You Always Hurt The Ones You Love

“You bitch,” he said.

I had just finished reading to my friend at Atlantic Records the review I had written about his group, Little Brother, in the Washington Post.

“It’s a good review,” I said.

“No, it isn’t. It’s negative.”

“Are you kidding? I used the word ‘genius,’” I replied.

“Yeah, but you ended negative. Fuckin’ writers.”

Truth is, he’s right. I was much harder on Little Brother last week than I was on Lil’ Kim today. But the irony is that I’ll never listen to Kim’s album anywhere near as much as I’ll listen to “The Minstrel Show.”

Not that “The Naked Truth” isn’t a good album. It’s probably Kim’s best. But that’s not really saying much. Kim has always been much more important for who she is (the best female mc) and what she represents (a psychological tie to a dead icon) than for her music. But I didn’t have many expectations for “The Naked Truth,” and she easily exceeded all of them.

On the other hand, the Little Brother experience is all about expectation. They shoulder the hopes of hip-hop fans who long for substance, exactly the kind of thing we don’t get from Kim. But Little Brother, despite years of labor on backpack rap’s chitlin’ circuit, is still a bit like unripe fruit. They haven’t yet been able to do the thing that even Kim has done on her new album — write something anthemic (and by that I mean an anthem that transcends their current audience).

That being said, it’s Little Brother’s music that swims around in my head as I take the train or walk around the city. And I think if you cherry picked the best songs from their three albums, you could make an incredible one. But, perhaps to a fault, I expect more from Little Brother because I see their potential and their pretensions. I mean, if Lil’ Kim can write a hit record, Little Brother should be able to. Or else, don’t whine about the current state of hip-hop at all. Put up or shut up.

When my artists used to argue with me about whether or not a song was a “single” or not, they would go to lengths to defend their 32-bar verses and self-centered themes. And I would say to them, look, there are certain incontrovertible properties of the popular song that haven’t changed for hundreds of years, and hold true from genre to genre, whether folk or punk, ballad or street jam: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, motherfucker. And have something to say. Stray from that at your own peril.

That — in the long run — is what has created the phenomenon of “backpack rap,” and the whole schism between commercial and conscious hip-hop. Not some diabolical scheme to dumb down the music. But that otherwise intelligent artists, in their rebellion from the norm, have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. They think they’re rejecting formula. But they’re really rejecting law.

And no one is above the law, baby.

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.

The Bridge to Gretna

It is the ugliest incident of the entire New Orleans debacle.

As the city descended into chaos and squalor in the days following the hurricane, 200 people from New Orleans -- mostly Black -- were told by police to cross the Greater New Orleans Bridge over the Mississippi River on foot. There, police told them, they would be met by buses to whisk them away to shelter and aid.

Here's who met them instead: a phalanx of sheriffs from the neighboring white suburb of Gretna, guns drawn.

The incident was reported by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, two white tourists from San Francisco who also happened to be emergency medical services workers attending an EMS conference in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions.

As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation... We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge... They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

To make matters worse, after they had retreated down the bridge and set up camp, the Gretna authorities pursued them:

Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, "Get off the fucking freeway." A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims," they saw "mob" or "riot." We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" attitude was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements, but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

On CNN, Larry Bradshaw quoted the Gretna sheriff as saying:

"If we let these people in, our city would look just like New Orleans: burned, looted and pillaged.”

Through the interview with Slonsky and Bradshaw, CNN's Anderson Cooper seemed incredulous. But the Gretna Chief of Police, Arthur Lawson, confirmed as much in his interview:

"Our city was locked down and secured for the sake of the citizens that left their valuables to be protected by us. Our borders were closed for the safety of our citizens and their property."

There you have it, the American sickness laid bare. Property over life. Especially when those lives are of people who don't own property. Especially when those lives are of desperate Black folks made so by centuries of white fear.

Not since the Boston school busing crisis of 1975 has there been a more graphic display of racial turf war in the United States. Usually, the urban/suburban tension is played out one arrest at a time, wherever Black folks stray into white territory: a car stopped here, a pedestrian arrested there. But it's all just a miniature version of the Great Primal Fear: Black people marching en masse into the suburbs. Here in New Orleans was the ultimate white fear played out in real life.

For anyone who claims that there were no "racial aspects" to the New Orleans tragedy, this makes those racial underpinnings explicit. All the cute little media catchphrases like "playing the race card" are just verbal exercises in denial anyway. The presence of race as a factor in American events is something that should never need proving. Want to know why the electoral map looks the way it does on election day? Race. Want to know why Americans have a gun obsession? Race. Want to know why America has such incredible economic inequities? Race.

Race isn't a blemish on our nation's history; race defines our history. Race isn't an "aspect"; it is the canvas on which our history is painted.

It is the story behind every story.

Slum Clearance, The Natural Way

Here's the thing about Katrina that few are talking about.

When the New Orleans basin is finally drained, and most of the ramshackle structures that make up the housing stock in the poorest areas are marked for demolition, does anyone in their right mind think that the majority of New Orleans citizens will have an opportunity to return?

No, when the rebuilding starts, it will not be for the actual citizens of New Orleans. It will instead be trumpeted as a developers bonanza, a tabula rasa, a slate wiped clean, a chance to begin again.

Robert Moses once drew lines around poor but thriving neighborhoods, called them slums, and wiped them off the map to build expressways and housing projects. He threw nearly a half-million New Yorkers from their homes and neighborhoods. Moses might well have liked the opportunity Katrina now presents.

New Orleans, when and if it is rebuilt, will rise again as an upper-middle class Disneyland caricature of itself (not that parts of the French Quarter aren't that already), with the kind of insidious development we see across American suburbia.

And the masses of Orleans citizens now taking refuge in shelters across the south will not be able to afford the admission to that party.

It will be a New Orleans not only wiped clean of its history, but of the people who made it.

Hooray for Kanye

So he's a bit of a whiner. A tad full of himself, maybe? Crying, as they say, with two loaves of bread under his arm?

Who cares. As of today, this kid is officially my hero.

Last week, he steps out on that shakiest of limbs in hip-hop to stand against homophobes.

Then, two days ago, he releases an album that is an unabashed personal statement in a genre that has increasingly become a paint-by-the-numbers affair.

And last night he basically told Bush to go fuck himself on network TV. Emotional, inarticulate, blathering, unscripted... perfect.

Contrary to what my good friends have said (and now retracted), I'm glad this guy has a mic in his hand.