Best Hiphop Effect

Strike up a conversation about music, race and politics with 10 grownup hiphop fans, and you're likely to hear a couple of the same things. Citizenry in the Hiphop Nation used to come with a complete worldview. Today the subculture is too fractious to allow for any sort of party line, and New York grownups tend to be individualists, yet certain features of a mental architecture shaped by hiphop remain striking to the outside observer. Foremost among these is a fusion of certain so-called "progressive" and "conservative" beliefs. Think of it as a 60s mentality peacefully coexisting with a 90s mentality. The former is expressed as a need for black people to stand together against racism. The latter is an imperative to rise above the pack and acquire a comfortably secure life for oneself.

My own casual polling and weekly coverage of hiphop turns up this mismatched pair again and again. Your average hiphop lifer is someone who believes (a) that American society is essentially demonic, either by design or through force of rot, but also that (b) he himself can do no better than to pursue his self-interest by participating in American systems of commerce, and by raising a family equipped to do the same. The root of the 60s mentality is shared identity as a victimized minority; the 90s ethos demands taking advantage of any available opportunity for personal advancement.

A simpleton's way of bridging the dichotomy involves framing the 90s mindset as a means of redress. The profit-focused "playas" who almost exclusively represent the subculture on television have been doing this for some time. Artists like Lil' Wayne, Mystikal and Trick Daddy were deprived their whole lives, and their windfalls have made for some of the most jubilant black music since Dixieland. Smarter rap artists portrayed deliverance-via-dollars as less of a panacea than a beautiful dream (cf. Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 "C.R.E.A.M." and Outkast's 1996 "Elevators (Me and You)"). But images of "payback" remain supremely popular. It's a band-aid across the 60s-90s chasm that grants even white fans their innocence.

It crumples under the weight of even the most furtive skepticism. A handful of jackpots doesn't honestly address the mass suffering in America's ghettos, let alone affect it. And "thug" rappers who count their money while NSYNC or a Broadway cast sings their chorus evade the salient issue. "Making it" always involves some degree of assimilation into the mainstream. The question is: What's compensation for oppression and what's co-option by the oppressor? Part of what Trick Daddy celebrates is not having to navigate this minefield. He (supposedly) got rich without working hard or delaying gratification. It's called "pimping the system."

The active fantasy is of assimilation without surrender to the country's assimilative machinery?e.g., the non-black-market economy?which is understood to be carrying on the legacy of slavery. It's the mirror image of hiphop a generation ago, when educated, leftist "Afrocentrics" simultaneously implied a kernel of capitalist fervor. Leftist critics believe rap's "revolutionary" ability to conjure up the spirit of 60s struggle is its glory, and materialism is its shame. But from a development perspective, the idea of pimping the system is useful at least for individuals, on whom the past exerts a force of drag. The perimeter of hiphop history traces the extremes of those two positions. Inside are a million nuanced points. You can hear the pendulum vibrating in individual rap songs, and follow its swing through hiphop's years. What seemed chaotic when it was happening now looks like a fairly reasonable, if heated, dispute about how black people born after the Civil Rights Act should feel about themselves and this country. To decipher it, all you need to know is that in rap, every opinion manifests as an image of action.

A good place to start decoding is hiphop's 1987-'91 "golden age," which roughly coincided with the first national hiphop audience's college years. Campuses were p.c., and hiphop billed itself as righteous. Rap stars identified as part of a collective movement against racism. When Public Enemy collaborated with Big Daddy Kane and Ice Cube on 1990's scathing "Burn Hollywood Burn," for example, hiphop spoke as a contingent of victims, demanding that society change its racist habits. It's easy to comprehend this music's appeal to college students, who have hanging over them the threat of imminent life-change. Everyone would rather be correct than to have to face a challenge, and groups like Public Enemy granted listeners a halo of innocence in exchange for mere fandom.

The Afrocentrics contrasted an earlier vision of the Hiphop Nation. That original blueprint (articulated by one of the triumvirate of hiphop-founding Bronx DJs, Afrika Bambaataa) was more of a development plan. A protest approach to urban problems would not likely have caught on in the 1970s Bronx. The region was a disaster area in the very wake of the great 60s movements and their suspiciously abrupt, violent ends. Bambaataa described hiphop as a four-pronged artistic tool for nurturing individual talents, thereby reviving an ancient line of black royalty. Hiphop's pioneer DJs, visual artists and dancers were futurists, responding to depravation with open-ended dynamism instead of grievances. And the earliest rappers?stylish braggarts all?presaged the lust for free-market adventure that would characterize the rest of New York in the following decades.

The pendulum swing toward a 60s sense of collective mission against racism was spurred by hiphop's natural growth. The first market sector the subculture spread to was middle-class black youth in New York's suburbs. Unlike the artists and audiences who invented the genre, this contingent was poised (or at least expected) to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the Civil Rights Act. That expectation weighed more heavily on teenage minds than the need to develop the South Bronx?though the latter provided abundant evidence of insidious racism. This double-bind incited a powerful demand for hiphop that could rattle the foundations and relieve the pressure. Much like rock fans in the Nixon-era boom years, privileged hiphoppers came to believe that artistic creativity would be an engine for deliverance, either of humanity or from the demands of maturity in a flawed society. This rap era saw new focuses on workmanship (EPMD), education (BDP) and collective nonconformity (Native Tongues) as well as accusatory rage. From nation-building brio to anticapitalist Romanticism, the change was almost instantaneous.

Nostalgia for rap's Age of Aquarius occludes the fact that hiphop's core contingent bristled at the dawning. Public Enemy got zero play on New York's crucial rap radio shows. To blast a De La Soul cassette from your car in 1989 was to invite derision from every passing b-boy. By 1992, labels were starting to make millions with contrived, artless rap. A flood of white-ethnic fans, cued by the Beastie Boys and House of Pain, had been the next demographic to crowd into hiphop's pool of potential customers. There was a sense in the boroughs that suburban rap unduly diverted the proper flow of hiphop profits. It should have been foreseeable that the pendulum would swing back, but of course when it did it came as another total shock.

The sense of disaster that didn't register with critics in 1988 was palpable in music magazines' review sections come 1993, when racism all but ceased to be a stated concern in hiphop. Commentators cried conspiracy, but sales figures and street attitudes strongly suggested that the times had simply changed. Snoop Dogg and Biggie Smalls were out only for themselves, and yet hiphop was all for them. The primary architect of the new rap, former N.W.A. member Dr. Dre, espoused a cold, businessman's amorality. Forfeiting the victim's sense of innocence cleared the way for increasingly anti-Romantic images of adulthood. Maybe I'm an evil man, rappers like Biggie and Dre seemed to wink, but is this not an evil country in a ruthless world? Subtracting from the equation the weight of group responsibility, "hardcore" hiphop imagined black liberation on the individual scale. Tough-talking 90s rap presented pop's very first images of black men absolutely free from fear of racism, and completely immune to the guilt of a so-called traitor to the race. The new music's unrelenting emphasis on gunplay and crew loyalty was a manifestation of those two themes, fear and guilt, in street camouflage.

The extreme nature of hardcore hiphop was duly noted by horrified cultural conservatives. If they were as race-blind as they claimed to be, such commentators would have balanced their disgust with praise for gangsta rappers' wholehearted embrace of free-market philosophy. For here was the ultimate repudiation of victim-identity politics, as well as an authoritative rebuttal to those who insisted that government handouts were as important as individual initiative in developing the inner city. Music critics missed the boat as well, letting leftist prejudice foreclose on the stunning artistry of many self-described hustlers, killers, drug-dealers and pimps. The dream of absolute personal freedom turned out to be ideally suited to rap. Its trinity of rhythm, technology and voice allowed hiphop to slip enchantments and incantations within Trojan horse tales of "reality." (Two recent compilations?The Real Hip-Hop: Best of D&D Studios Vol. 1 and Loud Records' The Early Daze?make it easier than ever to get a sense of how effectively outlaw fantasies were rendered.)

The era's inflated imagery was mostly perceived as just that. Mature fans of New York hardcore or L.A. gangsta rap talk about these "dangerous" sounds as if they comprised an extended pep talk. Combat imagery featuring underdog heroes inspired hiphop youth who'd been apprehensive about exploiting their individual talents, afraid of either failing or effectively working their way out of the race. Rap kids who in the 80s would have studied Five Percent Nation theology in the 90s studied marketing. With rap's focus back on the poorest parts of America's cities, where success at any given hustle was perceived as its own reward, courage trumped all. It's no coincidence that the 90s is when black executives achieved authority in the rap industry, as labels (Def Jam) and publications (The Source) that had been started in part by leftist wannabe whites began to pay homage to individualistic will-to-power as the fuel of the culture.

Then Tupac and Biggie were murdered, and everyone was shocked to realize that unchecked bravado had taken hiphop much too far. In 1997, though, the pendulum didn't swing back to the other extreme. If it had, the brilliant and visionary Dead Prez (who rapped, "Who shot Biggie Smalls?/If we don't get them they gon' get us all") would've become one of rap's top groups. Instead, they didn't quite catch on. As 60s as rap got after the assassinations was a moratorium on insulting other artists by name on record. The pendulum was losing momentum. The argument was settling down. The winning mentality was 90s, with the caveat that it mustn't be forgotten that 60s work remains.

The oddest effect of the cooling down of the 60s-90s argument is that hiphop is cleaving from black identity. Some kids today listen only to antiestablishment white rappers, while many of hiphop's biggest talents are finding more lucrative work in Hollywood. The first half of 2002 was probably the worst six months ever for recorded rap. The vast majority of new albums are pure formula, devoid of ideas. Just like rock. Hiphop had little to say about 9/11. The big exception was Nas, who survived his battle with Jay-Z (who had broken the name-naming moratorium) by hoisting hiphop's 60s-revival flag. The routine was astonishing only if you expected hiphoppers to feel much differently about the massacre than people who live in subdivisions outside of Omaha did.

There will be more reiterations. The Neptunes' latest proteges, Virginia brothers Clipse, play out extreme hardcore drama on a grander stage than Smif-N-Wessun ever graced. The next Dead Prez album will be incisively provocative. Those will be two CDs on a shelf, at once opposite and adjacent, comfortably sharing hard-earned space. The ideas they espouse do the same in millions of American minds.