Noel: So Nathan, last year, in your blog post "Hip-Hop And Generation X: A Love Story In Reverse?", you wrote that music buffs who came of age in the '80s still try to keep up with rap, but, "The very qualities that made hip-hop seem so transgressive and illicitly exciting when they were in high school or college—the misogyny, the anti-authoritarianism, the glamorization of drug dealing, drug usage, and pimping—began to seem obnoxious and irresponsible. Mainstream rap seemed mired in self-parody, obsessed with increasingly inane forms of conspicuous consumption… To keep in touch with the music and stave off the deadening ghost of middle age, they still bought a handful of the biggest, most hyped releases, but they began to wonder whether it was even worth the bother anymore."
All of that describes me to a T, and when I read it, I nodded along. But earlier in the year, in a response to Kyle's blog post "You're Hanging With Squares" (about the Jurassic 5/Dave Matthews collab), you stated the case much more bluntly: "Like Beastie Boys, Kanye, Common, Tribe Called Quest, Eminem, and a whole bunch of others, Jurassic 5 appeals to a lot of (white) people who otherwise don't particularly like hip-hop, or consider hip-hop a phase they went through in college that they can safely abandon now that they're ensconced in suburban homes and SUVs and the other trappings of middle-class domesticity."
There's a little more disdain in that remark, and I admit that when I first read it, I got a little steamed. And then I realized: What am I getting so defensive about? Just because somebody described me accurately? It would be like getting mad because you said I wear glasses.
Still, I can't help but be a little defensive, because in our business, there's something suspect about a rock critic who doesn't keep up with hip-hop. (Though the opposite isn't true: No one gripes at a Source writer for not knowing anything about The Hold Steady.) I get called a "rockist," as though my personal preferences were some kind of affront to the culture at large. Even more aggravating, when I do buy a rap album and like it, I find out that I still suck, because the rap album I bought is either elitist backpacker stuff or some huge crossover hit. The snobbiness of contemporary hip-hop fans has made it easier for me to disengage. If I can't do it right, why try?
The alternative would be to immerse myself in hip-hop and try to figure it all out, but I'm not going to do that, because I've got other specialties, both in music and in the popular culture at large. Also, you're right: I am turned off by hip-hop these days, for many of the reasons you cite, and a couple you don't.
I don't want to get too much into the clichéd complaints about rap—the misogyny and materialism, basically—because they've been hashed out so many times before. All I can really say about that is that I'm 36 years old, I have a wife and two kids, I live in a quiet neighborhood in a small Southern town, and I just don't feel comfortable blasting Clipse when I'm driving around. I get too self-conscious, both about what's being said and the way it's being said. It's not fun, at least for me.
Instead, I want to get into a couple other things that bug me about hip-hop, and I'm hoping you can explain them to me better. But first, how about an opening statement from you. Here's your topic: Why should a middle-aged white guy care about hip-hop?
Nathan: That question is almost too big to be answerable, let alone in a reasonably concise Crosstalk entry, but I'll give it a shot. I guess my first response is to posit an even bigger version of your question: Why should middle-aged white people (or folks of any race or age, for that matter) care about any genre of music? I think the answer has to do with the countless different roles music (and art in general) play in our lives.
I think everybody hungers for that glorious rush of identification we experience when we stumble across music that speaks to something deep and personal within us—that transcendent feeling of listening to someone whose music conveys what we feel or think, but lack the eloquence or talent to convey. Obviously, it's a little easier for us middle-aged white folks to get that feeling from Wilco or Belle & Sebastian rather than Young Jeezy or Li'l Wayne.
That said, I get that giddy surge of identification with a lot of my favorite rappers, from Phonte Maxwell of Little Brother and Foreign Exchange to MF Doom, Kanye West, Rhymefest, Boots Riley of the Coup, and Lupe Fiasco. Obviously it'd be nice if there were rappers out there who tapped into the anxieties of paying a mortgage or putting children through school, but there is a sizable block of hip-hop devoted to wrestling intelligently with the difficulties of becoming a responsible citizen of hip-hop and the world in a culture fixated with instant gratification and disposable popular culture.
One of the most important things art can do is engender empathy. Hip-hop allows anybody with an iPod or boom box to slip inside the skin of the street-corner hustler, coke dealer, or gang-banger. Is there a problematic element of cultural voyeurism in such a scenario? Of course, just as there's a huge amount of posturing, bullshit, and flat-out lies in most gangsta rap.
As a critic, it seems like one of the things you treasure most from movies is a fully realized sense of time and place. That's one of the areas hip-hop excels. I feel like I know a lot more about the South and the West and East Coasts from listening to hip-hop. I'll probably never set foot in a housing project in New Orleans, but thanks to B.G., Li'l Wayne, and Juvenile, that terrain doesn't seem quite so foreign to me, or the rest of America, for that matter. The Hot Boys are singing their life just as directly as Morrissey, they just throw a lot more slang, profanity, misogyny, and drug references into the mix. I love learning about different subcultures through hip-hop. Entire books could be written about how the differences between, say, crunk and hyphy reflect the regions that spawned each subgenre.
You could certainly argue that hip-hop—primarily the kind of mainstream hip found on BET, MTV, and top-40 radio—sells a reductive, sensationalistic, cynical version of black culture, but a fair amount of truth slips in alongside all the bullshit and calculation.
Hip-hop continues to be such a massive cultural force that you can't ignore it and still consider yourself a fully informed student of pop culture. It kills me that prominent critics can brag about having never seen an episode of The Simpsons. How on earth can you write about the pop culture produced by Generation X without experiencing something so central to how an entire generation sees itself and the world? Similarly, how can you write about pop culture without acknowledging or understanding how hip-hop has indelibly shaped and molded the world we live in? Hip-hop has irrevocably changed not just music, but also fashion, politics, race relations, music, and just about every other facet of the world.
It bears repeating that hip-hop represents some of the most infectious pop music around. It's telling that a hip-hop single tops the Pazz & Jop critics' poll pretty much every year. Ludacris, Timbaland, The Neptunes, OutKast, and Kanye West have created some of the most enduring and ubiquitous pop singles of the past 20 years. I know following hip-hop can sometimes feel like a chore and an obligation (work, in other words), but it should be fun. You don't feel comfortable blasting The Clipse round your hood. What about Rhymefest? Would you feel self-conscious blasting his music? Homeboy is nothing if fun incarnate.
Don't let the music snobs get you down. Snobs of every stripe exist to make people feel bad about enjoying anything. I try not to let the cliquishness of music snobs interfere with my relationship with music, just as I try not to let the banality of top-40 hip-hop color the way I view the genre as a whole. Your relationship should primarily be with the music you love, not with the people trying to make you feel bad about loving certain kinds of music. To use the vernacular: Fuck the haters.
Here are some questions for you: Should I feel bad about not keeping up with rock music? What else is turning you off about hip-hop these days? Speaking of regional differences, how do you think living in the South affects your relationship with hip-hop? I remember visiting Galveston once and having a very animated conversation about hip-hop with a cab driver bumping Trick Daddy's "Naaan" at top volume. My dad and sister looked at me like I was speaking some strange regional dialect, which in a sense I was. Have you listened to some of the more iconoclastic hip-hop coming out of the South these days from folks like Cunninlynguists, Supastition, and Little Brother?
Noel: Should you feel bad about not keeping up with rock music? Of course not. There's a lot you'd probably enjoy, but it's not like you don't have enough music to listen to already. It's funny, though: People who don't keep up with rock often complain that what they hear now sounds like a weak imitation of music that's already been made. Whereas I, immersed in it, enjoy the fine distinctions. (And anyway, I've never understood the "derivative" criticism anyway. The Hold Steady sounds like Thin Lizzy and The Boomtown Rats? So what? I like those bands… why wouldn't I want to hear more?)
But hip-hop, to me, does sound like a big soup of sounds that I can't tell apart. If people say, "That's hyphy," and explain what distinguishes the style, I can hear what they're talking about, but I have a hard time understanding why it's innovative.
It goes beyond that, though: I can't necessarily tell what's good and what's not. Here's an embarrassing example: That Kevin Federline song, "Rollin' V.I.P.", which I've only heard in his Super Bowl commercial. Federline's a big joke, sure, but all I know about him musically is this 20-second snippet, and based on that alone, I can't hear a qualitative difference between Federline's flow and lyrics and, say, Chamillionaire's. I wouldn't know how to begin evaluating their relative merits. (Though I'll grant that if I spent more time with each, I'd probably figure it out.)
Just to establish a baseline here, I'm not completely ignorant. I started listening to Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC and Beastie Boys in high school (Class of '88!), and in college (Class of '92!), I was deeply into A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, De La Soul, Ice-T, and even NWA. But for the past 15 years, I've been basically buying one or two rap records a year, following whatever the prominent critics say I should like. Using that guideline, I've found acts I dig (most notably, Blackalicious, OutKast, and believe it or not, Jay-Z) and others I just don't get (like Eminem, and nearly anything Danger Mouse has been involved with).
You mentioned Rhymefest, which I think was my only 2006 hip-hop purchase, unless Gnarls Barkley counts. And while Blue Collar sounded fine to me, I didn't love it. The lyrics seem more essentially "positive" than a lot of modern rap, but there's still too much profanity for it to go into rotation in our family sedan, and Strokes sample aside, I'm not hearing much I haven't heard before. (Not that "derivative" is a bad thing. See above.)
But here's my biggest problem with Rhymefest, and one of my major problems with hip-hop as a genre: When it comes to the popular arts, I like to think in modified auteurist terms. I don't look for a single authorial voice behind every pop song or movie, but I like at least to ascribe some responsibilities, and point out what's distinctive about, say, the production of an album, or a movie's screenplay, or the performances. (While bearing in mind that there's nearly always some collaboration involved in any end result.) But when it comes to hip-hop, I'm stymied. So many songs feature one artist "featuring" another artist, as produced by a third artist, using samples from a fourth, fifth, and sixth. If I say, "I like Rhymefest," what am I really saying? That I like Kanye West? Or Mark Ronson? Or the hooks they sampled?
Am I just way off base here? Is the insanely collaborative nature of hip-hop really one of its strengths?
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