Hip-Hop-1990-1993

And Mobb Deep where there, at the ceremony, after making an incredibly lucid and gorgeous album, but then with with Prodigy stumbling on stage with a nappy on his head, slurring "East Coast naaawayamin" pretensions, with a crew of fat useless fucks behind him. Not good. Bloody not good, to quote Kingsley Amis, the OG.

Lil Kim, with her short heels and dirty mouth, rocked it.

This is an engaging piece of film because it is the very moment, as Crowely explicates, that hip hop became murderous and took over the world. By 96/97 Wu Tang, for example, were in decline, apart from Heavy Mental in 98. (Had to say that.)

Crowley, keep gossiping, you are my favorite poster.

craner said:

Crowley, keep gossiping, you are my favorite poster.

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Yes, this is great.

While we're on the subject of Mobb Deep...

M.O.P. even released their first single in 93.

Crowley, seeing as you mention Boyz In Da Hood and Colours in the context of LA rap's glamorisation of gang culture, weren't these films anti-gang statements (particularly the former)? Didn't Ice Cube blub famous thespian tears in Boyz? What of the anti-gang/gang glamorisation tension that runs through some of these records? In the NYC context, Mobb Deep's Infamous, with its stark, bleak, visceral narratives, hardly glamorises Projects violence (it makes it sound terrifying, a cycle of fear and paranoia) even as it simultanously glorifies it. Is this all bogus?

I'm fascinated by your background detail of the criminal basis of rap crews in general, as it almost validates the conservative arguments against the music. I remember a quote from John Peel, who said that when he was playing early rap records on his show in the late 80s, Johnny Walker said to him, "why are you playing the music of young black criminals?" Peel recounted this with no malice, but as an example of the early knee-jerk soft racism directed at rap by rock and mainstream audiences, which he considered ill-informed and irrelevant. But from what you are saying, it was neither.

Is the definitive Native Tongues film Do the Right Thing?

I remember listening to 'Trife Life' over and over again in 1995, because it sounded so good, those crisp, hollow beats and that genius Norman Connors sample, but every time I listened to the lyrics (which I almost knew by heart) I would think, "fucking hell, I'm glad I live in Swansea and when I meet a girl I don't have to worry about being shot."

What made Warren G stay out of the Death Row embrace when his two childhood buddys Snoop and Nate Dogg got sucked in? Was he smarter, or stupider, or what?

Having revived my interest in all these stories, I just found out that Nate Dogg died a couple of years ago...of a stroke. WTF? What's the story Crowley?

How does Master P and the ultra-tacky, ultra-everything No Limit label that splurged everywhere in the very late 90s (with those astonishingly awful record covers) fit into all of this?

Master P actually found his graphic designer after a rap beef. Another rapper had a cover with an Ice Cream truck exploding, a subtle shot at The Ice Cream Man. Master P called the designer, but the designer talked him into changing his graphic direction.

As you would.

Not sure if this will embed right, but Pen & Pixel were ahead of the curve by years, they were making covers like Big Bear's Doin' Thangs in 1998:

There could be a whole enjoyable thread based on No Limit album art.

I always thought that Lil Kim's Hard Core cover paved the way, but I am obviously totally wrong about that.

Well let me put it to you this way. "New Jack City" is actually a very effective fictional portrayal of the Paid In Full Posse style gangs that were overtaking urban cities in America fueled on crack sales. And you can actually tell that Wesley Snipes based his character not off of people like Azie or Alpo but rather on Big Daddy Kane. Which is actually profound, as Kane most definitely KNEW these guys through Marley & Magic. But you ask anyone who's seen that movie, they know who are the good guys or bad guys, but nobody thinks Ice-T was the star, you know? (It's actually got a perfect sort of companion in Ferrara's "King Of New York" where Snipes plays the rogue cop and there you have someone deciding there's NOTHING sympathetic about these guys. Mario Van Peebles at least took the effort of painting Nino as an evil figure despite his nobility.)

So in that regard, look at your Boyz, Colours, Menace. You see all these more admirable, noble street types like Doughboy, and you also see demonic cops such as Sean Penn in Colours being the young OTT ready to kill the people he's supposed to police. It's reminiscent of people's criticism of police in Ferguson, or even more present-day Police criticisms in The Wire, and that's already the 80s. 30s years in America, and the urban community still thinks the police view its underprivileged citizens as 'the natives' while they occupy space, 'the war on drugs' as a sort of inner-American colonialism.

So look back again at those films, you can say "Yeah, they tell you they're the bad guys." but they made those people humans that are identifiable with heroic qualities. And I'm not trying to demonize the people in those gangs, but they sold the Bloods and Crips as a new American Outlaw the same way they did the Mafia. But does the Mafia have a way of marketing themselves as entertainment? No, because they thrive off of secretly dominating their community. Not everyone in the Bloods and Crips were looking to dominate their community, its why they don't function the same way (I remember Snoop having to discreetly allude to being in the Rolling 60s on Howard Stern, and nobody understood how the Crips aren't hierarchic in the same way as traditional views of organized crime), so rap brought them a method of escape. Look at people as talented as DJ Quik. It's a dangerous situation when you create this exchange.

"Do The Right Thing" isn't really a great example of Native Tongues aesthetic as cinema, though I'm not sure what is. Native Tongues is kind of like an artistic movement, not everyone has the same priorities. Like, there's a George Clinton irreverent theme in some people like the JBz, PE (via Flav) and Ultramagnetic. But Ultra LOVED playing Gangster Chic (Keith is probably the first MC from an East Coast basis to play with a pimp or serial killer persona), and we all know how negative "Criminal Minded" is. And PE totally underplayed the more 'gangster' elements on the debut album ("Miuzi" is probably as influential on NWA as KRS and Schoolly were) as they grew up, but also later jettisoned their humor. So like... Because they were such a disparate group, you can't say that there's a real PROPER Native Tongues aesthetic. Nowadays we've historically homogenized it into Africa Pendants, baby dreads, that scene in CB4 where the group pretends to be De La/Tribe and say "We're The Bohemians!". V. valid, but kind of shows how as certain groups moved into commerciality, aspects got lost over-time.

Because let's not get it twisted, Bambaataa is the spiritual father of these guys (The Jungle Brothers actually having been the 2nd generation official Zulu Nation MCs for Red Alert, the chosen new heirs to Zulu in the NYC while Bam was constantly touring the world as an ambassador for Hip-Hop, and people have vids of Kool Keith breaking for Zulu Nation), but he was most certainly a former Black Spade who was known for acts of violence in the South Bronx. In a sense, you have in the Juice Crew/Native Tongues schism (even though the JBz and Tribe are from the Queens/BK area) as a battle between the Bronx/Long Island trying to undo the damage placed upon them in society, and the Queens/BK based drug trade being like "*cocaine snort* FUKKIT!" (Wu-Tang, ever fittingly, are actually three Brooklyn based also-rans (Dirty, Gza and Rza) and a bunch of Staten Islanders. Staten Island is eternally behind the times (I think Luka once told me this can be said the same of South London), so it's fitting that they revived the Juice Crew aesthetic because they're still stuck in that era. Biggie and Nas did it because Nas' mentor was Tragedy, Juice Crew distaff member, and Biggie was groomed by Mister Cee, former DJ of Big Daddy Kane).

As far as Warren G's saga, he was Dre's cousin, and tried to get Dre to pay attention to his, Snoop and Nate's group. Dre was not interested in Warren's beats or rhymes, but saw Snoop and Nate and was like "YES." So Dre enlisted them to help in writing The Chronic, in addition to having The D.O.C. serve as his ghostwriter and as an 'editor' for Snoop. (Snoop's said basically that he would write 108 bar freestyles, and then DOC would be like "OK, this the first verse, this the hook, this the bridge, this is garbage) But Suge, a blood, disliked Warren, Daz and Kurupt for being crips. So Suge would basically bully the shit out of Warren G, I believe he may have even physically thrown Warren off a boat. After a couple of years of this, realizing that Dre wasn't going to actually help him, Warren bailed. Thankfully for him, Def Jam came a-calling, smelling a possible credible West Coast act, and they scored big with "Regulate".

I'm not even touching No Limit today, lol.

I don't know a lot about this, but wasn't Snoop a Crip too?

I completely understand your points about the films, and Colours is certainly largely about the police, and the gangsploitation films like Menace II Society and New Jack City are more ambigious, but Boyz was the big one, wasn't it? And it made gang culture look completely terrifying, wasteful and pernicious. Things like Furious Styles and his ferocious paternal presence and righteous speechifying, and the death of Ricky (had to look the names up, I admit, it's been a while, but I remember the scenes vividly) which is just horrible and kicks you in the stomach hard.

Anyway, tomorrow, will you tell me about No Limit? Pleaaase?

I have to admit I prefer Regulate...G Funk Era to Doggystyle but the fact that my mother used to play Warren G in the car on the way to work probably says a little something about his street cred. Nate Dogg didn't seem to mind sticking with him, despite becoming Suge Knight property.

These posts are magnificent, Crowley. The most informative I've read on Dissensus since the heyday of Vimothy's economics graphs and bar-charts. They are exactly the reason I posted the Source video and you haven't let me down.

I was also going to say, and I am not being sly here, and refer to my point above (the Peel/Walker exchange), but you are painting the rap scene, from coast to coast, as a psychopathic criminal enterprise. Clearly you are a fan and in some way invested in the culture. How does this come off? Where do you position yourself? What's left of this? This is almost like a Melanie Phillips cultural debunking here, but from a fan. It's gripping, I have to say. Which is why I want you to get to the aesthetics and origin of Master P, who made Mobb Deep look like tasteful.

Also, if you can solve the riddle of how Lisa I'anson (and how I loved her) ended up on Bobby Digital in Stereo (that lost Wu classic) three years after being sacked from Radio 1 due to taking too many drugs before her lunchtime show in Ibiza, I will never ask you another boring question ever again.

craner said:

I was also going to say, and I am not being sly here, and refer to my point above (the Peel/Walker exchange), but you are painting the rap scene, from coast to coast, as a psychopathic criminal enterprise. Clearly you are a fan and in some way invested in the culture. How does this come off? Where do you position yourself? What's left of this?.

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Let me put it like this, and it's taken me some time to chose how to say this...

I am saying that a lot of rap has had to deal with crime seeking to sustain itself on the profits involved. This is not untrue of Jazz, where many an artist was sustained by benefactors who might have a lot of money but weren't legitimate people (look at The Cotton Club; nothing more than a high-end version of the strip joints that Duke Ellington had to compose around. Many people forget that so much classic jazz was linked to an element of debauchery in society, which by this right explains something like Atlanta's Rap Scene being so based on strip-club music. I'd love to hear Eno's take on this sort of commonplace approach to lifestyle music, a sort of perpetual entertainment installation business. Unless he's forgotten when he used to be a fucking perv.)

What changed is of course, the level of profit afforded to black gangs thanks to the flourish of the drug trade (which was thoroughly nationalized by baby-boomer capitalist hippies as well as the Mafia). So whereas 20 years before rap, maybe some drug dealer might secretly want to have someone play a club for him... He knew how little money came from the urban music business unless you invested just as much. In the 80s however, it had become so much easier to sustain a local artistry. Shit, Def Jam's founder is a failed gangbanger, no matter how much yoga Russell does!

But when you say that rap is inherently criminal, the answer is no. The fact is that in America, crime is 'the hustle'. Legality is a tenuous thing that is often jumped around in order to survive, especially for the underprivileged and impoverished. Rap was able to provide thousands upon thousands with a legitimate business that could get them out of the senseless violence in order to maintain criminal enterprises. Some people had their feet in certain ends of the pool with greater emphasis. Some were flirting with identities, both as artists or as criminals, that were unrealistic to them (sad to say), and that led to gruesome clashes.

But I'm not saying the criminal underworld of urban america is the only aspect to this. There's the religious value of rap which rarely gets acknowledged, which allows a medium of expression for thoughts and cultures that would never have art based off it otherwise. There's the weird nuances of how this creates its own culture through how it gains access to technology, or community structures. Look at the evolution of the concept of the MC, DJ, Mixtape, etc.

Yet the struggle here is you can't simply paint these people as psychotic bad guys, because quite frankly, to live as a lower class urban american, as I've even experienced, is going to make you psychotic to some degree. And I'm not even black, so I get moved to tears sometimes at how nauseating this country treats its own people who didn't ask to live and breathe in such a hellish landscape. So how the hell am I going to judge the behavior, the lifestyle, or the outlook of someone like Chief Keef, or anyone before him who's rapped about violence or come from a violent background/climate? I can only judge them by how they treat their own, and how they treat their art sometimes.

Anyway, I'm sorry it's been so long. I'm not the best person to cover Master P, but I can offer my take as a No Limit fan.

No, great as always, thank you.