas the early 1980s saw rap to be neglected by many radio stations, there arose WBLS and WRKS (KISS-FM) in New York, and KDAY in Los Angeles. These stations catered for rap audiences via radio, which led to the introduction of rap music to cable television networks such as MTV (Rap Sunday), BET, and The Box (Keynes, 2004, p.99). This steadily increasing acceptance of Hip-Hop into the media signified that the hegemony was certainly not yet at risk due to its necessary identity.
Similar and contemporaneous reactions to morally challenging textual content may be observed in Heavy Rock music. Groups such as The Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) reacted to Heavy Rock’s often violent and sexually explicit lyrical content, mounting a campaign against it in 1985. The group consisted of politically well-connected women who sought to combat what they saw as the damaging effect of the lyrics on their and others’ children, which they did by addressing the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation (Binder, 1993, 753). Of interest to the present discussion is that their actions sparked a great deal of interest in the media, prompting a major national debate on the part violent and misogynistic lyrics had to play in contributing to youth crime levels in the USA. The PMRC lobbied for labelling of records which contained what they saw to be harmful lyrics, in such a way as parents might easily identify them and restrict their children’s access to them accordingly. The national debate focused on the fact that such labelling could be seen as a form of censorship, an argument which was hotly contested on both sides.
The PMRC compiled a list of fifteen songs which they found objectionable in support of their address to Senate. The list included Bastard (Mötley Crüe, 1983), a song which includes the lines: Out go the lights / In goes my knife / Pull out his life / Consider that bastard dead. It was precisely this kind of language to which the organisation objected. The husband of one of the campaigners, Senator Bob Dole, similarly launched a crusade against Gangster-Rap, notably during the presidential campaign of 1996. As with most of the campaigners, and in a tone reminiscent of, though not identical to the criticisms directed at 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be, Bob Dole labelled rappers in general as misogynistic and violent. One specific result of Dole’s campaign was the censoring and near demise of Death Row Records through problems with their distribution deal (Binder, 1993, p.753).
Mainstream mistrust of Hip-Hop and Heavy Rock culture and the consequent non-acceptance of the texts produced could easily be viewed as threatening to the legitimacy, potential success and longevity of the genres. In fact, in the first case, they were signs that rap music was functioning in precisely the way it needed to in order to be a ‘relevant’ reflection of youth culture – a music which went against the grain of popular culture, and was politically and emotionally provocative.
It was this pattern of attempts at censorship on the grounds of decency and the suppression of violent and sexually explicit content, however, which led to the demise of Heavy Rock music, just as it shall be seen below how, despite the critics who predicted the demise of rap in the 1990s (Keynes, 2004), there is still another chapter to be told in the story of Hip-Hop. Central to the demise of Heavy Rock was the concept of ‘selling out’, that is, when an artist compromises his or her artistic integrity in the pursuit of fame and fortune. An early example of this involves the change of musical values in pursuit of higher record sales in Metallica’s (1991) Black Album. Rock music at that stage, however, still had artistic currency, which was to flourish once more in the shape of the music of Nirvana. One trend which it is possible to identify here is the increased feasibility for a young and creative rock band to rise from creative college-band to selling millions of records, through independent record labels (Kruse, 1993). Indeed, it was through independent record label promotion that Nirvana rose in the early 1990s to form what seemed at first to be a new lease of life for Rock Music, albeit under a revised generic title of Grunge Rock. Nirvana had built up a considerable reputation as an ‘alternative’ rock band with the Seattle-based independent Sub Pop label before their 1990 signing to David Geffen’s DG Records. After the signing, and the recording of their first major album, Nevermind (Nirvana, 1991), higher-budget studio practices led to high sales, but ‘slick’ production values that did not please the band (Azerrad 1993). A conscious and failed effort to make the next album, In Utero (Nirvana, 1993) more ‘alternative’ in sound, i.e. make the music adhere more closely to the artistic principles set up by the Grunge hegemony, led to the recording of an entirely acoustic televised performance, which was later released as MTV Unplugged in New York (Nirvana, 1994) This abandonment of the very characteristics that defined their musical and social culture led to a predominant reading in the critical media that they had ‘sold out’, and the band’s side-stepping finally did represent the dying breaths of rock music.
If one single event in the history of Hip-Hop could be mooted as its death-knell in same way as the sequence of events surrounding the ‘selling out’ of Nirvana in the Rock genre, then it must be Lil’ Wayne’s coining of the term ‘bling’ on the Big Tymers (1998) track Millionaire Dream: ‘I got ten around my neck, and baguettes on my wrist, bling!’. The term ‘bling’, or ‘bling-bling’ is used by rappers to express or draw attention to their material wealth, which is signified by the wearing of expensive jewellery. The term initially gained great popularity – rappers found a way in their lyrics to express the wealth that had resulted from the phenomenal success of the Hip-Hop industry. The extent of its influence can be seen by its gaining an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of English (expensive, ostentatious clothing and jewellery, or the wearing of them: the bling-bling mentality dominated his early songs). In 2004, MTV released a cartoon which satirised the ‘bling’ culture. It showed a rapper using the term, followed by a succession of other characters, in decreasing order of how well their image conforms to the Gangster Rap ideal. It ends with a white, middle-aged woman describing her earrings to her mother and the epithet ‘RIP Bling-bling 1997-2004’ (Wikipedia, 2007).
The destructive influence of the ‘bling’ culture came to its zenith with the recent media coverage of the issue of ‘conflict diamonds’ or ‘blood diamonds’. Bling: Consequences and Repercussions (Edouard, 2006a) is an 11-minute documentary, which is ‘Dedicated to those who have been enslaved, murdered and amputated for man’s lust of diamonds’. It was produced and directed by Kareem Edouard and narrated by the Hip-Hop rap-star Chuck D, and will be re-released as a feature-length documentary in autumn 2007. Juxtaposing images of the decadent flaunting of expensive jewellery by rap stars and the horrific abuses which occur in Sierra Leone because of the trade in so-called ‘blood-diamonds’, the documentary serves to represent the hip-hop industry as diseased – a money-and-self-obsessed culture which supports, albeit indirectly, a trade which results in the deaths of thousands of poor Africans. In Sierra Leone, a violent rebel campaign operates, which smuggles diamonds out of the country, and knows no mercy in wracking the country and its people with war and atrocities of the highest order. In the words of David Shimanov, a jeweller whose clients include such well-known hip-hop artists as 50 Cent and Tony Yayo, and who is featured in the documentary; ‘I think Hip Hop is obsessed with diamonds, they can’t go to the stage without diamonds’ (Edouard 2006b).
This and other documentaries and news features combine to make the blood-diamond issue one of the most recent and most powerful critiques of hip-hop culture, and a major signifier that without significant reappraisal, hip-hop could well be in serious trouble.
Central to Hip-Hop’s hegemony since its inception has been its reaction against authority and mainstream culture. With the gradual naturalisation of the music into the very mainstream against which it sought to react, has come a removal from the original causes for its production. The vast wealth created by such a successful industry has finally resulted in important changes to the subject-material used in the writing of Hip-Hop lyrics. Whereas rappers in the past might have been able to legitimise their often controversial lyrical content by reference to their cultural background and politico-sociological message, it is simply untenable for their art to continue unfettered when the focus of the rap is the wealth of the rapper. Critical mass is likely to be reached within the coming 10 years, with the significant and growing media backlash over the blood-diamond issue, and it is only a matter of time before the industry begins to incur significant casualties. Just as in the case of Nirvana and Rock Music, when proponents of musical genres who rely so heavily upon their cultural positions lose sight of that fact and become fixated with their increasing wealth, the resultant impact upon the public and the media’s reading of their artistic integrity is bound to suffer.
This is not to say that no traces of Hip-Hop will be left – a wealth of musical legacies will persist, with the exclusively musical aspects of DJing and rapping influencing music for years to come. It would be prudent to predict, however, that Gangster-Rap, in what many would consider to be its true form, has become a parody of itself, severely limiting its credibility. One might wonder whether Hip-Hop could have been saved from this fate. To have done so would have been to resist the inevitable; it would have had to deny the powerful influence of the media, the seemingly inescapable fascination of Man with wealth, and the continually morphing structure of genres that has for centuries guided our understanding of music, and is extremely likely to continue to so into the future.