Minding My Business – Part Three

[The conclusion of a three part series]

Hip-hop is where it is today, and looks the way it does today — not because of a diabolical conspiracy — but largely because of its own success, its own mainstreaming.

Hip-hop once existed in isolation, in a political and cultural incubator (one that allowed for Native Tongues, comedic rappers, political hip-hop, etc.), separated from the twin mainstream diseases of banality and materialism. Now, as hip-hop has become less isolated, more successful; that success and inclusion has made it susceptible to those mainstream diseases.

It’s Bigger Than Hip-Hop

What’s being done to hip-hop is currently being done to everything in the mainstream. We used to have mom and pop stores. Now we have The Gap. We used to have cafes. Now we have Starbucks. And we used to have the variety of Dana Dane, Public Enemy, and Big Daddy Kane in hip-hop. Now we have endless varieties of the same guy — 50-Cent, The Game, Lloyd Banks — all on the shelf next to each other like GI-Joe Kung Fu Grip, GI-Joe Deep-Sea Diver, GI-Joe Ski Patrol, and so on.

“It’s bigger,” as the song goes, “than hip-hop”: What’s happening to women in hip-hop is symptomatic of what’s happening to women elsewhere in the mainstream. We live in a culture that commodifies sex, and in so doing, it debases women (and men too, albeit differently). What’s happening to hip-hop in general — the violence, the materialism, the nihilism — is happening elsewhere in the mainstream. We live in a culture that commodifies, dehumanizes and isolates human beings. And hip-hop happens to be the big mainstream music at a time when those processes are waxing.

Hip-hop is where it is today — not because of higher-ups — but because of the lowest common denominator. It is the same lowest common denominator that re-elected Bush; that raises no voice to challenge the lies of this administration; the same one that craves a steady diet of fast food and reality TV shows; supplies the demand for reams of gossip magazines like Us, People and the Enquirer; that buys an SUV as the Earth warms; that would rather fight than negotiate; that would rather be told than to think; that would rather regulate than wisely judge. And we are all swept up in that.

This lowest common denominator is not specific to hip-hop. It is currently poisoning our entire culture, on some last-days-of-the-Roman-Empire-type-s**t.

The Problem is Us

The problem is Disconnection.

Last year I drove across the country alone, and if there’s one thing I got from that trip through middle America, it’s that we are a nation asleep at the wheel. We are disconnected from everything. We don’t care where the meat comes from, where the oil comes from, where the paper and plastic comes from, where the land comes from, where the entertainment comes from… just keep it coming.

And if there’s one indelible image I got from the recent panel on images of women in hip-hop, it was the middle school teacher who said “You wouldn’t believe how many young girls we caught in the hallways and the bathrooms giving oral sex to guys after ‘My Neck, My Back’ came out.” Now, on one level, that makes no sense to me because Khia’s song is about cunnilingus, not fellatio. But, that being said, it is kind of chilling to think that not just hip-hop, but individual songs have that kind of impact. And plausible, from what I remember of my own grade school experiences (let’s just say that Randy Newman’s “Short People” made months of my life into a living hell).

We don’t like to talk about personal responsibility in hip-hop. Like Remy Ma said that same evening, “It isn’t my job to raise anybody’s kids.” And in a real way, it isn’t. But it IS her job to be human. At base, your duty is to be yourself. You also might try not to hurt too many people in the process. Expanding outward, you might develop some feelings of social responsibility and connection. And the truth is that it does take a village to raise a child. And our culture has lost a great many of its villages — both real and virtual — to the culture of consumption, the culture of ego, and the culture of blame and arrogance that is cultivated particularly well by the so-called-Christian right and the current administration.

So here we all are, separately: an army of One, a village of One, looking out for number One. A rapper writes lyrics without caring about who his words might hurt, because it’s all about what he wants to say. A music exec releases that record to buyers with whom he would never associate and doesn’t understand. A radio jock plays that record because it’s sensational and gives him the extra ears that he needs, no matter who’s attached to those ears. All under the guise of professionalism and propriety. After all, it’s just business, right? We’re just minding our own business.

And that’s the problem: Disconnection. The problem is not that “white boy video directors” or white record and radio execs are all up in Black artists’ business. The problem is that they are not in Black artists’ business enough. And the same goes for Black execs, and industry people of all colors and creeds. Nobody is connected. Nobody feels responsible. It’s always somebody else’s problem.

Who’s More Connected?

Let me explain with another personal story. When I was in college, in the African-American Studies department, writing my thesis on the music business, I took it as self-evident that more Black ownership of record and media companies would lead to better representation of Black music in the mainstream. And that it would also lead to better culture, smarter culture. I also felt that white execs, unless they “grew up” in Black music, probably shouldn’t market it, and turn that job over to more competent hands.

But a few short years later, after I had been in the music business for a while, I saw that things were much more complicated. Yes, the explosion of Black entrepreneurship had created some dynamite culture and had blown the doors off a closed industry. But many of the people at the majors who stood in their way happened to be Black, and many who helped them happened to be white. When I was at Warner, for example, I begged and pleaded NOT to have my Black artists managed by the “Black Department,” which would have been something akin to the death of the project. In many cases, it was.

The problem with many of these folks was not that they were Black. The problem is that they were disconnected: from music, from passion, from culture, from the rest of the company and even from each other. From reality. And, to be fair, they were set up to fail by white execs who really didn’t give a shit about them. So there’s your institutional racism.

When you look for a partner, in business or in life, you want somebody who is plugged in, somebody whose blood surges and someone who feels like they’re a part of you and you of them. That’s what makes a particular human endeavor great.

Whether that partner is white or Black, you want them minding your business, you want them caring about you as if they were caring about themselves. That is why, my friends, Warner had such great Black music (Prince, Funkadelic, Chaka) BEFORE they had a Black department. Because the top-level executives didn’t make Black artists somebody else’s responsibility. They made it theirs (until the day Mo Ostin hired Benny Medina). Clive Davis, another example. Made Black music his top priority, and he gets more respect from Black artists and their inter-generational audiences than almost anyone in the music biz.

Home Invasion

So what are we to make of someone like Jimmy Iovine, then? Like Clive, here’s another guy who made Black music a top priority. Jimmy was not disconnected musically. Rather, he was disconnected as a human being. He got into bed with gangsters. And if you get into bed with gangsters, if you don’t care what kinds of people they are, then you probably don’t feel connected to the communities from which they came. And you damn sure aren’t going to quibble about their lyrics or their imagery.

Chuck D half-joked recently that he wanted to do a “home invasion” on Jimmy Iovine. I understand what he means. If Jimmy had some sort of personal stake or experience or connection to what his products represent, I think he might think twice about the content of that product. But Jimmy, because he’s white and privileged, can simply mind his own business while Rome burns. And what’s really startling is that so many Black entrepreneurs and executives, many from those burning streets, act about as disconnected from those streets as Iovine.

Think about it: Was the image of hip-hop any better off in the hands of BET’s original owner, Bob Johnson? What kind of images did No Limit and Rap-A-Lot and Cash Money thrive on? Is Radio One a more worthy caretaker of culture than Emmis? “Black Owned” conjures up this romantic notion of “community ownership.” And it is not. More often, the reality of “Black Owned” simply means that the capitalist who owns the business happens to be Black.

In this mainstream culture where cash is king and everything has a price, the rarest commodity is connection. And you can’t find that ingredient in easy racial equations. You have to go, literally, soul to soul.

Connection and Censure

Hip-hop was vital because it was a community of connection. Community means a lot of things, but one thing it means is censure. Anybody gets out of line, talks shit about Black women for example, BAM! they’re going to have to answer to a bunch of people.

But here’s a subtle point: Some of the greatest art, hip-hop included, is created by people who risk censure. NWA was such a case. Some of the greatest hip-hop ever, and it faced a lot of censure from many corners.

So there is a place for NWA. There’s a place for a video like “Tip Drill.” There’s a place for that, there’s a place for “vulgar” humor, there’s a place for stupid reality shows, there’s a place for porn. There’s even a place for pimps and hos and gangstas. Rick Rubin used to say that there were only two types of art: Good and Bad. I believe that “Straight Outta Compton” was art of the highest order, brutal as it was. It also inspired a lot of bad art — based less on passion and connection and more on disconnection and sensationalism. And when people are disconnected, when there’s no community, when there’s no feeling of connection and responsibility enough to cause people in the right places to speak up, there’s no censure. Those images can metastasize and end up dominating the entire culture.

Maintaining that connection takes work, and for most people and most enterprises, it’s not sustainable. So as it plays out at Hot 97, at record companies, at video networks and in the population, those connections — those feelings of mutual responsibility — have withered. Where you once had Dr. Dre and Ed Lover — guys with connectivity going up and down, guys who you could even call “activists,” in a sense; you now have Miss Jones, who is obviously so disconnected from the world outside the radio station and the Arbitron books that she can’t tell the difference between what’s funny and what’s tragic. You can have Nelly sliding a credit card through a girl’s ass cheeks in his video and nobody — not Nelly, not the director, not anybody at the company nor the network — takes full responsibility for the impact that has on the culture and what it communicates to young men and women.

Connection is the most human faculty. Even though I don’t have a daughter, if I can connect with you about what it’s like to have a daughter exposed to some of these images; then, as an executive, I may think twice about how I work with artists and their art. Even if I’m not Black, I know what it is to be human, and how it feels when my own dignity is violated. If I’m Rick Cummings or Flex, and if I feel more connected to the audience that I serve, I may think twice about the steady diet of “beef” I broadcast as the flagship of hip-hop.

Minding Our Business

More than ever we need to be in each other’s business. I need to be in your business. You need to be in my business. And by minding your business, I’m minding my own.

That’s why I react so strongly to people who’ve tried in the past to invalidate my own connection; to say that it’s “none of my business.” It’s simply not up for argument with me. I just intuitively know that connection is better than disconnection; and that — to paraphrase Al Smith —the cure for the ills of connection is more connection,

Disconnection is the sin. The more I feel connected to you, the more you feel connected to me, the less suffering we’ll have. All human suffering comes from some form of disconnection.

Minding my own business, of course, would be easier. But then it wouldn’t be much of a life, would it?

Minding My Business - Part Two

[A continuation of a previous entry]

In the early 90s when two white Pop radio programmers did what hundreds of their Black counterparts at Urban radio were unwilling to do — program hip-hop aggressively — they shared a quite unexpected consequence.

Keith Naftaly and Rick Cummings suddenly became the voice of young people of color.

This must have come as quite a shock. Naftaly and Cummings had only intended to position hip-hop as pop music for their audiences (young, mostly white, middle-class teenagers), much as Alan Freed had re-positioned rhythm & blues 40 years before, renaming it “rock & roll.” It was, simply, the smart thing to do.

[And, culturally speaking, the right thing to do. Freed’s bold move would, in many ways, create a generation of white kids who accepted Black expression and Black people on their own terms. These same kids would go on to support civil rights and the Black freedom movement in the 60s. Young white America was way past-due for its hip-hop injection in the early 90s.]

But because Black programmers gave rap short shrift, a Black or Latino kid couldn’t turn on KKBT in Los Angeles or KBLX in San Francisco — traditional “urban” radio — and hear “their” music. With Naftaly and Cummings’ moves at KMEL and KPWR respectively, suddenly their pop stations became the de-facto urban stations; and the beneficiaries of all the pent-up, untapped energy that accompanied that release.

I do not know if Naftaly and Cummings, as businessmen, had much of a political consciousness. My guess is that they weren’t especially political people. But even if they did, most white Americans still place issues of race on their psychological fringes. Even if they watched The McLaughlin Group every Sunday, I would be surprised if the two of them knew much about Black history or had much knowledge of the issues facing people of color.

But now, because of a simple and inexorable business decision, they found themselves the ringleaders of a three-ring circus of race, culture and politics.

Suddenly, minding their own business — the business of broadcast — meant minding other folks’ business — other folks being young Black, Latino and Asian kids. It meant knowing their issues, their struggles their sensitivities. It meant having to deal with their parents and in some cases serve as surrogate parents.

This was not what guys like Cummings and Naftaly signed up for, and there was a long learning curve for the two of them, one that —for Cummings — obviously continues to this very day. But this learning curve comes into being wherever the undereducated, underexposed denizens of corporate America meet the hip-hop generation.

By hiring capable people from within the hip-hop community — like Dr. Dre and Flex — Cummings showed a willingness to serve that community on its own terms. By playing records that his mix-show jocks recommended, he was doing the same. So by and large, the community and culture of hip-hop (or at least the cross-section of it that Cummings was able to access with his own limited knowledge) determined the tone and content of hip-hop radio.

When the “bitch-ho-nigga” backlash happened in ‘94, Cummings had been doing business like that for some time. Here was a format that had been, for the most part, programming itself. Cummings didn’t write the words to “G Thing,” Snoop did. Cummings didn’t decide that Public Enemy was passé and Dre and Cypress were the new thing. His DJs did. Cummings had largely left the fate of hip-hop radio in the hands of kids. So when these kids’ more politically-correct peers, or their parents, started to raise a stink, Cummings had a choice: He could do nothing; he could dictate from on-high what was and was not to be played; or he could let the kids work it out. In the end, he chose the path of active guidance, according to whatever personal morality or ethics he had.

I suppose Cummings learned a lot more than he bargained for in those years before he was bumped upstairs to corporate, ceding the programming desk to other folks who would have to start at the bottom of their own learning curve.

Cummings was ill-prepared for the role of caretaker of the Hip-Hop Generation. But then again, so was almost every single out-of-touch, middle-aged Black programmer in the country. And for that matter, so were the kids: people like Flex, the Baka Boys, Angie Martinez.

Whether these programmers and DJs were white, Black, Latino or Asian, I never saw them as a particularly conscious bunch. And as the years have gone by, I think they’ve become even less so, because the culture itself has become less so. What we have, then, is a bunch of asleep people driving a somnambulant culture that once put a great deal of primacy on being aware and awake.

So when you listen to Hot 97, or pick up a Source magazine, or watch BET; when you hear, read and see their narrowness, their meanness, their crudeness and think back to a time when things seemed a lot more “alive”; it may be hard to swallow that the content of these media remain the completely collaborative, multicultural effort they once were, often controlled by the same people who gave you such great inspiration in the past.

The problem, dear reader, is not that these outlets have been “taken over” by nameless, faceless white corporate interests. The supposed “subversion” of hip-hop culture isn’t happening because rich white people are diabolically exploiting people of color. That to me, is taking it way too personally. In reality, what’s happening is strictly business. The “subversion” of hip-hop is a function of how corporate capitalism and a culture of materialism exploits, masticates and expectorates everyone who works within it. The truth is that we are all going down the drain together.

More tomorrow…

ALERT: The Real Story of The Source, At Last

It's been over a decade now since the original editorial team that created The Source magazine walked out in mass protest. That moment began the magazine's long, slow and painful decline.

I had the privilege to work with the leaders of that original team - Jon Schecter, James Bernard and Reginald C. Dennis. In those early days at Harvard, and in the brand-spanking-new offices on Broadway in New York, I never once saw anyone named Ray, a man who would eventually surface and write himself into history as a "co-founder" of The Source, and turn the once cutting edge magazine into a bizarre platform for personal vendetta and ego.

The story of how that transpired is now being told for the first time, because Reggie Dennis, the former Source Music Editor and founder of XXL Magazine, is speaking out for the first time in a detailed and compelling narrative. Reggie had previously spoken to Jeff Chang on the record for his book, but this new revelation is even more comprehensive.

Reggie is a good friend, a good man of much integrity. When you read his story, you will understand why things at The Source have been unraveling with such rapidity as of late.

"Minding My Business - Part Two" coming soon!

Minding My Business – Part One

Talking may put your business in the street, but blogging puts your business everywhere.

For some, that’s a frightening proposition. Yet — since returning to New York — my personal life has already become the subject of a monthly column in cyberspace. So launching this site on the anniversary of my return to the East Coast is not too much of a leap, really.

In any case, journaling about my personal life isn’t nearly as daunting as writing about hip-hop and racial politics again. After all, I’ve been minding my own business for over a decade now, making records, writing TV and teaching yoga; letting others do the talking and writing. Why stick my neck out?

My introduction to the blogsphere came only recently, through daily visits to Jay Smooth’s hiphopmusic.com, which features some of the most intelligent discussions of current issues in music and beyond.

That site has been a hub for conversation about two recent controversies, both centered around Hot 97 FM: The Tsunami Song and the recent beef-n-bullets between The Game and 50 Cent. Those conversations led me to a protest rally in Union Square where I saw Afrika Bambaata tending silent witness as dozens of kids vented at the hijacking of hip-hop by corporate interests; and to a panel on “Images of Women in Hip-Hop,” where hundreds of young girls showed up to weigh in on the increasing objectification of women in videos, magazines and more.

One the one hand, these protests stir the imagination. It’s heartening to see that, after a decade of bling, so many people care. And whenever people mobilize, there’s a real chance that culture can shift. On the other hand, I think a lot of people have some flawed notions about what’s really going on. And if you want to change the game, you’d better know how it’s played. Otherwise it’s just rhetoric.

Mainly, I’m hearing this frustration: The feeling that these media outlets — whether it be Emmis or Viacom, Universal or TimeWarner — have become, at best, a runaway train with hip-hop culture on board; at worst, a diabolical force for exploitation and subjugation.

At its apex, the lament becomes caricature: Hip-hop is romanticized as this wholesome purity; despoiled by the evil corporations for profit, and for the deliberate promotion of images of violence, ignorance and immorality; satisfying the appetites of white America for prejudice-confirming stereotypes; all conspiring to keep people of color down.

White supremacy has been the rule for 400 years and it’s still the stage upon which our national drama is played. But I no longer have patience for romantic exaggeration: Portraying white executives like Rick Cummings as evil, while excusing Funkmaster Flex and Miss Jones as manipulated pawns; or "white boy video directors" (as one woman at the Images panel said) as somehow more culpable than the artists who inspire those videos. These stories are convenient, easy fictions that will completely derail any effort to change things precisely because people who are invested in fiction take their own power away from the real situation.

And what’s more, even though I know it’s business, I do take it personal. I’ve been working in Black music and with hip-hop artists for close to two decades. Not only have I never been able to get a hip-hop artist to do something they don’t want to do, but as far as I’m concerned, most of the ideas and images that many decry come directly from the artist’s own insistence. Personally, I’m starving for hip-hop with progressive politics. But when my artists and their audience think that’s corny, there’s not much I can do. Working against the cultural grain, for me, has produced some art that’s been critically regarded and commercially ignored. Puffy’s vision of hip-hop, so different from my own, captured young America’s imagination instead. And because they tap into the zeitgeist, folks like Puffy will always find corporate partners because they make money for their partners.

I’m offering two personal stories that I hope will shed some light on how the game is really played, and how hip-hop itself has changed the game.

Story #1: Rick Cummings, Emmis and Hip-Hop Radio

Some people have maintained that the Hot 97 controversies are about ratings. They are absolutely right. Corporations and executives don’t care about the content, just as long as the content has proven to get ratings.

That’s why Emmis wasn’t even thinking about getting involved in hip-hop in the early 90s. Hip-hop was completely unproven. We (meaning folks in the hip-hop record business and media) used to have strategy sessions about how we could convince station owners and programmers that hip-hop could be profitable for them. In other words, we were directly appealing to that corporate interest.

I remember one meeting in particular, Bill Stephney called a few of us up to his offices at Soul Records. It was me, Jon Schecter from The Source, and a few others. I invited one of Chuck Chillout’s DJs along, a nice guy who wasn’t even on the air at the time because WBLS had suspended Chuck yet again for something or another. And we spent hours debating about how we could talk to Joel Salkowitz at Hot 97 (the big Freestyle, bridge-and-tunnel pop station) about a new format that would unite hip-hop and alternative rock for the urban and suburban masses. I left New York long before there was any movement in that direction; but I can tell you this: When Hot 97 finally did succumb to the inevitable, they hired that nice guy who was at our meeting as their first mix-show DJ. That DJ was Funkmaster Flex.

But Emmis wasn’t feeling hip-hop for a while. How did it start? It started with Rick Cummings taking a chance at Power 106 in LA, where he was, at the time, the Program Director. There simply was no real hip-hop formatted FM station until Rick Cummings stepped up. (The first guy to aggressively program hip-hop on AM was Greg Mack at KDAY. On FM, it was Keith Naftaly at KMEL in San Francisco) What did Rick do? Did he develop a playlist of poppy confections like Gerardo, Hammer and Vanilla Ice? No. He hired some knowledgeable kids, two hip-hop heads from Bakersfield, and let them do their thing. Power 106 became a hip-hop station just as “The Chronic” was released. Power 106 made “The Chronic”; and “The Chronic” made Power 106.

How do I know this? Because I was there, on the air, with The Baka Boyz, every Friday night. And I would occasionally talk to Rick, a diminutive guy (even shorter than me) who I actually really admired for doing something that the rest of the radio world regarded as nuts. Following Rick Cummings’ example, Hot 97 followed suit, where, in similar fashion, the fortunes of that station and Sean Combs’s Bad Boy rose together.

At the time, Black programmers at Urban stations wouldn’t play groups like Public Enemy in daytime rotation because they were “too Black.” Now, just as Bill had predicted, these programmers were scrambling over themselves to keep the white boys from serving their own core audiences better than they were.

Inevitably, the abrasiveness of uncut hip-hop — now transmitted on the open-air — began to alarm some people in Black and Latino communities. What did Cummings and his staff do? He had Power host an on-air town hall meeting. The result? The Power 106 community decided that the words “bitch,” “nigga” and “ho” were no longer acceptable for broadcast. That may be obvious on its face, but I give Cummings credit for not censoring hip-hop at first. Emmis had entered the game without reservations, gave programming power and airtime to people who knew what they were doing, and created a completely new format as they went along.

It’s my belief that Emmis has maintained this hands-off approach, allowing its people to do what they want to do (and take what they want to take) as long as the ratings stay up. That approach has its benefits, as well as its dangers. And I believe that explains, in part, what we’re hearing now…

Story #2: Sir Mix-A-Lot, Big Butts, and Video

In July 1991, as I prepared for my impending move to California, the Village Voice published a brilliant essay by Lisa Jones called "Venus Envy." Above it was a picture of this young Black British model (help me here, Beverly Peele? Beverly Poole?). Anyway, if memory serves me, Jones went on to talk about how, after years of under-representation, the Black beauty aesthetic was finally gaining ground in the mass media. That meant women with real bodies and real curves, and women of color on the cover of magazines.

Almost on cue, a few days later, Rick Rubin sent me the advance tape of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s new album. Being a snobby New Yorker, I wasn’t yet a Mix fan. But there was one song that made my hair stand up: “To the bean-pole dames in the magazines,” he rapped, “You ain’t it Miss Thing/ Give me a sista, I can’t resist her/Red beans and rice didn’t miss her.” To my astonishment, here were some good cultural politics disguised as a pop song. Rick called me and asked me what I thought the single should be. “There’s no question,” I answered. “It’s ‘Baby Got Back.’”

“I know,” he said. “I think so too. But Mix thinks it should be ‘One Time’s Got No Case,” another political record, this one about DWB. So we compromised. Mix got “One Time” as his first single, and we would follow it up with “Baby Got Back.”

In the meantime, I knew that despite Mix’s intentions, this single would be misunderstood by a lot of people. Some bourgeois Black folks would hate it because it represented something, like hip-hop in general, that they wanted to run away from. Black conservatives would hate it for its open sexuality. White conservatives would hate it for the same reason, adding to it their own racist fears. And some white liberals would hate it for its objectification of the female, ignoring the song’s progressive political implications, which were so clear from the mock-Valley-Girl opening of the song.

So I made copies of Jones’ article and sent it to everyone at the company. I had conversations with Heidi Robinson, Rick’s publicist, trying to show how we could frame this single within the context of cultural Afrocentrism. As for Rick, he didn’t much care about that. As far as he was concerned, he had a perfect record: It would piss everybody off.

A few months later I was in California, on the Chaplin Stage at A&M where the video was being shot. Rick had hired Adam Bernstein, who had created this cartoonish set where mountains shaped like buttocks bumped up against an electric blue sky. Mix was understandably concerned. A cartoon was not what he had in mind. But what Mix was really upset about were the dancers. Here he had written a song about big butts, but even I was like, “These dancers got some tiny asses.” So Mix had beef with Adam about that, and when Bernstein tried to put a blonde wig on a Black model dressed up as a mermaid, Mix nearly walked off the set. This really was, for Mix, a celebration of Blackness, a concept that had gone very much over Bernstein’s head. Still when they put honey in the yellow dress up on the turntable, all was forgiven. Mix and his boys stood, open mouthed, as we watched the unfolding of pop music history.

“Baby Got Back” would go on to become a huge record, and the video an iconic statement of the 1990s. But what most people don’t know is that MTV only played it for a minute. They put it on the air and it got so many complaints that they got scared and yanked it. You wouldn’t know that now, what with VH-1 showing it in retrospectives and all. This song was resisted.

But it ended up, really, as the declaration of a new age; Lisa Jones’ article in song form. American culture really did change after that (and I must give props to Luke too, on the lowbrow side). In the 80s, a J-Lo or Beyonce would have been unthinkable. Now they are, in many ways, the norm. When I saw Beyonce’s “Crazy In Love” video for the first time, admiring her casting, I wiped the drool from my chin and thought back to the kind of girls we had on the Chaplin Stage. Boy, we were amateurs. But there’s a clear continuum between both videos, the Initial Protest Song to the Ultimate Victory Celebration. Uh-oh-uh-oh-uh-oh-oh-no-no.

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And so, you’ll pardon me if every time I see some girl’s big ass in a magazine or a video, I take it as a bit of a triumph. That’s just my personal perspective. I remember when we had to fight the “white boy video directors” to get some big asses INTO the video. (And as far as degrading women is concerned, the guy who really needs to put down the camera is R. Kelly.)

And you’ll pardon me if I don’t cringe when I hear 50 Cent or The Game on Hot 97. I remember when the only hip-hop you heard on pop radio was Hammer, Vanilla Ice and, yes, Sir Mix-A-Lot. I give thanks it did not stay that way. I am grateful to Cummings and Cloherty and Flex for, at least, making it sound hot and somewhat authentic. Even if they never did play my records.

Still, my perspective doesn’t change the fact that things have taken a turn for the worse.

What started as a celebration of Black and Latina beauty became, somehow, a race to see how much skin you could get into a video. (Even Mix went from “Baby Got Back” — a genuinely political song — to “Put ‘Em On The Glass” —a juvenile cars-n-chicks record.)

What started as the jubilant, iconoclastic voices of the hip-hop generation, finally unleashed upon the airwaves and in the print media; over the years degenerated into a shadow call-and-response of ridicule and recrimination, resulting in the murders of at least two of hip-hop’s greatest artists; and mix show Djs — once a ray of hope for the unestablished artist — quickly became as corrupted by the indie promotion game.

How did we get from there to here? How is it that Hot 97 could allow something as insipidly vile as the “Tsunami Song” or "Smackfest" to be broadcast without any real repercussions? And why has hip-hop media, year after year, made booty and beef its main course? How is it that many of the partnerships that fostered such great art — Iovine & Dre, after all, birthed “The Chronic”; Cummings and Flex gave hip-hop a home on the FM dial — now preside over a seemingly amoral environment where nothing really seems to matter: not quality, not intention, not consequence? Hip-hop used to be angry. Now it's just mean. Rap used to be passionate. Now it seems rapacious.

The question is why. Is this race-to-the-bottom in hip-hop yet another manifestation of an insidious cultural power-play by white elites? Or is it part of something bigger?

Much bigger. Stay tuned for part two…