Against Everything by Mark Greif
Author:Mark Greif
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-05T16:00:00+00:00
Another obstacle to identifying with hip-hop at the moment it was turning into an epochal art form was the lethal quality of African-American city life in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When you rapped along to lyrics about homicide twenty years ago, it felt as if you were talking about homicides that were rising beyond all limits and that nobody knew how to stop.
Pre-1988 hip-hop—again, before its truly world-historical phase—hadn’t seemed to be notably about shooting people to death. Guns do turn up in lyrics, and MCs speak of planning to shoot back if shot at—inevitable details of music that started in neighborhoods that were poor and thus robbery-prone. You’d carry a gun, too. Public Enemy spoke of guns differently, in the context of revolutionary self-respect, the tradition of rifle-bearing Black Panthers.
Post-1988 hip-hop seemed increasingly concerned with boasting how many bodies one had to one’s name, and some of the grandest music was developed in lyrical fantasies of shooting rivals, not for self-defense or politics, but for business. The conceit that the rappers were themselves drug kingpins, thugs, and murderers, “gangsters,” was maintained with Dr. Dre and Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg in Los Angeles, and did not diminish in the wake of the two most tragic real-world murders in hip-hop: those of New Yorker the Notorious B.I.G. and the originally San Francisco–based Tupac Shakur. Biggie was shot to death in March 1997 in his car in LA after the Soul Train Music Awards. Tupac had been killed in September 1996 in Las Vegas following a Mike Tyson fight. If anything, the gangster persona settled in further as Tupac and Biggie became “classical” references. Their life stories were ones that television liked to retell with especial relish, until it was hard not to suspect that the white music media might like some of its black rappers best once they had been shot to death.
To be a white teenager, singing along with what were—supposedly—realistic depictions of life in a black ghetto, in the actual situation of the early 1990s, was callous and ghoulish; indifferent to what you saw on the news, which was a world of crying mothers and angry preachers who had been, in effect, abandoned by wealth, government, the economy, the justice system, and charity. If you watched nightly news in the late 1980s and early 1990s in any city in the United States, what you mostly got to see from black neighborhoods was people weeping. This was because their sons, daughters, brothers, husbands, and best friends had been victims of homicide or crossfire. (This, alongside The Cosby Show and In Living Color—twin lenses on fractured times.) By 1988, it was known that the New York murder rate had exceeded any previous known record for the city, since records were kept. Homicide became the leading cause of death for African-American men in their twenties, above heart attack, accident, etc. The murdering peaked nationally in 1991. As many as one-twelfth of each year’s murders, though, were being committed in New York City alone, where hip-hop had originated and from which it mostly still emanated.
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