I have always thought April 30 was important because it’s my birthday, but for Lil Boosie I concede the day has a tad more significance–it’s the day his first degree murder trial is scheduled to begin. Two important updates here. First, The Advocate reports that the death penalty is now officially off the table. If convicted, Boosie will face life in prison. Second, and more interesting, is that Boosie’s jury will be anonymous, meaning that jurors will be referred to by number rather than name. This is apparently uncommon, but attorneys on both sides say it’s because of the high profile nature of the trial. Of course, when I read that prosecutors requested it, I immediately assumed it was in response to–or to create the appearance of–possible jury tampering, something Boosie’s attorney’s were quick to dismiss.
One last thing caught my attention: Prosecutors have asked for a sample of Boosie’s handwriting, and one of Boosie’s lawyers has suggested that this may be an attempt to tie him to certain rap lyrics. I’ve written about this before, but it looks like prosecutors are going to use Boosie’s lyrics against him, which of course raises all kinds of issues. I don’t know what the judge and jury will look like, but if it’s a mostly white panel in the deep south, then rap could end up going on trial along with Boosie. And that’s a verdict I feel like I can predict already.
While fans and critics of American rap music have long bemoaned the lack of political change that rap was “supposed” to bring about in the U.S., the same criticisms can’t be made about rap in the Middle East–at least not right now. Rap has played a central role in some of the so-called Arab Spring uprisings, particularly in places like Tunisia and Libya, and now it appears that authorities in Morocco are trying their best to ensure that rap doesn’t sow the seeds of resistance in their country as well. Al Arabiya reports that Moroccan rapper Mouad Belghouat, aka al-Haqed (“The Vengeful One” in Arabic), was arrested today in Casablanca for a song denouncing the police. Apparently, this is not the first time he has been put in jail for criticizing the state.
What’s important to remember is that rappers in the U.S. have long faced a similar threat from authorities. In its earliest days, hip hop drew the wary gaze of law enforcement–there are countless examples of police surveillance, harassment, and containment of hip hop artists throughout the movement’s history, up to and including the present. The FBI’s response to NWA’s 1988 song “Fuck tha Police” is a notable example, but it’s hardly an isolated one. (See my piece in PopMatters for more on this topic.) Indeed, hip hop has always had to contend with the oppressive state apparatus that tries to undermine or contain rebellion, especially among black Americans.
When trying to explain why rap has had a less-than-desired impact on American politics, scholars often point to the recording industry as the main culprit. This is a legitimate but overplayed argument. I think we also need to look more at the mechanisms of repression that have made planting the seeds of resistance extremely difficult for black artists in the U.S. Only time will tell if rappers in the Arab world have better, more enduring results.
Australian attorney and satirist Hugh Atkin put together this ingenious video of Romney clips set to Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.” Atkins manages to achieve a clever and consistent rhyme scheme while, at the same time, mocking Mitt Romney’s own inconsistencies over the years. He also captures some of Romney’s best campaign trail gaffes, made all the more humorous when set to this soundtrack. Good stuff, and definitely a glimpse of the challenges Romney will face in the general election when he is forced to confront his, uh, evolving positions on a range of issues.
By the way, why is it that I keep hearing more and more about the Australian hip hop scene? Is it growing or just getting more attention here? American rappers have been touring there for a very long time, but I am also hearing more on this side of the globe from Australian rappers like Iggy Azalea, whose most recent album was produced by T.I. And I recently learned that New Jersey rapper GDP, still more of a local phenom than a national figure, went to Australia to produce his latest album. (Thanks to Mickey Hess for that tidbit.) It’s the first time I’ve heard of an American rapper traveling down under for production…
Washington Post music writer Chris Richards has a piece today on DMV rapper Fat Trel. (For the uninitiated, DMV refers to the District, Maryland, and Virginia rap scene.) To date, the only DMV rapper to have achieved nationwide success has been Wale, though it’s safe to say that even he hasn’t taken off the way many hoped and predicted. His most recent album, Ambition, did debut at #2 on the U.S. Billboard 200, but nearly 5 months since the release, it hasn’t gone gold yet, and the lukewarm reviews suggest that it might not at all.
Richards, whose opinions I value and have referenced before, thinks Fat Trel might be the one to elevate the DMV scene to Wale heights and beyond. I’ve heard a few of Trel’s songs, and he does have the qualities needed to be commercially successful. He’s a fairly agile lyricist who rhymes over sometimes grandiose, heavily synthed, club-ready beats. Here’s an example:
But does he rhyme about anything meaningful? That’s debatable. Richards writes that “At his most thrilling, he manages to sound dangerous in a genre that has exhausted the notion of taboo.” To me it all sounds a lot like the banal imagery of money, cars, violence, and women that has been played out for years now. On the other hand, I happen to know Trel’s ‘hood very well. The projects on Benning Road that he made his home were three blocks away from my house in DC, and I can attest that the violence that he raps about is not imaginary, even if his own role in it is exaggerated. I witnessed multiple shootings personally, as well as high speed police chases on a regular basis, some of which ended in dramatic crashes. The intersection at 16th and E, NE, was one of the most dangerous spots in DC while I lived there (my house was at 16th and D). Gun shots were not uncommon, nor were drug-addled junkies roaming the alleys. While the “E Street Bangers” that Krel references were kind of a sad attempt at a gang, they did know their violence…
And so the lifestyle that Fat Krel depicts in his songs is not entirely imaginary, but does that make it worth listening to? I don’t really think so. Yes, violence is a real part of life in much of DC and other urban centers, and so rapping about it is understandable and potentially important. Nobody would deny that when NWA and many others first did it in the late 80s and early 90s, it changed American culture in profound ways. But if Fat Trel is simply going to revel in it like so many other rappers do now, without adding something more innovative or intelligent to the mix, I don’t see how the still-insignificant DMV rap scene is going to distinguish itself anytime soon.
Then again, rap’s top tier is chock full of bitches-guns-and-money rappers, so maybe there’s a little room for one more—even if he’s Fat.
His new mixtape drops at the end of the month. I will reserve judgment until then.
So it’s March already, less than 8 months until the presidential election, and it’s difficult not to notice that hip hop has been left out of Obama’s campaign this time around. Leading up to 2008, he found all kinds of opportunities to associate himself with hip hop, tapping the energy of the music and culture to motivate young people across the U.S. to hit the polls. I think it’s safe to say his strategy worked–and with the exception of the occasional stupid lyric (think Ludacris’s “Politics: Obama is Here”), there was minimal fallout. I definitely admired Obama for this–previous presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican, generally went out of their way to distance themselves from hip hop. Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” comes up all the time, even now. Obama flipped the script on all of that.
But after the election, the love for hip hop seemed to dry up, and now, in 2012, I think it’s fair to say that the Obama campaign is straight-up scared of it. The president’s playlist, 29 songs long, has plenty of country but not a single rap song. No way this is accidental. It’s also not hard to figure out why the campaign is reluctant to go near rap. When Common, one of the most positive and socially conscious rappers out there, was invited to the White House last May, right wing critics like Sarah Palin and Karl Rove had a field day, cherry picking (and intentionally misinterpreting) lyrics from his Def Jam poem “Letter to the Law.” All of a sudden Common of all people was branded a violent thug and a would-be cop killer, even though anyone who has listened to Common knows he regularly takes a stand against violence in hip hop. His track “I Used to Love H.E.R.” became a classic with this very message:
In any case, I decided to email Karl Rove about all of this, thinking (naively) that he might listen to reason. But he’s a political operative through and through, and hatchet men don’t care about facts. Here’s my (slightly abridged) email to him and his super-annoying response:
My email:
I am writing to express displeasure with your recent characterizations of the hip hop artist Common. I am a hip hop scholar with years of experience listening to rap music, and I can say with absolute authority that Common is far from being a “thug.” He is, in fact, one of the most eloquent, positive-minded, peace-loving rappers in the industry today. I am not saying that I agree with every word he has ever uttered, but having listened to a great deal of his music over the years, I have found his messages to be inspiring and frequently critical of the lyrics that many “gangsta” rappers have introduced to the genre.
His criticism of violence, for example, got him in trouble with Ice Cube, a well-known “gangsta” rap pioneer, and since then other rappers like Jay Z have used Common as an example of the kind of rapper they are NOT. His work is complex and always socially conscious; in fact, some of his songs recently appeared in a Yale UP anthology that was endorsed by the likes of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West. In short, he is a man of genuine intellect and talent, and I think you do him (and, honestly, yourself) a great disservice by lumping him together with the kinds of artists who are more deserving of your vitriol.
Rove’s entire response:
So you think people who call for killing cops and President Bush and denigrate women are “intelligent” and “talented”?
Illinois Senate Republican leader Christine Radgono reads a letter from Raekwon out loud in the Illinois state house. The way she so fluently pronounces Raekwon and Wu Tang Clan tells me that Senator Radgono is a lifetime hip hop fan.
Have to applaud her sense of humor. It’s actually interesting to me that some Republicans on the national stage have attempted to create the impression that they embrace rap, too. I’m thinking specifically of that creepy Eric Cantor interview on 60 Minutes in which his kids reveal that their dad is super-cool and listens to rap. Cantor himself, equally fluent in hip hop speak, said “I do the Wiz Khalifa stuff and Jay-Z, and Lil Wayne.” The image of Cantor bobbing his head to Lil Wayne is both funny and disturbing since Lil Wayne is one of the grossest, raunchiest rappers out there. Wrap your head around Cantor listening to “Gonorrhea,” for example.
Thanks to Rene Bryce-Laporte for the heads up on the Wu Tang letter.
15 years to the day since Notorious BIG was killed (and apropos of my post last night), this is the question Nesnga Burton asks in today’s The Root. I think it’s a question lots of hip hop fans have asked at some point–and the same could certainly be extended to 2Pac. The two MCs had very different styles, but their impact on the genre was profound.
So this article certainly asks an important and timely question, but I don’t think Burton’s answers make much sense. She says that if Biggie were around, rappers wouldn’t get away with using Auto-Tune or making the same song over and over. I’m not sure how you’d support an argument like that, but it’s unlikely that Biggie alone would’ve single-handedly saved rap from redundancy or technological experimentation done badly. She goes on to assert that “Today’s rappers could learn a lot from Biggie, like increasing their vocabulary, painting pictures through words, [and] having complex lyrics that actually make sense…” OK, now I am wondering if the author is actually a fan of rap music. Rappers like Nas, Andre 3000, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Eminem could teach courses on word play. I’m not sure what “painting pictures through words” is supposed to mean, but I am pretty sure most (all?) rappers do that.
And the last bit I will comment on is this piece of speculation: “I don’t know if Jay-Z would be the reigning King of Hip-Hop…” I know this has become the new orthodoxy, but Jay-Z is not the reigning king of hip hop. No disrespect intended—I loved Decoded–but I can think of more innovative and/or influential rappers. See my list in the previous paragraph for examples.
The Washington Times today includes a list of 20 rappers who were killed at a young age. There’s no real argument or stated purpose to this piece, but it does serve as a reminder of the violence that has sometimes followed rap music. (Though, it’s worth noting that hip hop actually evolved, in part, through a desire to end street violence, and it still serves that function in many ways.)
Globally speaking, however, rap is not the only music genre that has seen its rising stars killed off; in fact, the Mexican narcocorrido (a folk genre that often mythologizes drug kingpins and their violent lifestyles) has witnessed a truly shocking number of murders. More than a dozen performers were murdered in just over a year (between 2006 and 2008), and just a few months ago, Diego Rivas was added to the list of slain Mexican musicians. With this disturbing context in mind, rap doesn’t seem so hazardous after all…
Apparently Rush Limbaugh has decided it’s unfair that he is getting in hot water for calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” and “prostitute” since rappers say similar things about women in their lyrics and, according to Rush, don’t get in trouble for it. Of course the problem is that rappers regularly get called out for it. The other problem is that while rappers usually degrade fictionalized women or women in the abstract (which is still not OK, mind you), Rush trained his sights on an actual woman who dared speak her mind in a public venue and launched a deeply personal attack on her character.
In any case, it’s good to see that Rush is taking responsibility for his actions. I felt that his apology was genuine, and this pretty much confirms it.
Arguably the harshest rebuke of the Obama administration from within the hip hop community, “Obama Nation Part II” takes some pretty surprising shots Obama, including M1’s claim that he’s “a master of disguise, expert at telling lies.” British grime artist Black the Ripper’s argument–“He’s sittin’ in the White House, so who cares if he’s black”–has been articulated before by groups like deap prez and Immortal Technique, suggesting that anyone occupying the American presidency is a tool for larger white interests. But this song takes things further, asserting that Obama himself is a more-than-willing participant in the epic trick being pulled on America. Some tough stuff here.
A nod to Travis Gosa, who brought this one to my attention.
