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 How Hiphop Failed Black America part 1: When the people cheerby QuestloveThere are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” (Actually, he said “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford,” but the switch to the pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” And for the third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in “Gangsta Gangsta” back in 1988: “Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.”Those three ideas may seem distant from one another, but if you set them up and draw lines between them, that’s triangulation. Bradford’s idea, of course, is about providence, about luck and gratitude: You only have your life because you don’t have someone else’s. At the simplest level, I think about that often. I could be where others are, and by extension, they could be where I am. You don’t want to be insensible to that. You don’t want to be an ingrate. (By the by, Bradford’s quote has come to be used to celebrate good fortune — when people say it, they’re comforting themselves with the fact that things could be worse — but in fact, his own good fortune lasted only a few years before he was burned at the stake.)Einstein was talking about physics, of course, but to me, he’s talking about something closer to home — the way that other people affect you, the way that your life is entangled in theirs whether or not there’s a clear line of connection. Just because something is happening to a street kid in Seattle or a small-time outlaw in Pittsburgh doesn’t mean that it’s not also happening, in some sense, to you. Human civilization is founded on a social contract, but all too often that gets reduced to a kind of charity: Help those who are less fortunate, think of those who are different. But there’s a subtler form of contract, which is the connection between us all.And then there’s Ice Cube, who seems to be talking about life’s basic appetites — what’s under the lid of the id — but is in fact proposing a world where that social contract is destroyed, where everyone aspires to improve themselves and only themselves, thoughts of others be damned. What kind of world does that create?Those three ideas, Bradford’s and Einstein’s and Cube’s, define the three sides of a triangle, and I’m standing in it with pieces of each man: Bradford’s rueful contemplation, Einstein’s hair, Ice Cube’s desires. Can the three roads meet without being trivial? This essay, and the ones that follow it, will attempt to find out. I’m going to do things a little differently, with some madness in my method. I may not refer back to these three thinkers and these three thoughts, but they’re always there, hovering, as I think through what a generation of hip-hop has wrought. And I’m not going to handle the argument in a straight line. But don’t wonder too much when it wanders. I’ll get back on track.*I want to start with a statement: Hip-hop has taken over black music. At some level, this is a complex argument, with many outer rings, but it has a simple, indisputable core. Look at the music charts, or think of as many pop artists as you can, and see how many of the black ones aren’t part of hip-hop. There aren’t many hip-hop performers at the top of the charts lately: You have perennial winners like Jay Z, Kanye West, and Drake, along with newcomers like Kendrick Lamar, and that’s about it. Among women, it’s a little bit more complicated, but only a little bit. The two biggest stars, Beyoncé and Rihanna, are considered pop (or is that pop-soul), but what does that mean anymore? In their case, it means that they’re offering a variation on hip-hop that’s reinforced by their associations with the genre’s biggest stars: Beyoncé with Jay Z, of course, and Rihanna with everyone from Drake to A$AP Rocky to Eminem.It wasn’t always that way. Back in the late '80s, when I graduated high school, you could count the number of black musical artists that weren’t in hip-hop on two hands — maybe. You had folksingers like Tracy Chapman, rock bands like Living Colour, pop acts like Lionel Richie, many kinds of soul singers — and that doesn’t even contend with megastars like Michael Jackson and Prince, who thwarted any easy categorization. Hip-hop was plenty present — in 1989 alone, you had De La Soul and the Geto Boys and EPMD and Boogie Down Productions and Ice-T and Queen Latifah — but it was just a piece of the pie. In the time since, hip-hop has made like the Exxon Valdez (another 1989 release): It spilled and spread.So what if hip-hop, which was once a form of upstart black-folk music, came to dominate the modern world? Isn’t that a good thing? It seems strange for an artist working in the genre to be complaining, and maybe I’m not exactly complaining. Maybe I’m taking a measure of my good fortune. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a little more complicated than that. Maybe domination isn’t quite a victory. Maybe everpresence isn’t quite a virtue.Twenty years ago, when my father first heard about my hip-hop career, he was skeptical. He didn't know where it was all headed. In his mind, a drummer had a real job, like working as music director for Anita Baker. But if I’m going to marvel at the way that hip-hop overcame his skepticism and became synonymous with our broader black American culture, I’m going to have to be clear with myself that marvel is probably the wrong word. Black culture, which has a long tradition of struggling against (and at the same time, working in close collaboration with) the dominant white culture, has rounded the corner of the 21st century with what looks in one sense like an unequivocal victory. Young America now embraces hip-hop as the signal pop-music genre of its time. So why does that victory feel strange: not exactly hollow, but a little haunted?I have wondered about this for years, and worried about it for just as many years. It’s kept me up at night or kept me distracted during the day. And after looking far and wide, I keep coming back to the same answer, which is this: The reason is simple. The reason is plain. Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant. Not to mention the obvious backlash conspiracy paranoia: Once all of black music is associated with hip-hop, then Those Who Wish to Squelch need only squelch one genre to effectively silence an entire cultural movement.And that’s what it’s become: an entire cultural movement, packed into one hyphenated adjective. These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as “hip-hop,” even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. “Hip-hop fashion” makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: “Hip-hop food”? “Hip-hop politics”? “Hip-hop intellectual”? And there’s even “hip-hop architecture.” What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer?This doesn’t happen with other genres. There’s no folk-music food or New Wave fashion, once you get past food for thought and skinny ties. There’s no junkanoo architecture. The closest thing to a musical style that does double-duty as an overarching aesthetic is punk, and that doesn’t have the same strict racial coding. On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop’s success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion. The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range — social contract, anyone? — but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black starliner. Containers on the container ship are taken from here to there — and never mind the fact that they may be empty containers. Keep on pushin’ and all that, but what are you pushing against? As it has become the field rather than the object, hip-hop has lost some of its pertinent sting. And then there’s the question of where hip-hop has arrived commercially, or how fast it’s departing. The music industry in general is sliding, and hip-hop is sliding maybe faster than that. The largest earners earn large, but not at the rate they once did. And everyone beneath that upper level is fading fast.The other day, we ran into an old man who is also an old fan. He loves the Roots and what we do. Someone mentioned the changing nature of the pop-culture game, and it made him nostalgic for the soul music of his youth. “It’ll be back,” he said. “Things go in cycles.” But do they? If you really track the ways that music has changed over the past 200 years, the only thing that goes in cycles is old men talking about how things go in cycles. History is more interested in getting its nut off. There are patterns, of course, boom and bust and ways in which certain resources are exhausted. There are foundational truths that are stitched into the human DNA. But the art forms used to express those truths change without recurring. They go away and don’t come back. When hip-hop doesn’t occupy an interesting place on the pop-culture terrain, when it is much of the terrain and loses interest even in itself, then what?Back to John Bradford for a moment: I’m lucky to be here. That goes without saying, but I’ll say it. Still, as the Roots round into our third decade, we shoulder a strange burden, which is that people expect us to be both meaningful and popular. We expect that. But those things don’t necessarily work together, especially in the hip-hop world of today. The winners, the top dogs, make art mostly about their own victories and the victory of their genre, but that triumphalist pose leaves little room for anything else. Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive. People who want to challenge this theory point to Kendrick Lamar, and the way that his music, at least so far, has some sense of the social contract, some sense of character. But is he just the exception that proves the rule? Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.How Hiphop Failed Black America part 2: Mo money mo’ problemsby QuestloveWhat do people think of when they think about hip-hop? I don’t mean the technique of the music so much as its meaning. Technique is a limited part of any art form, really: how well Rapper X raps is important but not central. How devious or wonderful Producer X’s beats are can get you on your feet more quickly, but hip-hop isn’t an abstract sonic art form. It’s a narrative one. And what that means is that matter matters more than art. Or rather: what matters to art is its matter, what it’s about, the ideas it communicates to its audience. The other aspects serve it, but perfect performance and production of empty ideas can’t fake the fill. I hope this isn’t a controversial view. It shouldn’t be.I’d argue that when people think of hip-hop, pretty quickly they think of bling, of watches or cars or jewels or private jets. They think of success and its fruits, and the triumphant figures who are picking that fruit. This linkage isn’t limited to hip-hop — all of American celebrity, to some degree, is based on showing what you can buy — but it’s stronger there. The reasons are complex, of course, but the aspirational strain in African-American culture runs all the way back to slavery days. Slaves couldn’t own property because they were property. When freed, they were able to exist politically, and also economically. Owning things was a way of proving that you existed — and so, by extension, owning many things was a way of proving that you existed emphatically. Hip-hop is about having things to prove you’re not a have-not; it works against the notion that you might have so little economic control that you would simply disappear.But what are the haves that you might have? And are they the same haves that people had 10 years ago, or 20? You only have to wind the clock back a few decades to see how drastically this dynamic has changed.Back in 1986, the group standing on top of the rap heap was Run-DMC, and after rising to international prominence, they released a song about one of their prized possessions. That song, of course, was “My Adidas.” Let’s take a look at how rap stars back in the '80s celebrated what they owned:My Adidaswalked through concert doorsand roamed all over coliseum floorsI stepped on stage, at Live AidAll the people gave and the poor got paidIt doesn’t take much scrutiny to see that this is an especially benign form of consumerism. For starters, it’s not about the shoes themselves, in the main. It’s about the group’s experiences on the way to stardom: the audiences that came to see them, the shows they headlined. And fairly quickly, it’s not about them at all — it’s about Live Aid, a benefit concert focused on making sure that “the poor got paid.” In last week’s column, Albert Einstein and I talked about spooky action at a distance, which I reimagined as a version of the social contract: what happens elsewhere also happens to you, and it’s hard to divorce yourself from other people’s circumstances, no matter how much you try. This is that same principle, an illustration of connection. It’s sole music: the shoes convey you to the spot where you can see the haves working on behalf of the have-nots.But there’s something else, too. Think about the product that’s carrying the song along. It’s a little strange: It’s a German athletic shoe from Herzogenaurach, not Hollis, Queens. But it is also (or was also) part of the Run-DMC uniform: the terry-cloth Kangol hat, the warm-up suits. At the time, Run-DMC was counterprogramming the flamboyance of other hip-hop artists, who were dressing like they were still in the funk and disco eras, with furs and studded jackets. Run-DMC stripped it down, and in doing so, sold a new kind of cool. More to the point, they sold a cool that was accessible to their fans. You could buy Adidas and be in their club, which was a club that you wanted to be in.What has changed? Well, back in Run-DMC’s day, hip-hop had winners and others, on a sliding scale, all the way down to artists who were making more modest local impact. Now, because of the radical contraction of the market and the reluctance of companies to invest in anything that’s not a sure bet, hip-hop has become almost exclusively about winners, big sellers who have already proven their muscle. And even those numbers are dwindling, to the point where the million-seller club these days contains almost no one — Jay Z, Eminem, Drake, Macklemore, and Kendrick Lamar. You could argue that there are artists a tick down who have more cultural cachet: the big example there is Kanye West, who has sold not quite 700,000 copies of Yeezus. But that’s a half-dozen artists, total, with any appreciable influence.And what do those artists do? They celebrate themselves, just like the artists of a generation earlier. They talk about products that prop them up, just like the artists of a generation earlier. But what have the products become? Let’s look at one of the descendants of “My Adidas” — a song on Jay Z’s recent Magna Carta Holy Grail called “Picasso Baby.”I just want a Picasso, in my casaNo, my castleThis is on the opposite side of the planet, ethically and socially, from “My Adidas.” It associates personal satisfaction with a product, but on an entirely different scale. I went to the mall the other day. They didn’t sell any Picassos. You can accuse me of a certain amount of humorlessness, and I’ll plead temporary insanity. But let’s look back into the lyrics. Jay Z isn’t just collecting art. He’s using the brand names of other famous painters to declare himself, by association, as an artist.It ain't hard to tellI'm the new Jean MichelSurrounded by WarholsMy whole team ballTwin Bugattis outside the Art BaselWhereas “My Adidas” highlighted consumer items, “Picasso Baby” is all about unattainable luxury, fantasy acquisitions. Within the first ten words of the song, Jay Z ensures that no one in his audience can identify with the experience that he’s rapping about. He would never want to be in a club that would have you as a member. But this doesn’t offend his audiences. They love it. They want to be just like him so they can exclude people just like them. There’s an even more egregious (comic?) example, from Ace Hood, with his song “Bugatti.” I’ll quote the chorus.I woke up in a new BugattiI woke up in a new BugattiI woke up in a new BugattiI woke up in a new BugattiI woke up in a new BugattiNow I’ll quote a verse:Niggas be hatin’I’m rich as a bitchA hundred K? I spent that on my wristTwo hundred thousand, I spent that on your bitchYou and your model put that on the listI don’t know exactly how much a Bugatti costs. Oh, wait: I’ve been told by my business manager that it costs Amused Laughter. Very few people I know, including several best-selling artists in various musical genres, can afford this item, which depreciates as violently as whiplash the minute it’s off the lot. Something about the song, though, creates an environment where I feel a twinge of shame admitting that. And I won’t even get into whether I can spend a hundred K on my wrist.But what does it mean that hearing the song somehow makes me measure myself against its outsize boasting? For starters, it means that hip-hop has become complicit in the process by which winners are increasingly isolated from the populations they are supposed to inspire and engage — which are also, in theory, the populations that are supposed to furnish the next crop of winners. This isn’t a black thing or even a hip-hop thing exclusively. American politics functions the same way. But it’s a significant turnaround and comedown for a music that was, only a little while back, devoted to reflecting the experience of real people and, through that reflection, challenging the power structure that produces inequality and disenfranchisement.Who’s to blame? It’s hard to say. Certainly, Puff Daddy’s work with the Notorious B.I.G. in the early '90s did plenty to cement the idea of hip-hop as a genre of conspicuous consumption. Before those videos, wealth was evident, but it was also contextualized, given specific character that harmonized with the backgrounds of the artists. Run-DMC had East Coast cool and cachet; Dr. Dre had West Coast cool and cachet. But Puffy had — and wanted to tell everyone he had — a different idea of power, an abstract capitalist cachet. His videos, and the image they projected, played as well in California as in New York, as well in Chicago as in Florida. It was a cartoon idea of wealth, to the point that specific reality no longer mattered. In literary terms, it was pure signifier. It would take him a little while to formulate that into a manifesto, but when he did, he hit it on the nose. “Bad Boy for Life,” in 2001, contained a line that says all that anyone needs to know about this strain of hip-hop: "Don’t worry if I write rhymes / I write checks.” Picasso, baby.A few years back, there was a video on YouTube that featured the rapper Lil Boosie. It showed him counting out his money onto the pavement of a parking lot. You can see it here. I haven’t studied too much contemporary performance art, but whoever’s doing it — Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic — can’t be doing anything stranger than this. (You too, James Franco.) The money is a pure abstraction. Nothing is purchased with it — no goods, no services. It’s a series of symbols being thrown to the ground, one after the other. And as each one lands, the message gets stronger and stronger. You don’t have this money. You may never see this many hundreds. You don’t belong here.The last stop on this train, at least for today, is the “Otis” video that Jay Z and Kanye West made to promote the hit single from Watch the Throne. In the video, which was directed by Spike Jonze, the two of them go to an industrial space and proceed to demolish a Maybach (another car, like a Bugatti, that no one can afford), after which they drive around the lot, four models in the backseat. What are they destroying with their hammers and their saws? The car? The idea of the car? The idea of the car in other videos? And what are they building as they destroy? The idea that they exist at a level where they can afford to discard something as valuable as the car? The idea that their cool transcends money and the things that it can acquire? The belief that art should always violate and remake consumer products? A hierarchy of image that somehow, strangely, privileges the human element? The car was eventually auctioned, and proceeds were donated toward the East African Drought Disaster. Spooky action at a distance.How Hiphop Failed Black America part 3: What happens when Black loses its cool?by QuestloveCan I start this essay by asking a rhetorical question? Have you heard of black cool? It used to be something ineffable but indisputable. Certain African-American cultural figures — in music, in movies, in sports — rose above what was manifestly a divided, unjust society and in the process managed to seem singularly unruffled. They kept themselves together by holding themselves slightly apart, maintaining an air of inscrutability, of not quite being known. They were cool.Who did this idea adhere to? People are welcome to make lists of their own, but there are some examples that we can all agree upon. Miles Davis was cool. Betty Davis was. Muhammad Ali was cool, and Richard Pryor was, and Lena Horne, and Billie Holiday, and Jimi Hendrix, and Sly Stone, and Angela Davis, and Prince. Early hip-hop had several contenders for cool, from Run-DMC to Public Enemy. And black cool, when it comes right down to it, is everyone’s cool. The baseline of the concept, in vernacular terms, in historical terms, is black. Black is the gold standard for cool, and you don’t need to look any further than the coolest thing of the last century, rock and roll, to see the ways in which white culture clearly sensed that the road to cool involved borrowing from black culture. But black cool is at a crossroads, unless it’s at the end of the road. The dynamics that historically produced black cool within the American landscape have shifted, allowing some things to be pushed to the side and others to fall through the cracks.You can tell something’s missing when you see people trying to find it. A few years back, the writer Rebecca Walker oversaw an anthology called, as luck would have it, Black Cool. Inspired by a photo of Barack Obama climbing out of a limousine, she invited dozens of writers to reflect on the phenomenon of black cool. They made a variety of arguments regarding a variety of examples. Mat Johnson wrote about black geeks. Rachel M. Harper wrote about how her artist father taught by example that pain, released, produced cool. When I read through the book, I locked into an essay by Helena Andrews. It’s called “Reserve,” Andrews’s piece, and it’s about the mask that black women learn to wear as girls. She imagines a black woman moving through a city, negotiating the looks of others on the subway.She seems to be doing more than everyone else by doing so much less. Your eye is drawn to her. She acknowledges your presence by ignoring it. She is the personification of cool by annihilating your very existence.What drew me to Andrews was these four sentences, which articulated, in a different way (gender-specific, subway-specific), something that I have thought about black cool for a long time, which is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Black cool is part of society in general, part of white society. Black cool is the tip of African-American culture’s engagement with the broader white culture. Black cool only works the way it works because it’s part of a relationship. Look at Andrews’s scene more closely. The woman, getting attention, rejects that attention, and as a result gets more attention. Cool has an additional dimension, too, which is that it buys time. In an uncertain social situation, where the wrong decision can have disastrous consequences, cool lets you stay a beat behind while you settle on the path of least destruction. Taken to the extreme, cool can be sociopathic; taken to the right levels, it’s a supremely intelligent mix of defense mechanism and mirroring.The idea of withholding attention is central to most human interaction, of course: The person with less interest in any relationship has the upper hand. But go wider. In talking about cool here, we’re not just talking about a man and a woman on a subway. We’re talking about a black culture and a white culture, a subculture within a mainstream culture. Any of the figures of black cool we mentioned above (Miles, Hendrix, etc.) simultaneously drew the gaze of white cultural observers and thwarted that gaze. They acted in ways that weren’t entirely predictable to white audiences, weren’t entirely safe or regulated, and that prolonged and deepened the attachment. When you looked at a picture of Miles Davis, you knew that you didn’t know what he was thinking, and that kept you looking. The dialogue between black and white cultures stayed alive and vibrant, full of productive tension.Let’s go back to the word: cool. Cool doesn’t mean a lack of temperature, exactly. It doesn’t mean low affect or indifference. It means cool heat, intensity held in check by reserves of self-possession. Cool is social engagement masquerading as a kind of disengagement. As a result, in any display of cool, there is a slight hint of threat. What if the mask is lifted and the heat released? That threat can be physical or sexual or intellectual, but it’s always felt. Look: That person has power that he or she is not using. Think: What will happen if he or she uses it? React: I don’t exactly know, but I better keep watching to find out. (To step away from black cool for one second into the broader concept of cool, it’s worth noting that reserve is less possible than ever. Think of John F. Kennedy. During his life, there was a gentleman’s agreement to protect his privacy and the office of the president. That permitted cool. These days, privacy has been melted down. Social networking, instant journalism, and culture of humiliation have turned the private-public dynamic more inside out than a Clippers jersey. That hurts cool in general.)But what happens when the broader culture stops looking at black culture for cues, or clues? What happens when the very idea that black culture contains something different and distinctive dissipates? A song like Lorde’s “Royals” critiques one version of hip-hop’s values, Cristal and Maybachs and gold teeth, and while it’s reductive in some ways, it’s also instructive, because it shows how the signifiers of hip-hop culture (which has swallowed black culture in general) have lost much of their cool. They’ve emptied themselves out and don’t know how to fill back up. The criticism that Lorde’s references are four or five years old, at least, does nothing to dull her point and may even sharpen it, because even if the names of the products have changed, their meaning(lessness) remains the same.Roland Barthes wrote famously about French toys. This seems like a detour, I know, but I was talking to a writer friend of mine about a book we worked on together, and this came up in relation to the notion of cool. Barthes wrote an essay about French toys in which he celebrated building blocks for sparking the creative impulse and damned other toys for doing the opposite.The merest set of blocks, provided it is not too refined, implies a very different learning of the world: then, the child does not in any way create meaningful objects, it matters little to him whether they have an adult name; the actions he performs are not those of a user but those of a demiurge. He creates forms that walk, that roll; he creates life, not property. Objects now act by themselves; they are no longer an inert and complicated material in the palm of his hand. But such toys are rather rare: French toys are usually based on imitation; they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators.What’s a demiurge? Sounds scary. Is it half an urge? I have half a mind to look it up. But Barthes’s analysis of toys touches on something that’s central to culture in general, and to cool. You need at least the prospect of creation for cool — well, creation or destruction, which are two halves of the same whole. And creation and destruction depend upon some notion of unpredictability, a potential threat to the way things are. It’s important to remember here that it’s a potential threat, the moment before an innovation: Cool is more about the space between the notes than the notes themselves. But when the melody becomes monotonous, when things continue on in the same vein for too long — again, back to Lorde — cool peters out.These days, the vast majority of hip-hop artists follow a script because they’re trying to succeed in a game whose rules are clear. To paraphrase Barthes: American hip-hop is usually based on imitation, and it is meant to produce artists who are users of the existing tradition, not creators. And because of that, black culture in general — which has defaulted into hip-hop — is no longer perceived as an interesting vanguard, as a source of potential disruption or a challenge to the dominant. It might be worth watching if nothing else is on, but you don’t need to keep an eye on it. And that leads to a more distressing question, not rhetorical this time: Once you don’t have a cool factor any longer — when cool gets decoupled from African-American culture — what happens to the way that black people are seen?Are they seen? That’s also not rhetorical. The majority of any population listens to rules. Most people do what society tells them to, to a predictable degree. Those people don’t need to be monitored, because they aren’t any threat at all. There’s a second, smaller group that shows itself over time to be ungovernable. Most of those people are warehoused, locked away in prisons or otherwise contained. Neither of those two groups needs to be seen — not really, not in the sense of being significantly visible to the culture at large. But what about those rare people who remain ungovernable and free? What about the people who draw society’s surveilling gaze and gaze back levelly? Those people are cool. Pick your icon: Hendrix or Ali or Pryor. Think about how they handled being handled. And in black America, traditionally, the rest of us need those people. They produce a wide and welcome positive halo effect. They teach by example that a certain edginess and individuality can persist without being stamped out.Why haven’t any current cultural figures completely and successfully replaced the icons of the past in the Pantheon of cool? Here, finally, we have come to another rhetorical question. These days, increasingly, black cool is a Ponzi scheme that revolves around a couple of people, disingenuously at best. Everyone pays tribute to those tip-top hip-hop stars, but their cachet comes from their celebrity, and their predictable devotion to it. Do they embody black cool in the traditional sense? I don’t think they can. I don’t think any of us can. The cultural landscape now is about winning, not taking the extra beat to think your way around a problem. Today’s hip-hop stars may be the Federal Reserve of black cultural cachet, but these days they’re just printing money whose value has long ago diminished. And that’s not cool.How Hiphop Failed Black America part 4: Discoby QuestloveWe’re halfway through this weekly series now, which means that it’s time to take a breather. Okay. Breather over. Halftime over. Back to work.In past weeks, we’ve talked about black cool (shrinking), consumerism (swelling), and the effect of hip-hop upon the broader black culture of America (chilling). Now, I think, we’ve arrived at a point where we can look confidently at the time before hip-hop. The hip-hop world, like the world around it, wasn’t created in a matter of days. It took years to get from there to here. But when people talk about the genres that led into (and fed into) hip-hop, they usually look at '60s soul and '70s funk. That’s because those are the most audible ingredients. You can feel those peas under the mattress; pass them. But that analysis leaves out a conspicuous player. It overlooks, in fact, the tallest mountain in the range, the dominant aesthetic in African-American music in the years directly preceding hip-hop. I’m talking, of course, about disco.As disco has become the stuff of cliché — usually represented in movies and TVs by a statuesque woman in platform shoes or a mirrored ball rotating slowly in the center of a room — it’s increasingly hard to remember how groundbreaking it was, how thoroughly it changed the relationship between those producing music and those consuming it, not to mention the places in which those transactions occurred, both actual and conceptual.A brief primer — or at least an undercoat. Disco came out of the discotheques, French dance halls that predated any modern idea of a dance club. In the mid-'60s, promoters in European cities, including Paris and Berlin, started replacing live acts with a curated selection of records played over sound systems, a forerunner of DJ culture and also a second source for the name (“disco” for “disc”). People danced on shag carpet and records went round. Lift the needle. Skip ahead. In the early '70s, in places like Philadelphia, the soul music of the '60s was still flowering, and the vegetation was lush: There were strings, there were horns, and there were lavish orchestral arrangements. There was also an ebb tide in both the introspective romantic themes of traditional soul music and the darker-than-blue social consciousness of early funk. Black music, increasingly, was about love and happiness: Though by happiness I mean dancing, and by love I mean sex. Out of that black music came a new black music: In New York City, primarily, club culture and gay culture came together to make dance clubs the center of the universe, and the music that played in them — rather, that was played in them, often with the intervention of in-club DJs — the soundtrack to that universe. What emerged was the party, and the party went strong through the middle of the '70s. And then, suddenly, powerfully, disco was everywhere: Not just in the dance clubs, but on the radio, and not just in music primarily figured as dance music, but in music that had previously been rock or pop. As disco blew up further — Saturday Night Fever ate up almost the entirety of 1978, except for the part that Chic ate — it became not only a musical genre, but a way of doing business. Disco held its historical moment so tightly in large part because of an incredible streamlining of the aesthetic. Records could be stamped out like Model Ts, with assembly-line production: Not with an indifference to quality, but with a fierce determination to deliver the same level of quality in each product. Fredrick Winslow Taylor, whose work in the late 19th century helped to establish a new way of thinking about business efficiency, probably never went to a disco, on account of he was in the ground 60 years before “Love to Love You, Baby.” But it’s worth looking at his work, if only for a moment. Taylor prized efficiency and work ethic, which depended on the primacy of the factory or office manager. Something similar happened in disco. Despite the hedonistic trappings of the music, disco worked by ruthlessly making records via a top-down, template-heavy process. While rock and roll privileged (or at least pretended to privilege) the artist and the notion of individual expression, disco made no bones about casting its lot with management. Labels like SalSoul and Casablanca and producers or DJs like Tom Moulton and Larry Levan were the architects of the sound more than any individual artist. In fact, the artists themselves are remembered primarily as interchangeable and disposable, secondary to the corporate ethos, to the business of refiguring pleasure as product. It’s no accident that one of the first No. 1s was by the Hues Corporation. Disco paid dividends.But the corporation had layoffs, too. Mechanistic, largely impersonal, it cut such a wide swath through black music that it damaged the culture of live performance and decimated the value of the black musician. Soul music needed virtuoso musicians, even if (in the case of Motown and the Funk Brothers) they weren’t properly credited. Funk music required the best guitarists, bassists, and drummers in the world. And before (or parallel to that) were other genres that were even more reliant on skill: jazz, especially, where stars were people like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, or Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus, or Cecil Taylor and Freddie Hubbard. They were instrumental in the genre. Disco, willfully simplistic, needed no virtuosos, only adequate players. Anything else was inefficient.Disco just grew, and then grew some more. And then, at some point, like all products, it reached the point of inevitable obsolescence. We don’t have to recount the specifics of the genre’s fall from grace, embodied most (in)famously by the 1979 Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago, in which the DJ and avowed disco enemy Steve Dahl burned disco records in the stadium’s outfield. (Though if you don’t remember that, look it up: It’s worth it just for the reaction of Nile Rodgers, the lead guitarist of Chic — and one of the genre’s few legitimate virtuosos — who likened the promotional stunt to Nazi book burning.) Strangely, Dahl did disco’s job for it, in a sense. Disco was always designed to be disposable. It depended on limiting cost (and with it, a certain kind of quality) to maximize profit. The end of the road was always part of the road. Let the record show that the records showed that.What killed disco? Look to motive. People have written plenty — and correctly — about the way that disco angered traditional rock-and-roll artists by prioritizing producers, not to mention the way that the mainstream slowly peeled away from disco culture as a result of homophobia and racism. The signal thing that people point to is John Travolta’s (d)evolution from being an icon of disco in Saturday Night Fever to being an icon of the new, macho, honky-tonk revival in Urban Cowboy. But there’s another urban beneficiary of disco’s decline that complicates the argument: hip-hop.Hip-hop happened, largely, in reaction to disco. A half-decade earlier, punk had declared classic rock a bloated corpse and then killed it. Hip-hop was in a similar position with regard to disco. Disco had taken over black music by taking out most of its competitors with supreme confidence and efficiency, like a contract killer. After disco shattered, black music passed through various stages that incorporated elements of funk along with new synthesizer technology: boogie music and other post-disco sounds that followed milestones like Quincy Jones’s work on Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall, including the work that Leon Sylvers did at Solar Records and Leroy Burgess’s Universal Robot Band. And then there was the toothless soul overseen primarily by white producers (the Pointer Sisters with Richard Perry). Still, it was largely a wasteland, at least compared to the explosion of disco, funk, and soul of a few years earlier. In that desert, the first real greenery wasn’t a mirage but an oasis. It was hip-hop, ready to pick up the pieces and make something new.How new? Newer than new. Disco had replaced live music with artificial, largely canned instrumentals. Early hip-hop went one step forward by going two steps back, reviving and recontextualizing the gritty R&B of James Brown and Stax. And then there’s the fashion. Disco was about artifice and glamour, a calculated decadence.Hip-hop, which came around a few years later, put yet another wrinkle in popular fashion. Early hip-hop stars embraced the same look as disco stars, wearing tight clothes and bright colors, with the occasional fur for good measure. Many flaunted mirrored surfaces. But it quickly became clear that the music was as much about drawing attention to a community as training the spotlight on yourself. The first big fashion breakthrough came courtesy of the genre’s first superstars, Run-DMC. We have talked in an earlier essay about their black-hat-and-leather look, and what it meant: It was stripped-down, urban, almost punk, but also borrowing from prison culture (shoes with no laces, pants with no belts). Run-DMC went right back into the teeth of disco, to rattle them.It wasn’t just style. It was substance, too. Hip-hop was about moving in directions that disco didn’t (or couldn’t). Consider Ultramagnetic MCs, one of the most singular (and, paradoxically, most representative) early rap acts. The group’s production influenced everyone, most directly the aggressive sonic collage that the Bomb Squad designed for Public Enemy. But I want to look at the lyrics, which represent a new kind of cool — or, if you’d prefer, Kool. Here’s Kool Keith, in “When I Burn”:Yo I’m on with the freaky styleWhen you wait debate and rate my rhythm expansionDimension lyric extensionRise above, amazing daysCrashin’ your brain, changin’ ways, sore for daysFigurin’ outMany channels, triggering out forthI’m sendin’, brains are bendin’Disco’s strict die-cut mentality, which maximized production and minimized waste, is turned on its ear here, and it’s a head-turning (and occasionally head-scratching) process. The lyrics are scatological, philosophical, philological, neurological, at times defiantly illogical. They thrum with the thrill of discovery, of what’s unknown and — despite the torrent of terminology — only half-articulated. Early hip-hop is full of that sense of expansive discovery.But times have changed — or maybe it’s more accurate to say that times have changed back. Hip-hop, after beginning as a site of resistance, has become, in some sense, the new disco. The signifiers are different, of course. Hip-hop has come to know itself largely via certain notions of capitalist aspiration, braggadocio, and macho posturing, which are different notes than those struck in disco. But the aesthetic ruthlessness, the streamlining of concept, is similar. What began as a music animated mainly by a spirit of innovation now has factory specifications. Hip-hop, more product than process, means something increasingly predictable, which means that it means less and less. Again, this is a trap situated within a prison. By the time disco came around, black music was already in a sex-and-dancing pigeonhole; disco represented not escape from that spot, but a nearly perfect refinement. Hip-hop finds itself not very far away from that corner. Just look around the rest of the room. The most popular music these days, EDM, is nothing if not a modern disco — just as artificial, just as geared toward the party, but with the product of the record replaced by the product of the concert experience. Hip-hop thought it was picking up the pieces of the shattered disco genre when in fact it was picking up seeds that had been dispersed. Disco regrew. Hip-hop got overgrown. It is not what it was, and it’s once again surrounded by what it wasn’t. It may be crashin’ your brain, but it’s not changin’ ways. ................
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