Celebrity, Inc. by Jo Piazza

Author:Jo Piazza [Piazza, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0553-2
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

What’s the Beef?

Hip-hop beefs are an internecine web of disses, comebacks, and brawls that some speculate have resulted in several deaths over the last twenty years.

“Exchanging broadsides and comparing your greatness to others’ became a way to get people interested in what you were doing. You wanted to prove who was the toughest and had the greatest skills. The ways to do that were to boast and to insult—twin sides of the same stylistic coin. That was the straight original hip-hop beef,” rap scholar Adam Bradley, the editor of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop and coeditor of The Anthology of Rap told me.

Jay-Z calls this the most familiar refrain in rap: “Why I’m dope.”1

What we recognize as hip-hop today began on the streets of New York City in the 1970s. Because the genre was new, delivering music to the consumer wasn’t easy. The record industry was still high on the fumes of disco and the burgeoning punk market. They had little time for or interest in music that was emerging from urban communities.

But being a little bit scrappy worked. In 1979, future Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons passed out his 12-inch vinyl rough-cut album to DJs in clubs across the city. He wrote on the album that DJs who liked his music and wanted to know more should just contact PolyGram Records. PolyGram had no idea who Simmons was and certainly didn’t have him on their roster. But the label eventually received so many phone calls that they bought the album. Decades later, in 1994, PolyGram would acquire 50 percent of Simmons’s label, Def Jam, for $33 million. Simmons found his early success as a promoter launching artists like Kurtis Blow, his younger brother Joseph “Run” Simmons, and his friends Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and Jason “Jam-Master Jay” Mizell, who became the East Coast rap group Run-DMC.

In the late 1980s, in response to being ignored by the majors, a handful of independent labels sprung up on the East Coast, Simmons’s Def Jam included, and began producing albums on their own. Out on the West Coast, Ruthless Records and Death Row Records were also run by the hip-hop artists and promoters themselves.

That decade also saw the emergence of the subgenre of “gangsta” rap, which reflected the violent lifestyles of America’s inner cities. It was first popularized in 1987 by N.W.A, a group that used gangsta rap to differentiate itself from both the flashy, disco-influenced old-school rap of artists like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and from the likes of New York’s college-educated Run-DMC.

N.W.A stood for Niggaz With Attitude. The original group was assembled by Compton-based drug dealer Eazy-E, cofounder of Ruthless, and consisted of himself and the artists Arabian Prince, DJ Yella, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and the D.O.C.

“They wanted shock value and they wanted a way to brand themselves,” Alonzo “Lonzo” Williams, a West Coast promoter, DJ, and hip-hop artist who used to run with N.W.A, recalled. “They were looking for something that hadn’t been exploited yet and that was it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.