The Graying of Hip Hop

By Mark Anthony Neal
SeeingBlack.com Music Critic

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More than anytime in its 30-year sojourn in North America, hip-hop culture is at a crossroads. The strongest evidence of this is the unparalleled nostalgia that pervades so many sectors of commercial hip-hop. No doubt, part this nostalgia is driven by corporate desires to provide the so called hip-hip generation (particularly the back-packers) with a canned history of the movement, ready for consumption, particularly as those core consumers move toward adulthood and look to other forms of music and entertainment for stimulation.

Though the "keepin' it real" dictums within commercial hip-hop have always been dicey—as if Jigga is more authentic than Blackalicious or classic Fresh Prince (who?)—the clear message coming from corporate these days is that "keepin' it real" includes knowing your hip-hop's history. Thus a spate a projects like Yes, Yes, Y'all: the Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-hop's First Decade and Kevin Powell and Ernie Paniccioli's Who Shot Ya? Three Decades of Hiphop Photography offer such knowledge in accessible book form. MTV2's daily schedule now regularly includes an old-school half-hour and Time Warner's cable music network Music Choice dedicates one of its 40-something channels to "Old School Rap" allowing the younguns to have a fluidity in Nice & Smooth, Schooly D, and Monie Love.

But this nostalgia is also driven by the "graying" of the hip-hop generation. Over the last few months I've come across more than a few hip-hop generation artists and intellectuals who are beginning to show strains of gray in their locks, twist, beards, and fades. The reality is that when we talk about a "hip-hop generation," we literally have to make a distinction between the cats all up in the videos and the close to 40-somethins who have been all present and accountable thru most of hip-hop's first 30 years.

These are folks now more concerned with mortgage rates, school vouchers, life insurance and alternative health care than they are concerned about "keepin it real." There was that pause a few weeks ago watching Ice Cube's cameo on the Bernie Mac Show where Cube and Bernie argued about whether or not Cube's kids where in prep school or have a nanny. Who would've thought, the first time we heard "Gangsta's Fairytale," that we'd ever see Cube in such a role? And even Scarface, never one to give anybody the warm fuzzies, waxes nostalgic on his latest disc The Fix, particularly on the track "My Block," which samples Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack's "Be Real Black." Throughout, Scarface celebrates community and a time when the ghetto network of aunties, grannies and Ms. Fanny across the street meant that the dirt you did as a shortie would no doubt waitin' for you when you got back to the crib.

Like so many actors and actresses, now older hip-hop artists are concerned with creating music and making movies that their kids can dig. So Coolio (who just turned 39), De La Soul, and Phife contribute to a hip-hop soundtrack for the Cartoon Network's Dexter's Laboratory. Snoop, who is on record saying that "chronic" kept folks in the hood off of crack (and thus performed a community service), films a cameo for The Muppets Christmas Movie. His footage is later cut, in large part because of another tirade from Bill O'Reilly (so Bill, how exactly do you know that Snoop has a porno site?). Hip-hop influenced R&B acts such as New Edition and Keith Sweat are now making the rounds on the Tom Joyner Morning Show as "old school" acts. LL Cool J (who the ladies apparently still love) is now a doting family man who just released his 10th recording (with no cuss words). This longevity was thought to be impossible when artists like LL first debuted in the early 1980s with a series of 12-inch singles that they hoped would one day comprise an album. In either scenario, Hip-hop is clearly taking stock of its past and considering its future as it slowly moves towards middle age.

It is within this context that Erykah Badu's "Love of My Life (an ode to Hip-hop)" attempts to negotiate hip-hop's current fascination with its history and longevity. Appearing on the soundtrack of the film Brown Sugar, the track is yet another foray into the full service metaphor that Common (then with Sense) created eight years ago when he recorded the track "I Use to Love H.E.R" on his second disc Resurrection (1994). On the track, Common posits "H.E.R" not simply as the "girlfriend" who's left him but as "hip-hop" herself. The song, which was written when so-called "gangsta rap" was at its peak, essentially blames the West Coast for H.E.R. "talkin' about poppin' glocks, servin rocks and hittin' switches." Ice Cube and Mack 10 duly answered the charge with "Westside Slaughterhouse" though the beef was later squashed by the Nation of Islam.

The Roots picked up on Common's theme five years later, recording a love song for hip-hop with "Act Too (the Love of My Life)." Around a chorus of "It's like that, and it sounds so nice/Hip-hop, you the love of my life," Black Thought (Tariq Trotter) and guest Common trade loves stories. Whereas Black Thought is nostalgic, Common again hits at the commercialization of hip-hop ("Caught in the Hype Williams, and lost her direction…Her Daddy'll beat H.E.R., eyes all Puff-ed) and the subtle changes in hip-hop's core audiences ("when we perform, it's just coffee shop chicks and white dudes). But he ultimately accepts that "this is her fate or destiny that brings the best of me/It's like God is testin' me." Common like so many hard-core hip-hop fans, was responding to the stylized glitz of the "shiny suit man" and the video production of Hype Williams. (Ain't sayin' that they ain't talented or genius in the case of Hype, but that wasn't the thing I had come to love.)

Common's reservations are later registered on the brilliant "A Film Called (Pimp)" from Like Water for Chocolate (2000), where "H.E.R." is finally given a voice, courtesy of veteran MC Lyte. In this guise Common is less the lover and now the pimp (hence his line on De La's "The Bizness" (1996) that "I used to love H.E.R., but now I bone H.E.R."). He suggests that he could "expose her to some paper, freedom and culture/The way a righteous pimp is supposed to." But it turns out that it is hip-hop that is all about pimpin' as Lyte hits back: "You must not know of me/I'm the mack here/Ought to have you ho for me/Pimp yo punk ass/Have you write poetry/I'm from a land called cash/You too slow for me."

The song broadly acknowledges that hip-hop is not just somethin' to be appropriated by the mainstream entertainment industry, but an industry in and of itself, that regularly exploits the cats who have been with "H.E.R." from the beginning. When Lyte again reminds Common that she "pimps ho's, pimps pens, pimp rhythms, pimp flows, pimp systems" he can only respond "well [expletive] you then, I'm about to be preacher" (more a bitch-slap to the close proximity of some black ministers and the big pimpin' that takes place in hip-hop videos.)

Badu's "Love of My Life (an ode to Hip-hop)" is fully cognizant of this rich strain of critique of hip-hop and the song and music video serves as a lover's whispered response, both to the old-school hip-hop heads (most of whom are 30-somethins) and her real-time lover Common. The film and soundtrack that the song appears on is itself an ode to the love of hip-hop (As Sanaa utters softly at the film's beginning "when was the first time you fell in love with hip-hop).

But it is the video, co-directed by Badu with Chris Robinson, which really brings the current hip-hop nostalgia into focus. The video opens with the epigraph "Once upon a time on a planet somewhere, a bombastic beat was born…Let's call her hip-hop." Badu or rather "hip-hop" is first pictured sitting in a project window, all funkadelic-ed out, but quickly retreats into the house to change her gear and grab her "boombox" (back when they were boom boxes) on which Bambaatta and Soul Sonic Force's "Planet Rock" can be heard faintly. With her warm-up suit, Kangol and shell-top Adidas in tow, "hip-hop" heads to the roof, where she meets Crazy Legs and the rest of the Rock Steady Crew and proceeds to exchange break-dance moves with Legs, who is still in peak form after being in the game for more than 20 years. Crazy Legs cameo is the first of many throughout the video (most wear t-shirts with their names on them in 1980s styled iron-on black letters—classic crew wear—for the folks who don't know who they are).

The scene on the roof-top is a reminder not only of the role that dance has always played in hip-hop but also the presence of New York Latinos during hip-hop's gestation, well before folks like Fat Joe, the late Big Pun and a bunch other folks had to remind the neophytes that they had been there from the beginning. The sequence on the roof ends when Freddie Braithwaite appears, calling it a wrap. Braithwaite is more well known to folks as Fab-Five Freddy, the purported graffiti artist-turned first host of YO MTV Raps. Though Fab Five's credibility within hip-hop, even while host of YO, was at best suspect, he's crafted a bit of a reputation via his presence in Blondie's "Rapture" video and his role in Charles Ahearn's film Wild Style (1982).

Wild Style (just issued on DVD by Rhino Home Video) is generally recognized as one of the most "authentic" hip-hop films. While the film celebrates hip-hop's four elements (graffiti, rapping, DJing and break dancing), the primary focus is on the love affair between Zoro and Ladybug, who are portrayed by legendary graffiti artists Lee Quinones and Sandra "Lady Pink" Fabara, who along with Lady Heart, was one the most significant women on the early hip-hop scene. The film features legendary performances by the Chief Rocker Busy Bee (who had to be an influence on Mos Def), The Cold Crush (including Grandmaster Caz and Charlie Chase, who was the most prominent Puerto Rican on the "rap" side of early hip-hop culture), the Fantastic Five (with the brilliant DJ innovator Grand Wizard Theodore, who "invented" the scratch technique), and a special cameo by the then "famous" Grandmaster Flash (on the mix in his kitchen).

Wild Style is also notable, because it gives evidence that as early as 20 years ago, folks in the game had concerns about the authenticity of hip-hop culture as the folks from "downtown" art galleries and periodicals (like The Village Voice) began to pay more attention to what was happening up in the Boogie-down (Bronx) and elsewhere. In a critical moment in the film Zoro responds to a planned exhibition of graffiti art a downtown gallery: "graffiti is the trains and the walls. Being a graffiti writer is taking chances and [expletive], taking the risk, taking all the arguments from the transit, the police, from your mother even…You got to go out and paint and be called an outlaw at the same time."

Zoro's view of his art as inherently oppositional (thus outlawed) is striking. But the film is also prophetic; despite the prominence of break dancing and graffiti at the beginning of hip-hop culture, Lady Bug is clearly reading the future late in the film when she tells Zoro that the rappers "gonna be the stars of this thing, not you." Arguably, when hip-hop music was separated from its organic elements (first the art and dancing and then the DJing) and the multi-ethnic forces that shaped those elements, hip-hop culture as a whole lost some of its artistic integrity. Like R. Kelly is so fond of telling folks (via his departed mama), "what does it mean to gain the world, if you lose your soul?" There is little doubt that hip-hop lost some of its soul (and politics and spirituality and authenticity), when it began making the rotations of the MTVs of the world.

Badu's "Love of My Life" also addresses hip-hop's transition into "soulnessness" as it is portrayed rocking the red, black, and green Africa medallion that was in vogue in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a historical moment when "conscious" rap artists such as Public Enemy, Poor Righteous Teachers, Paris, Cube, X-Clan, Lakim Shabazz, Brand Nubian, KRS-One (Boogie Down Productions) and for a hot minute Big Daddy Kane (the template for pimp-daddy race men in the hip-hop era) were among the most popular. This generation later spawned current hip-hop gramscians like Mos, Common, Talib Kweli, Mystic, Bahamadia, and Dead Prez. The video attempts to bridge the two generations, as "hip-hop' rolls into a room where Chuck D and Dead Prez, among others, are standing over blueprints, plotting the "revolution."

The popularity of "Conscious" hip-hop, which was never as popular as some of us would like to think (the kids in my 'hood where more into Special Ed than they ever were into PE), began to recede with the emergence of Eazy E ("we want Eazy!") and NWA. While NWA was all about gratuitous rage ("F*** the Police" as a party anthem as opposed to a legitimate challenge to racial profiling by law enforcement), it was with the success of former NWA member Dr. Dre's The Chronic (1992) that the West Coast sound was solidified.

The video for "Love of My Life" references both of these influences as an Eazy-like figure gives the audience the finger as the words "F*** the police" appear on screen. Ironically, it is "hip-hop" that is arrested, conceding the fact that it was not via the strident Black nationalist tomes of "conscious" rappers that hip-hop experienced increased scrutiny from law enforcement. Rather, the unrequited rage in the music of so-called gangsta rappers like Cube, Paris, Ice T and NWA brought the ruckus. Even this aspect of hip-hop receded with the success of the The Chronic, as witnessed in "hip-hop's" appearance in one segment of the video on a blunt-high as the video images are cleverly brought to slow motion and blurred, having a rather dramatic affect on viewers.

When "hip-hop" emerges from her funk she's getting paid and suddenly garnering attention and being "handled." "Hip-hop" is uncomfortably put on display and realizes that she is performing for a crowd of white kids (a nod to Common's "coffee shop chicks and white dudes" reference). Finally accepting that this is the only way she can stay paid and survive, "hip-hop" gets with the flow and jumps into the crowd (i.e. the Limp Bizkit-ization of hip-hop). It is during this sequence that Common "returns," reminding folks of his history with "H.E.R." "Ya'll know how I met her, we broke up and got back together… thought she rolled with bad boys forever, in many ways them boys made her better to grow I had to let her/she need chedda and I understood that, looking for cheese don't make her a hood-rat/in fact she a queen to me, her light beams on me, I love it when she sings to me."

Common's tone is conciliatory, no doubt in response to the fact the very "pimpin'" of hip-hop that he despised on "I Used to Love H.E.R." created a commercial context for his most successful release Like Water for Hip-Hop, which made him a leading light among hip-hop's "celebrity gramscians". The video for "Love of My Life" ends with "hip-hop" and Common reuniting and hopping on a school bus full of kids—the bus is driven by Kool Herc.

The closing sequence is a reminder that the future of hip-hop can only be guaranteed by reaching the minds and passions of the kids—the very thing that Herc, Caz, Theodore, Flash and others did in the first place when they helped create this thing called "hip-hop ya don't stop" nearly 30 years ago. It remains to be seen whether this moment of hip-hop nostalgia will translate into the increased integrity of the art form (I hold out little hope for the integrity of the industry) and the development of institutional forces to address of the myriad of issues that hip-hop's graying public is beginning to acknowledge. I have little faith in the Hip-Hop Summit organization but the work of Erykah Badu and Rick Famuyiwa shows that there are still folks in the industry very passionate about the "hip-hop" that we've all come to love.

(BTW, I feel in love with hip-hop the first time I heard a scratch mix T-Connection's "Groove to Get Down"-this would have been in 1978 and I would have been 12 years old.)

Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany. He earned his doctorate from the State University of New York at Buffalo and an undergraduate degree from the State University of New York College at Fredonia. He is the author of the forthcoming Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation which will be published in June. Neal resides in Schenectady, NY with his wife and two young daughters.)

-- February 28, 2003

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