Against Everything

by Mark Greif

  So, the way hip-hop changed in the late eighties involved, if you like, a double response to this Reaganite (others would call it neoliberal) challenge. The double response went under a single name: in the word of the time, the “gangster” moment. In one dimension it mirrored and emulated the privatization, oligarchical temper, and militarization of Reagan neoliberalism. Gangsterization corresponded to the Wall Street fantasy of new private wealth through market economies and an entrepreneurship of pure will, not industry and productivity. In its other dimension, of course, gangster crime was a consequence and representation of the economic abandonment of the bulk of black America, everybody who had not yet reached the institutional uplift of higher education or the stability of middle- and upper-class wealth.

  Its drug was crack. Scholars have shown in the decades since the so-called crack epidemic that the instant addiction, violent madness, and “crack babies” attributed to the drug at the time were overblown or fake. Crack wasn’t very different chemically from the cocaine from which it was made. Crack’s significance was its business model.

  This was a capitalist innovation, though one at the level of cottage industry. The crack decade, from about 1986 to 1996, was like the result of a discovery that one could take available but expensive sirloin and turn it into an enormous quantity of cheap, adulterated meatballs, for a tiny population of hardcore buyers desperate for access to meat. They would taste good for a minute and then leave you feeling hungry. The sirloin in this case was Latin American cocaine.

  Less important than pent-up demand for such a lousy drug was huge pent-up pressure for an avenue of local entrepreneurship to employ jobless black and Latino youth and create a hope of wealth. Anyone ambitious, hardworking, charismatic, ruthless, and organization-minded—the same virtues in demand for all capitalism—and not too afraid of police and prison, could afford to purchase a very small initial inventory of cocaine, cook it into crack on the kitchen stove, and begin putting together a network of salespeople. In a situation of 50-percent youth unemployment, one could “hire” as many underage subdealers, lookouts, and runners as one could manage. They didn’t cost much, they didn’t have other opportunities, and the sheer size of one’s organization could confer a competitive advantage.

  These various new entrepreneurs were right on top of each other, however, in a tiny impoverished geography, selling to the same restricted markets of hardcore drug addicts; competition was experienced as constant street-to-street friction. And the product cooked up by different people was all but undifferentiable as a product. If you cut it enough to be profitable, all crack is said to be basically the same. One did not succeed, entrepreneurially, by making better crack. The real means of advantage, both to surpass other entrepreneurs and to forestall arrest, was the wise use of security and violence. Studies of the homicide peaks in American cities suggested that the killers and victims weren’t high on the drugs, but involved in aspects of sales and protection.

  I hadn’t known very much of this until I encountered Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine’s great Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, itself a book of the late 1990s. But as soon as you understood the social scientists’ picture of the suppressed truths of crack and its economic opportunities, you could see right away that the history matched, and surely explained, misunderstood changes to hip-hop, too.

  The unexpected genius of the gangster moment and everything that came after it, from 1988–89 forward, was in effect the reorganization of the themes, metaphors, ethos, and authenticity of rap lyrics around business, property, and violence—usually from crack drama. From its mid-1970s beginnings to the late 1980s, the topics of rapping had really been boasts, partying, romance, the celebration of inexpensive luxury goods (principally clothes and sneakers, like “My Adidas,” plus the occasional car), neighborhood shout-outs, and memorable, occasional state-of-the-postindustrial-city plaints like “The Message.” In the late 1980s, however, the topics mutated. Why? Well, each of the changes occurred in step with changes in police violence and the new structure of drug sales. This is how and why rap truly becomes a capitalist music, and also a music so emotionally effective about the situations and dilemmas of the present day. In 1990s lyrics, crack is the source of the cash that funds the first champagne, cars, and jewels. It’s also the source of the pathos of being able to enjoy these for only a short time before you are shot to death or imprisoned.

  Or, really, crack is only the initial reason the metaphors and ethos turn to business and the chase for money. What soon enough supplants crack dealing for pay is rapping, itself, for pay, as its new grandiosity of subject matter made hip-hop, justifiably, ever more salable to white America and the world.

  One of the most important things to note about the corpus of music about crack is that practically no MC smokes crack. At least, not a single MC uses crack in the limited songs I know. But Biggie sells it, Jay-Z sells it, Nas sells it, Raekwon sells it, 50 Cent sells it, and with the proceeds they relax with liquor and marijuana (drugs of choice for all classes and identities of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Americans, black and white and rich to poor). The passage back and forth between the two activities (“If I wasn’t in the rap game / I’d probably have a key knee deep in the crack game,” says Notorious B.I.G.) animates the new drama since 1988. You aren’t always sure any longer when an MC is talking about one activity or the other, so overlapping do the two become. The greatest MCs can authenticate elaborate and purely fictional dramas with the biographical fact that any ghetto-born MC of the period was likely to have had a chance to be, at fifteen or sixteen years of age, one of those lookouts or runners on the block. Plus, drugs do have that curious effect, because of their illegality but also their oily quality of slipping into every cranny of private life, of making everyone young, across all strata, feel like an outlaw. “I was there,” the crack-selling songs declare. And while the police really are lethal—and one’s competitors are lethal—the rewards are material and universally appealing. In the end, this is what made hip-hop grand, operatic, titanic, embracing ranges of emotion and expression distinct from previous popular music. Crack business made it cinematic, too, as rappers integrated the American mythologies of previous eras of gangster capitalism celebrated in the movies of Coppola and De Palma and Scorsese.

  This all could escape casual white listeners at the time, I think—it certainly escaped me in the early 1990s. Only now does it seem glaring, the endless rhetorical focus in the “new” hip-hop on business, organization, “the Firm” (the name Nas chose for his collective of rappers), or “the Commission” (one of the names Notorious B.I.G. used for a hip-hop crew, along with his official crew “Junior M.A.F.I.A.”). It was a way of thinking about the smallest sort of business with the trappings of the biggest, cutting out all the intervening layers and middle classes of employment and job-holding institutions. So, too, did I fail to understand the ambition evinced by successful rappers to gain places in the increasingly corporate white labels that distributed 1990s hip-hop. (Jay-Z went from his own Roc-a-fella Records to become head of Def Jam Records for a period; Def Jam had once been a black-owned independent label, but in the Jay-Z era was already a division of Universal, who own everything from hip-hop to Decca and Deutsche Grammophon). Sometimes a rationale was articulated, as by Jay-Z himself, as revenge for historic exploitation of blacks by white capital and owners and music producers, and to create new role models:

  I do this for my culture,

  To let ’em know what a nigga look like when a nigga in a roadster

  Show ’em how to move in a room full of vultures

  Industry’s shady, it need to be taken over

  Label owners hate me, I’m raising the status quo up

  I’m overcharging niggas for what they did to the Cold Crush

  Pay us like you owe us for all the years that you hoed us

  We can talk, but money talks, so talk mo’ bucks.

  But the rewards of success at escaping the crack gam
e and becoming a musician, artist, and star existed in the same exceptional, private, neoliberal framework to which “gangsterism” was, surprisingly, such an incredible compelling analogy. A hundred ordinary citizens might perish, but one “innovator” would get out and all the way to the top. The kingpin, become a rapper, would acquire and exhibit the same unattainable properties known to be the toys of a high-status equities trader or corporate CEO. He’d have a private jet, a Bentley, Louis Vuitton bags, Armani suits, top-shelf whiskeys and cognacs—the things being sold in the pages of magazines seen by all of us, but directed to the white ultra-rich, as they have pulled away from the rest of the country in America’s new runaway inequality.

  Another thing I’ve been able to see clearly only with time, however, is how much post-punk, supposedly disobedient and destructive and nihilistic, actually spoke on behalf of its own compensatory perspective on capitalism, associated with a falling but sincere long-term middle class and an older “producer ethic.” The punk ethos that middle-class whites got from the early 1980s had identified Reagan-Thatcher–era neoliberal winner-take-all capitalism as the problem for everyone. Reagan’s “supply-side economics” was the reason hard work sent money to the top, not the middle. Globalized corporate capitalism was the reason good jobs dried up or were sent overseas. Consumer capitalism was the reason a life of products and trivial luxuries was weightless and ultimately worthless. Racism might cause the black working class to be liquidated first. But the changes were coming for all of us eventually.

  So white middle-class youth in its 1990s No Logo moment was against conglomeration, deregulation, upward redistribution. And the post-punk achievement, frankly, was almost less its music and more its vision of “alternative,” rival systems of performance, production, and distribution. This was the meaning of DIY, too—do it yourself, that other long-lived descriptor of post-punk. Every region and city generated its own small, marginal record label: SST, Dischord, Touch and Go, Taang!, Triple X, Homestead, Sub Pop, Matador, etc. If you were a young person of good taste who cared about rock music in the 1980s and 1990s, you might listen to the Minutemen, Big Black, the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, the Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, or, later, Fugazi, Mudhoney, Pavement, Bikini Kill. And before 1991, not a single one of them could be purchased through official capitalism, as incarnated in the despised “major labels.”

  Were middle-class whites going to lecture black entertainers that brandies and consumer goods wouldn’t buy happiness? I hope not. Yet the consumer exaltation in one music, and the hidden producer ethic in the other, placed a chasm between the potentially like-mindedly political post-punk and hip-hop cultures.

  The white middle-class rebellion, in its political anti-corporate-globalization and anticonsumer movement, confronted a hip-hop that seemed to evince a conspicuous will to capitalism—with an extremity that no black American music, which had sometimes spoken of getting ahead in business or needing to make a buck, had quite shown before. What stood out most to non-fans was the naming of white-owned luxury products, consumer logos and brands, curiously mixed with a new and unfamiliarly textured sexism: “Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money.” Women seemed to be for sale, too, in the lyrics; white rock has always been super-misogynist, directly, but somehow this lyrical equivalence of women, cash, and consumer goods could be read as alien.

  But black artists, from communities that had last been economically stable in the North when tied to systems of larger capital (as workers and employees, not small owners), had to win big at the game of official capitalism, through its new, giant conglomerations, or have no public voice at all. They didn’t necessarily come from the classes of petty-bourgeois stability and entrepreneurship. There was no backstop of middle-class-white small capital, accumulated over generations.

  If the money ethos was mostly scandalous in N.W.A, and grim and ironic in the Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.” of 1994 (“Cash Rules Everything Around Me / C.R.E.A.M., get the money / Dollar dollar bill y’all”), it was also becoming increasingly tragicomic as the music advanced—or gleefully comic. It reached some of its great narrative heights in the elaborate tales of the Notorious B.I.G. (“Gimme the Loot,” 1994; “I Love the Dough,” 1996) and acquired an absurd triumphalist flavor in Jay-Z songs like “Money Ain’t a Thang” (1998) with Jermaine Dupri (“In a Ferrari, a Jaguar, switchin’ four lanes / With the top down, screamin’ out, ‘money ain’t a thang!’ ”). As the luxury names were worked in with always elaborate rhythmic dexterity, a highlight, after some years, was Busta Rhymes’s embedding of the four-syllable cognac Courvoisier to a chorus in 2001: “Give me the Henny, you can give me the Cris / You can pass me the Remy, but pass the Cour-voi-si-er!”

  The best summary I know, within hip-hop, of the paradoxical history that made the music attain such intensity of artistry and prominence, comes late—in the 2000s—from Kanye West. West belongs to a postcrack generation. He is part of the line of artists that comes after the gangster triumph, but is not entirely done with its metaphors. (This also characterizes the duo Outkast, and Lil Wayne. The hip-hop historian Jeff Chang points out how few new rappers broke through to commercial success in that short generation, when label consolidation and collapse stalled the careers of some of the most talented.) West’s history comes in a song called “Crack Music” (2005). The lyrics are framed by invocations of a history of state conspiracy and deception that includes Reagan’s repressive rise as governor of California in the 1960s (“How we stopped the Black Panthers? / Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer”) and the Reagan–Bush–Bush II arming of Saddam’s Iraq before making war against it, twice (“Who gave Saddam anthrax? / George Bush got the answers”).

  But the main idea Kanye conveys is of a ruse of history by which the poison of crack, addicting the black ghetto, gave rise to the serum of hip-hop, by which black artists thrived and to which they have now addicted a white listening audience. He even adds a poem, spoken at the end by Malik Yusef:

  We took that shit, measured it, and then cooked that shit

  And what we gave back was crack music

  And now we ooze it through they nooks and crannies

  So our mammas ain’t got to be they cooks and nannies

  And we gon’ repo everything they ever took from granny.

  Now the former slaves trade hooks for Grammys.

  This dark diction has become America’s addiction.

  Those who ain’t even black use it.

  We gon’ keep baggin’ up this here crack music.

  —

  I imagine someone could object: This isn’t really how you listen to popular music, is it? How you choose it? How your taste works? You don’t really put it into a blender and siphon the messages off from it and sip them like red blood cells—do you? You’re inhuman! Do you really judge art by a criterion of its politics—as if you had to hear an editorial, backed with a beat?

  Of course the answer is: not really. But I do sing along. When I sing along, I hear myself singing along. That is, I know I’m saying these words with my own tongue, my own spirit, that I’m doing it. Listening to music is doing something. It’s important that you don’t listen, with pop, without moving or singing along. There’s a profound pleasure in saying, with the singer of a song, words you might never utter in real life. Sometimes the pleasure is even in part because they seem opposite to your opinions—to who people think you are in straight life—or because they upend all respectable norms. So I like singing along to “Okie from Muskogee” and “Stand by Your Man,” and also “Run for Your Life,” “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “There Is a Light that Never Goes Out,” “They Saved Hitler’s Cock,” not to mention, apropos of hip-hop, “10 Crack Commandments” and “A Milli.” But it can kill my enjoyment if I’m singing lyrics that are dumb and conformist, truly stupid and cynical—basically, lyrics that indicate, in a convincing way, that the person who created them is shallow, lazy, or untalented, or racist or corrupt, especially if they’re also proud of themselves. It’s
a bummer—though of course it happens.

  I’ve met real fans of pop music who tell me that they honestly never listen to the lyrics, and don’t hear them. This is an entirely different phenomenon, which I respect, though it seems to me a bit like the fact that some people don’t dream, or that I’m color-blind to some shades of pink and green—a loss. Anyway, it leads to a different conversation, about timbres and rhythms.

  In rap, though, words are the music. Because it speaks in whole sentences, indeed in stanzas, with extended metaphors, quotations, puns—and especially jokes, often jokes that make you think before you laugh—hip-hop is complexly articulate in a way that separates it from the rest of popular music. This doesn’t preclude trying to tease out musical genealogies: obviously, in its fund of formulae and oral tradition it is like blues and toasting; in its structure of (verbal) solos, arrangements of soloists, habits of phrasal quotation and sequential improvisations around head-tunes, it’s like jazz; in its presentation and distribution, it’s often like singles-based “pop” (also called Top 40). But in the wider history of the traditional arts, it seems more or less the re-eruption of the whole tradition of metrical, rhyming poetry that ended around 1920. Hip-hop develops capabilities on one side, the lyrical, beyond anything that has ever been developed in the musical arts before. It communicates as language does, because essentially it is language, not just song.

  —

  The pleasure in American democracy has always found expression in a pleasure in the American language. Its pleasures include its extreme promiscuity, its mixed origins, its difficulty to learn “properly,” its greatness when most improper, its comic obscenity, and its redundancy and superfluity, continually renewed.