Elvis Has Left The Building

When Vanilla Ice came out back in 1990, a few of us were sure that hip-hop was dead.

“Well, that’s it,” I said, packing up my metaphorical office. “It was fun while it lasted.”

There would be no room for Black hip-hop artists on the charts now — no matter how progressive, no matter how many white fans they had. From now on it would be poseurs like Vanilla Ice, and non-threatening numbskulls like Hammer.

It was particularly distressing for me, because I had staked my life and career on this idea: After 400 years of ambivalence, white attitudes toward Black culture were slowly but surely resolving in favor of acceptance of that culture on its own terms. Jazz had taken us to one level, r&b/rock & roll to another, and hip-hop would take us the rest of the way. White kids were ready for the raw, and once they tasted it, they wouldn’t need their music “whitenized,” as LeRoi Jones put it. A new generation of Americans would be born that would deal with race and culture in a different way.

The only thing that stood in the way of progress were the intransigent institutions of video, radio and record labels, manned by older executives who came up in the musical apartheid era of the 70s and 80s, when programmers would readily back away from things that sounded “too black,” as they often said flat out.

And here they were, still in control. Right in the midst of the greatest flowering of hip-hop culture, here came two records (“Can’t Touch This” and “Ice, Ice Baby”) that totally played into their hands. Now white kids wouldn’t ever get to hear Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill and the rest of the emerging artists of the time. Instead, we’d have Vanilla Ice as the new Elvis.

But it didn’t happen.

Vanilla Ice disappeared as soon as he came, Hammer with him. And Black artists did something they hadn’t ever done in history. They completely took over pop radio. One by one, pop stations that had once played Van Halen and Tiffany and Debbie Gibson fell — WPGC in DC, boom! KPWR in LA, boom! WQHT in NY, boom! — and now programmed more Black youth music than the so-called urban stations. The slow cultural process that had been churning for a century was beginning to bear fruit.

Years later, as Eminem appeared on the horizon, we again heard the apocalyptic cries of “Elvis is coming!” If it was gonna happen, I thought, it would be with Eminem, the first white emcee who didn’t need to use his whiteness as a marketing crutch. Soon, there would be an avalanche of skillful white rappers, edging out their Black counterparts.

But it didn’t happen.

As successful as Eminem was, white kids didn’t abandon Dre, Snoop and Jay-Z. In fact, hip-hop grew as never before, and the artists riding the crest of that wave were almost all Black. And yes, there were some new white entries to the field, like Bubba Sparxx. But the Great White Hope never emerged, because he wasn’t really needed anymore. White singers like Justin Timberlake and Brittany Spears invested heavily in hip-hop production, but none of them stood on the way of, say, Beyonce ripping them completely to shreds in terms of having a classy, comprehensive showbiz profile. That Black producers and executives were behind most of these white artists only gave further indication that times had changed.

Elvis has left the building. And yet, some people keep looking for him.

First, there was Bakari’s article in the Village Voice a few months back, which ended with the another version of the Elvis scenario: white kids, underexposed to Black originators (yeah, right!), immersing themselves in a world of whites-only hip-hop.

Now there’s this new article in the Voice by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, examining the “White artist/Black puppeteer” phenomenon I mentioned above. Not as a positive, mind you, but as a suspicious negative.

“The list continues to grow,” says Brew-Hammond, speaking of Black-white partnerships as if describing a cancer. She lists some old ones (Dre and Eminem, Pharrell and Justin Timberlake), some newer ones (Diddy and Jordan McCoy, Swisha House and Paul Wall) and some just plain weird ones (Lil’ Jon and Paris Hilton). She concludes the list, saying: “Though there are no guarantees of success, these mixed-race power-couple pairings are worth their weight in potential platinum and gold.”

To punctuate this stunner of a scoop, she calls on A&R mercenary Kawan "KP" Prather (“newly named executive vice president of a&r at Sony Urban Music” — a reassuring thought, considering that Sony Urban is well-known for hiring great cultural thinkers) who drops the prosaic like it was a revelation:

“It's just easier to market white artists. They're just more easily embraced.”

Easier to market Joss Stone than Beyonce? In today’s market? Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sony Urban's newest A&R genius. (Didn't he come from LaFace? Didn't Outkast have more legs than Pink in the long run?)

Next, after Brew-Hammond informs us that Prather is talking on his cell phone (ooh!), on the way to his 21st-floor office in midtown's Sony Building (aah!), she says Prather notes that “Black singers and rappers come a dime a dozen, but a white rapper or artist in an all-black crew adds the wow factor necessary to sell records.”

Right. Bubba Sparxx sure boosted that Timbaland stock. The Neptunes weren’t shit till Justin Timberlake came along. Miri Ben-Ari sure made everybody go out and buy Terror Squad and Kanye. And while I wholeheartedly agree that Fergie was a brilliant move on the part of the Black Eyed Peas, it was also a very, very risky one. Fergie was no star before she joined the Peas.

Brew-Hammond’s treatment of Ben-Ari is particularly shameless. First, she positions the Israeli violinist as “white,” when she damn sure looks Sephardic to me. (She also eraces ethnicity in other places that might impede her argument: Christina Aguilera stripped of her latina heritage and Pharrell stripped of his Asian-American partner, Chad Hugo). Second, she takes advantage of Ben-Ari’s language and culture gap, using direct quotes to make her look as stupid as possible — quoting every “like,” “you know” and “yo.” She does the same disservice to Prather by setting the poor guy up as an expert.

All this to say, what, exactly, I don’t know. The article sort of trails off into the murky future of music, with Miri Ben-Ari “seizing her moment” as an artist of white privilege (wake me when that moment arrives, by the way), and Prather blathering about “make better music” and (I love this, check this out) “one of the reasons I came to Columbia [Records is], it's not as cookie-cutter. I mean, you have to get your money, but it's more artist friendly.”

My friends, Columbia smelted the mold from which all contemporary musical cookies are cut. Prather is obviously smoking his salary. Good luck and Godspeed in the hallowed tradition of Michael Maudlin and Tone & Poke.

As for Brew-Hammond, I do not know her. I’ve never read anything she’s written about hip-hop or music or Black culture. I suppose she is a thoughtful person, with her own prejudices and agenda, like most of us. I think the subject is fascinating, but it deserved more than her alarmist screed, piss-poor reporting and foregone conclusions.

The real news here is not the same old song, but that white and Black artists are interacting in some interesting and twisted ways that stand history completely on its ear.