Did We Miss the Message Because of the (W)Rapper
I do not own the copyright/license to any of the material below, but am using it for an educational demonstration — and not solely for personal gain.
We may not like the language of some 90s Rappers, but they were trying to tell us something!
I am old. By Generation Z’s standards, I am ancient. I am so old, that I remember when LL Cool J was an actual RAPper. I remember when there was not one, but several huge female RAP stars (who kept their clothes on!). I remember before RAP had a category at the Grammy or AMA shows. I remember the Fat Boys, Run DMC, and the explosion of Gangsta RAP. Sadly, I also remember when a group of older, Black folk took RAP to Congress to have it banned because of its lewd content.
First, let me say that in looking back, that the whole RAP to Congress thing was an embarrassment. I honestly cannot find where Gangsta RAP was any more lewd than an old Redd Foxx or Lawanda Page album. There was no more profanity in those first RAP songs than the Richard Pryor or Dolemite albums that I listened to behind my mother’s back (“…way down in the jungle deep. The signifying monkey..”). If you can finish the text in the parenthesis, you are guilty, too! We will relive these moments later (Please don’t tell my mother, though).
I will give all of those who were initially frustrated with RAP this one thing: the violence was there. It was real, and on the surface, it seemed glorified. But was it? That brings me to my second point: did we miss some very valuable messages in the 1990s, because we were too caught up by the (w)rapper that the package came in?
As stated earlier, I am old. I am old enough to listen to Ice Cube’s RAP productions without the thrill of gaining new ways to cuss behind my mother’s back. As I listen to Amerikkka’s Most Wanted as an adult with children of my own (who had better not be sneaking my music, but I know they probably are), I can listen with a mature ear. How could we have focused on the profanity and totally missed the cyclical poverty, drug addiction as escapism, systemic racism, police brutality, self-defeating violence, sometimes hopelessness, happiness, gender tension that caused strained interpersonal relationships, teenage pregnancy, respect, materialism, love, disrespect, life, death and even gossip that a RAPper Cube presented? How did we miss the excerpts from Malcolm X and the Nationalist strains presented in his music? Where were we when he talked about the tense relationships between Asian Americans who owned stores in African American neighborhoods and the African American population they served and feared? How could we listen to “Better Off Dead” and only hear the profanity but not the call for criminal justice reform in America? How could we miss Cube’s comparison of the LAPD to the KKK? How could we miss the fact that Cube was telling us that racism is an American problem and not just a Southern one?
Then I began to wonder about other music of my childhood. Though I am a Mississsippi woman(and proud of it, thank you) who considers Blues as good as gospel, RAP forms a titanic part of my childhood soundtrack as well. It was, for the most part, music that we danced to at parties (Remember when you went to parties to actually dance and get sweaty?). We spent all week preparing for that Kid’N’Play song and ensuing dance contest between the best girl dancers and the best boy dancers in class (I never beat a fellow classmate who we called Grill!). But the music was more than entertainment, and in using it strictly for entertainment or as a new “thing” for Baby Boomers (Come on. Not all of them were in the Civil Rights Movement as they claim. Some of them were elementary school children!) to rally against, I could not help but wonder what else we missed aside from Cube’s plea for socio-economic justice and reform of America’s current prison-industrial complex that preys upon young Black men (That’s one reason why the album is called, Predator. Get it?). And I cannot help but admit that people who use profanity are sometimes brutally honest. And maybe Cube yelled and cussed, because a certain age group simply refused to hear him. We have our narratives, and they are psychological comfort blankets to us. To have these young people take away long-cherished mental blankets…well, they met with resistance. And here was the psychological blanket they removed: we moved from the dirty, backwards, “country,” racist South to the cities of the North and West and did better. Right?
But not all of the pictures painted were dire. Some of the songs manifested the resilience of Black folk and our ability to live (not survive, but really live) and create good art to boot in the most trying of environments! Did any of us pay attention to MC Lyte’s craft? I mean, the woman RAPs with questions and inverted sentences. I do not know of ANY ONE who is doing that today. Can we name someone (not TuPac…he is always our default answer. Really think, though) who is currently RAPping in inverted sentences? Is there any song comparable to “Cha Cha Cha” out there right now? Does anyone have the vocabulary or paid enough attention in grammar class to create another “Cha Cha Cha” right now?
How many of us listened to “Poor Georgie” and thought seriously about cancer for the first time in our lives? It may have been the first song that Black America had about cancer and its effects on our community— ever! And how many of us paid/pay attention to the sophisticated nuance of Black womanism in her lyricism? Yes, Lyte declared on the one hand, she is a strong Black woman, and she owns that in her songs. On the other hand, she is a human being with the same needs and desires as anybody else. She tells us in “Poor Georgie:” “Cause Lyte needs love, too. And that ain’t no lie.” Being whole does not mean being alone, and she is heterosexual by the way (not that anything is wrong with being lesbian, but every time we discuss Black feminism in any way, certain academics are dismissive, because they automatically label all feminists as lesbian, forgetting the fact that men can be feminists, too. They also mistakenly yell that feminism is not indigenous to Black women. We started womanism and should own it!).
As I continue to go back through my 90s RAPpers collection, including Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, I am disgusted by how little critical attention the lyrics of these groups and individuals has been given. Critics have been so quick to label RAP as an evil artform that causes mental degeneration, that they missed how everybody acted right for one summer when Bone released that video and Uncle Charles’ eyes turned black while they said, “I miss my Uncle Charles, ya’ll…” Our focus went to booty-shaking video vixens and not messages. Again. What about all of the videos the Wu Tang Clan released where there were no women — just themselves in a grimy subway or something? What were talking about? We seem not to know. I guess we missed that line in which one of the members outlined what the music of hip hop is supposed to do: “Rock and shock the nation like the Emancipation Proclamation…”
And sometimes, quite honestly, it did. The shockwaves from RAPpers of the time, male and female, made certain segments of Black America tremble at least. These RAPpers were like urban griots, painting us a picture of nihilism and decay forced upon Black people by national Jim Crow economic and social policies that were pushed by the legislative body, signed by the executive branch, enforced by the police, and further defined and upheld by the Supreme Court. And I don’t think the artists can be blamed if consuming audiences and critics alike declared that they glorified the violence of the ‘hood and degraded women. Yes, some songs are very misogynist, but the whole genre is not. Listening as an adult, I don’t hear glorification only but pleas to be heard! And what was it that they wanted us to hear so badly and with such force and urgency? Even gangsta RAPpers articulated this cold, hard fact for us: when Black folk moved from the plantation to the ghetto, we didn’t make as much progress as we pretended to when we drove down South and made fun our “country” cousins. For the most part, we just moved. Racism and oppression took one form on the plantation, but another insidious form in the projects. We dodged white sheets on the plantation and had to survive a slow death by poverty in the projects.
And perhaps that story, told by RAPpers as early as Grand Master Flash, was the story that many Baby Boomers simply did not want to hear. I leave you with “The Message.” For the record, like many of the very earliest RAP songs, there is no profanity, sex, drug dealing, use of the “N-word,” casual pill popping, weed smoking, rock-smoking, or coke snorting in the song. Just a message of what progress we did not make by moving to the urban jungles that populate and haunt later, profanity-loaded albums like Amerikkka’s Most Wanted.
