by Mark Greif
But now that I had lyrical skills to acquire, I thought I could see a different truth—you had to practice! Rapping along in public was practical and necessary. The learning process is hard. The rehearsal is vitiated when you do the words under your breath and don’t rap loudly enough for performance. Even the breathing is different. And there is just so much to learn at this point, the entire canon of previous rhymes and performances, so much to memorize, from “Rapper’s Delight” to “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)” that you really ought to be rehearsing all the time. You’re like a Homeric bard, who will have fifteen thousand hexameter lines to run through before a warlord or a king someday. No doubt doing this in public, and on the subway, is part of overcoming a kind of performance fright. Perhaps it’s a way of becoming scary oneself, as James Baldwin once in The Fire Next Time characterized the need to adapt to oneself the expectations that other people will hang on you: “One needed a handle, a lever, a way of inspiring fear.” All bystanders know that the emphatic quality of rapping really can be jarring, when someone is walking up behind you or standing by you on the subway, rapping “Protect Ya Neck.”
The songs I was working on after Nas were Snoop Dogg’s “Tha Shiznit,” from his first album, and the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Party and Bullshit.” The latter is canonical, a song I felt I ought to be able to do, ostensibly a happy song:
I was a terror since the public school era
Bathroom passes, cutting classes, squeezin’ asses
Smokin’ blunts was a daily routine
Since 13, a chubby nigga on the scene.
I used to have the tre-deuce and a deuce-deuce in my bubble goose
Now I got the Mac in my knapsack loungin’, black…
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Honeys wanna chat, but all we wanna know
Is where the party at? And can I bring my gat?
If not, I hope I don’t get shot
Better throw my vest on my chest, cause niggas is a mess…
So: Biggie was a cutup in school; all he and his crew want to do is party and get with girls. But the rhythmically difficult lines to deliver (“I used to have the tre-deuce and a deuce-deuce in my bubble goose”) focus your mind on the .32 and .22 pistols he says he hid at age thirteen in his wintertime parka, like the MAC-10 submachine gun he boasts he’s moved on to now, at twenty-one—kept still in his schooldays knapsack, along with his bulletproof vest.
Maybe it was the juxtaposition of kiddie banality and too-real mortality, but this song got me worrying again. It was too strange to blithely rap through things now that had been obstructions to me twenty years earlier.
First, to start with the personal, there was the problem of making sure not to say “nigger.” This has always had a curiously powerful effect for white listeners, and I think it was meant to. “Nigger” is the word that righteous whites will not use—to the point where whites of the civil-rights generation, grown adults in their sixties or seventies, almost literally cannot say it, blushing, stammering, even when quoting from history (or reading from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). They will call it “the n-word”—write it on a chalkboard rather than pronounce it—clear their throats and give meaningful looks or avoid people’s eyes. This was a sort of victory for antiracism. But the conspicuous theater of it, the sheer ostentation of the one word I will not speak, also has wound up showing off how little it can mean in comparison to all the racism white people don’t give up, and equally won’t name or speak. White people in authority are okay with seeing black people profiled, demonized, and terrorized by police. They just won’t say one word, which of course they can say perfectly well. I should add, I don’t think white people should be taking “nigger” back up, even to “join in” to black songs—which is part of its point in rap, because it hammers home a fundamental claim that white people shouldn’t be rapping. Like other formal developments of hip-hop, the place of “the n-word” in the music, after a certain point in its history, can be thought of as a clever collective strategy to forestall white cooptation.
The comedian Richard Pryor’s voice is still, if I’m identifying it correctly, a voice often quoted and sampled in the now-long tradition of hip-hop songs reflecting on the meaning and use of “nigger.” He called his 1976 best-selling stand-up comedy album Bicentennial Nigger. I like to think of a televised exchange, transcribed later in The New Yorker by Hilton Als, when Pryor is being interviewed by Barbara Walters, lovable paragon of the white liberal television establishment, and she is asking him about his controversial word choice:
WALTERS: When you’re on stage…see, it’s hard for me to say. I was going to say, you talk about niggers. I can’t…you can say it. I can’t say it.
PRYOR: You just said it.
WALTERS: Yeah, but I feel so…
PRYOR: You said it very good.
WALTERS: …uncomfortable.
PRYOR: Well, good. You said it pretty good.
WALTERS: O.K.
PRYOR: That’s not the first time you said it. (Laughter.)
I think only after 1988 did hip-hop really make use of the word “nigger” ubiquitous. I can’t tell if its historians date it that way; I keep looking for a good discussion of the question. But I get the impression you can’t rap along to anything of significance produced after 1988 without running across this word that whites ought not say, whereas you can do so earlier. It can’t be accidental that it came at a moment when the white audience for rap was growing enormously; when in absolute numbers of record sales, whites were outpurchasing blacks in hip-hop releases, and people said so, and worried about it; when Vanilla Ice was on his way. The arrival of “nigger” was like an ingenious fail-safe. If you were a white pretender, you could not rap for real, as blacks did; you could not train on the official rhymes. Either you could not rap in public, period, or you could never rap right, never fully, always marked off, mildly excommunicated. But probably also, in ways I can’t see, it worked as an internal rebuke over respectability, and who was getting ahead and who left behind, in those years of disputes on whether the black middle class had abandoned a black “underclass.”
It must be said, “nigger” makes an extremely flexible two-beat metrical insertion in rap and wide-ranging rhyme in English. It rhymes with all sorts of terms of lyrical boasting, with “bigger,” “trigger,” “figure,” “did her,” etc. N.W.A amplified the turn with a group name that was unpublishable and unsayable except as an acronym (by reputation it stood for Niggaz With Attitude). The word appeared in titles and choruses, from the most “conscious” and peaceable rappers (A Tribe Called Quest’s “Sucka nigga, nigga nigga”) to the grittiest (the Wu-Tang’s “Shame on a nigga who try to run game on a nigga”).* The repetition itself seemed to serve a function. Jay-Z proved himself the most adept, as in so many other self-branding maneuvers: creating a primary nickname for himself (“Jigga”) to multiply his own rhymes with “nigga,” and producing an unequaled run of relevant titles and choruses—“Jigga That Nigga,” “Nigga What, Nigga Who,” and the earliest, “Ain’t No Nigga.” This last, cleverly, was not about Jay-Z saying he was not no nigga (as in Sly and the Family Stone’s 1969 “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey”), but rather that there is no nigga as great as Jay-Z. So there were formal dividends for what might also have been a class divider and an anti-cooptation strategy.
The basic justification for reviving the word was simply that racism persisted and white folks treated young black folks like shit. If white America treated them like niggers, making life in the city jobless, serviceless, and abandoned, why shouldn’t they announce it? This was how N.W.A explained it at the start. “Niggaz 4 Life” is not a great lyric, but it’s direct:
Why do I call myself a nigga
you ask me?
Because police always wanna harass me
Every time that I’m rollin’
They swear up and down that the car was stolen
Make me get face down in the street
And throw the shit out my car on the concrete
In front of a residence
A million white motherfuckers on my back like I shot the President
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. The other hip-hop center was then the black ghetto of Los Angeles, which televised America took a look at finally in helicopter flyover footage of the riots of 1992. The murder rates would never be so high again, as they began dropping precipitously in 1995 and have dropped steadily since. But we didn’t know that then.
“Don’t ever question if I got the heart to shoot you / The answer is simply too dark for the user.” “Shoot point blank, a motherfucker’s sure to die.” “Beef is when I see you, guaranteed to be in ICU.” “Let’s picnic inside a morgue/ Not pic-a-nic baskets, pic-a-nic caskets.” “From the Beretta/ puttin’ all the holes in your sweater.” These were lines in the songs I was practicing, twenty years later.
Of course the songs were obviously a combination of street report and fantasy. But, really, what business would I have had back then, singing along? I hear the songs, now that they have just become “lyrics” again, and I wonder if my recoil then was ignorance or ethics, whether I have more depth now, or less. Should I be singing along? I find that when I have my headphones on, I too now practice rapping on the subway, though silently. Each time “nigger” comes up, I have to make a decision. Sometimes, I’ve discovered, I wind up substituting “brother”—especially when I’m in public, though no one is going to hear me. Maybe they can read lips? This is embarrassing and shameful, but so is a white person, nearing middle age, rapping. I cover my mouth with a fist as if I’m coughing, and keep it there.
—
In the midst of this, the Roots took over the job of backing band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, a reputable hip-hop outfit taking a key role in what is fundamentally one of the squarest and most ordinary middle-class institutions of television. The undeniable task of the late show is to make viewers feel safe and mellow enough to fall asleep.
I learned that once a month after the evening’s taping they were doing a residency at the Highline Ballroom in New York. This seemed a gesture of sharing the benefits: Questlove and Black Thought were hosting a kind of variety show, after midnights, midweek, with up-and-comers and celebrated guests, and themselves as house band, in a small place, for sophisticates. I felt extremely chic as Mos Def and I went in by the same door; he was pointed backstage, while I went to coat check. As always in New York, I was shocked by the extreme plushness of music venues, at every level from high to low, contrasting with the world I’d known in the provinces, where clubs tend to be dumpy and uncomfortable. In fact, I had seen the Roots play a decade earlier under a shitty tent on a soggy lawn on a college campus, on the circuit that then brought a whole range of “conscious” acts to majority-white colleges: the Roots, the Fugees, Digable Planets, and my favorites, De La Soul. The shame I’d felt at such concerts was that there were too few black people in the audience, just as there were too few black people at the universities. It didn’t necessarily make me feel better to know that white fraternity houses in the South had been key moneymaking venues that Little Richard and James Brown had played to in the fifties when not on the chitlin circuit.
Here at the Highline, I was feeling much better about myself, since the audience was majority black and I was happily at ease—which, now that I write it down, is probably just code for the recognition that the audience was middle-class. Black people were upstairs in seats too expensive for me, eating dinner. That’s the America I want to live in. Then, between sets, the house started playing a now-solid canon of nineties classics—Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z and others—and this multiracial, middle-class audience started singing along. And, again, I was pulled up short. Because, as we sang of Dom Pérignon and Ferraris and La Perla and Gucci, we were once again traveling through lyrics that I couldn’t do as a teen, that seemed hostile or alien to hopes for an interracial middle class of the kind I seemed to be standing in now. And the kind of hip-hop I had liked and been able to sing along to, including the Roots, the “conscious” rap that seemed more connected to middle-class aspiration, more overtly political, Afrocentric, seemed like it had been sidelined in that canon.
Can I confess that in addition to working on my rapping, I’d also been doing some reading? Specifically books by African-American sociologists like Benjamin Bowser and Mary Pattillo, about the relation to property and economic power of African-Americans in the twentieth century. Probably the most openly discussed, overt obstacle to identification when a politicized white middle-class youth encountered a ghetto-derived hip-hop in the early 1990s was what was then called the “materialism” problem. (That’s alongside the “misogyny” problem, which has never quite gone away, and which scholar-critics Imani Perry and Tricia Rose have treated with more understanding than I ever could.) Now I could see that both “materialism” and the punk–hip-hop divide had more to do with a historical pro
blem about capitalism, and different orientations to its failures.
From the end of Reconstruction to the first decades of the new century, the majority of African-Americans still lived in the South, not the North. Six million moved north in the Great Migration between the two world wars. They came for industrial and manufacturing jobs. Yet starting in the years just after the great Civil Rights Act of 1964, the new migrants—shunted initially into ghettos in the least desirable parts of the Northern industrial cities, racing to reach the middle class—faced the cruelest Northern joke yet, at least since the withdrawal of federal troops during Reconstruction: sudden deindustrialization and factory job loss in the 1960s and 1970s.
For former industrial-economy workers, the new service economy possessed codes that discriminated powerfully against poor black men particularly. They had been acceptable in industry, where a learned ethos of strength and toughness was favored; but their toughness was viewed as frightening and hostile in service jobs. The best-paid service jobs rewarded docility, Northern white English, fake intimacy, and a minimum of visible pride or independence. Much of the service economy followed the sprawl out of the increasingly ghostly city to white suburbs and exurbs anyway, out of reach of urban public transportation, and therefore hard to reach for a former working-class in cities.
At risk of repeating what everybody knows, the subsequent war on these new jobless workers in the North came with Reagan and his war on the poor, called a War on Drugs, expanded and continued under Bush and Clinton. The federal power—formerly often the defender of African-Americans against the several states—now militarized local police, and state legislatures mandated long prison terms for simple drug possession and personal use. (Never hard to find among unemployed people pursuing self-medication with alcohol and street drugs in the absence of middle-class psychiatry, Valium, and Prozac.) Wherever local police forces had a particular history of racism and white supremacy—as especially in Los Angeles, not that the NYPD had a stellar record—the new “antigang” initiatives looked openly terroristic and antiblack. (These were the abuses that created the LA riots.)
