It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (5 page)

It’s startling that today, more than eighty-five years later, we are dealing with the same shadow, a shadow not even cast by our own Black bodies. A shadow that, as Locke writes, is “fiction,” but is paraded as real. And this is
reel
Blackness.

With rap videos, movies, music, news, advertisements, our minds have been shaped by one-dimensional, stereotypical, racist, and, most of all, limiting images of what Blacks can be. Because of the post-hip-hop generation’s overexposure to media-recepting technologies, these images—a multiplex of comfortable violence, sexism, machismo, and conspicuous consumption—bombard us 24-7. Although they may not
reflect our reality, their sustained and continuous presence can determine it—determine the real.

The reel becomes the real.

In 1994
, at twelve years old, I stayed in the house for nearly a year. When I did go outside, I didn’t wander beyond the ring of our home phone.

Why?

Because I couldn’t miss the call from my brother.

Brrrinnnnggg. Brrrinnnnggg
.

I was the first to pick it up.

“ ’Ello,” I would say in a budding, out-of-breath voice.

“You have a collect call from the state correctional facility,” the operator would say in monospeak. A smile would split across my face as I pressed 1 and accepted the call.

“What’s up, lil’ brother?” My big brother would ask sincerely. A few minutes into our conversation, he’d say the magic words: “Play somethin’ for me,” and he called the other inmates to the phone so they could huddle up and listen to my selections. I remember putting the phone to the speaker on my boom box and bumpin’ “Life’s a Bitch” off of Nas’s
Illmatic:

As a preteen, I became a remote prison DJ and as I rocked the crowd of inmates, I began to see just how powerful hip hop was as my brother and the other inmates erupted in awe, repeating, like scripture, the lines: “Keepin’ it real, packin’ steel, gettin’ high / ’Cause life’s a bitch and then you die.” It was clear then, as it is now, that the
hip-hop generation was using rap music, almost exclusively, to shape, develop, and define both public personas and personal identities.

Although for the hip-hop generation, “keeping it real” became the ultimate barometer of one’s character, the post-hip-hop generation realizes that because we do not control how “real” is constructed, defined, and disseminated, this image is not real at all. Rap may serve as the most visceral example of the performance of reel. As writer William Jelani Cobb, in
To the Break of Dawn
, writes, “‘Real’ is to the rap industry as ‘All-Natural’ is to the fast food supplier, as ‘New and Improved’ is to the ad agency. As ‘I Solemnly Swear’ is to the politician.” Hip-hop culture, and in particular rap music, is particularly unique in this because “The blues artist may sing about evil, but is not required to be it or live it. The rapper is judged by a different set of credentials—the ability to live up to his own verbal badness. To get down to the denominator, hip hop has come to understand itself in the most literal of terms,” concludes Cobb.

“I’m trapped between me as a person and me as J.O. the rapper,” Baltimore emcee John Jones, who has just come home from serving jail time, tells me. “When I was inside [prison], I was rappin’ a lot more positive. But now that I’m out, my rhymes is more on some negative stuff because that’s what people want to hear. It’s a different kind of prison,” he explains. This prison is erected by the need to respond to stereotypical and racist portrayals of Blackness and maintained by our cultural obsession with the “real” and inability to see through the traps. This crowds and distorts not only the aesthetic space that Black artists create in, but also the average Black woman or man, like J.O. or my brother for example. Under the banner of “keeping it real,” the hip-hop generation has been conditioned to act out a way of life that is not real at all. The hip-hop
industry
(as opposed to the hip-hop
community)
has been successful in framing an authentic Black identity that is not intellectual, complex, creative, educated, or diverse, but a
monolith of violence (only against other Blacks!) and sexism. These images are not just harmful domestically, but are beamed around the world as a statement about universal Blackness. As a student in London I experienced, firsthand, the effects of this global distortion when my Nepalese roommate, once he discovered we’d be living together, asked to be transferred because he “feared for his life.” After a discussion, he confessed that his irrational fears were not the result of ever being around Black folks (he hadn’t), but consuming, in Nepal, the negative images about African-Americans. “I thought you’d shoot me,” he confessed to me later.

This ethos translates to hip-hop films, as well. Hood films, unlike, say, Italian mafia flicks, are supposed to capture and define what it means to be Black. Take, for example, the fictional film
Menace II Society
whose official tagline was “This is the truth. This is what’s real.” Filmmaker Byron Hurt, whose documentary
Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes
premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, introduces the film with this observation:

So why do we continue to stay in these boxes? Perhaps it’s because of the American golden rule: those with the gold make the rules. So, essentially, white teenage boys, the primary consumers of rap music, spend billions of dollars on images and music produced by white corporations that reinforce these stereotypes. Fixed on meeting bottom
lines, corporations in turn leverage their excessive amount of capital and power to produce, perpetuate, promote whatever’s on sale—thus employing a disproportionate influence on our minds.

This process of white consumerism, which is age-old, has taught Blacks that there are hefty profits to be made by living
down
to white expectations. Many of today’s artists feel as prominent Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Fauset did when her first novel,
There Is Confusion
, was rejected because, as one editor put it, “white readers don’t expect Negroes to be like this.”

“Yo, I’ll kill you nigga… I’m moving kilos of coke… I’m strapped with AKs, semis, Glocks, shit from Russia… yaddy, yaddy, yah,” J. O. tells me about the topics young Black rappers feel they have to discuss. “That’s the shit that most niggas is on. Why? Even though it ain’t true, ’Cause if it was you’d be under the jail, they know, just like I know, that that’s the shit that sells. Negativity. Drugs. Guns. Bitches. There really is not an alternative. You either rap like that or you don’t sell. That’s where you gotta come from if you wanna make it.”

“Even if that’s not really you?” I ask.

“Yup,” he confirms.

My brother felt the same way.

In the
hip-hop world, keeping it real has become the measuring stick for one’s connection to the ghetto. The ghetto has become the repository of all that is real, and everything else is not. The problem with this is that the ghetto in mass media is not the real ghetto.

The ghetto doesn’t exist and the Gulf War never happened. French theorist Jean Baudrillard shocked people when he published the book
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
. Baudrillard argued that the war was largely a TV event, experienced by the masses more like a video game than an actual situation of war. Baudrillard explained this theory as hyperreality and asserted that we can no longer distinguish
between imitation and reality—and that we often prefer the imitations because they have been gutted of any societal consequences.

The ghetto then, as most experience it through mass media, doesn’t exist either. It, too, is reel. Wrenched out of its sociopolitical and racial injustice context, it is transformed into an urban playground. It allows people to listen to “ghetto music,” without examining the issues that allow such a place to exist.

“What makes it so difficult is to know that we need to be doing other things…. They want [Black artists] to shuck and jive, but they don’t want us to tell the real story because they’re connected to it,” says rapper David Banner, who is a graduate of Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he also served as president of the student government. Banner is right on; whites and even upwardly mobile Blacks who consume reel “ghetto” music have made a fetish out of Black disenfranchisement. And because the music is
lite
, they are not forced to deal with the reality that it is racist policies—exclusionary zoning laws, real estate industry discrimination, redlining, parasitic corporate development, and the Department of Transportation’s highway projects that tear apart viable Black communities—that create the ghetto in the first place.

On the Black-hand side, Blacks in the ghetto see a highly stylized, depoliticized version of their environment, and on the other, Blacks outside of the ghetto are told their experience is inauthentic. In this market-driven environment, truly important ideas about love, caring, and service are disregarded as incidental or lost completely. For those of us who are already battling issues of inadequate education or poverty, warding off these harmful ideological ideas is even more challenging.

This might help explain a recent article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
entitled “Suicide Rate Climbing for Black Teens: Move to Middle Class May Cause Identity Crisis,” which details a federal study that
shows the suicide rate for Black teens has been rising dramatically. Unlike white and Latino teens, the Black teens who commit suicide tend to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds than the general African-American population. Many social psychologists speculate that this increase is due to identity crises perpetuated by the mass media.

In bell hooks’s provocative analysis on Black masculinity,
We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
, she furthers the discussion, stating:

Writer Kheven Lee LaGrone believes that middle-class “Black teens are stuck between the plantation and the ghetto.” In the article “The 90s Minstrels,” he asks,

The real Blackness hooks and LaGrone write about, and that my brother spent his life chasing, isn’t real at all. It’s reel: from the ignorant, womanizing, hypermasculine thug to the oversexed, loud, quick-to-get-an-attitude-over-nothing bitch. It’s all reel.

In the case of my brother, who is a few years north of thirty, I hold on to grains of hope that someday he might turn things around, redefine himself and climb out of the prefabricated box he’s in. For some though, it’s too late.

The late
Russell Tyrone Jones—also known as Joe Bananas, Dirt McGirt, Dirt Dog, Ason Unique, Big Baby Jesus, Osirus, and most commonly Ol’ Dirty Bastard—died frontin’. Much like my brother, ODB spent his adult life dancing between jail, welfare, and stints with rap success. And also like my brother, ODB vehemently denied his middle-class upbringing, and instead promoted a poverty-stricken, dangerous one (as if being Black wasn’t enough). In “Caught Up,” he raps:

“I was furious,” said William Jones, ODB’s father. “You know, that story about him being raised in the Fort Greene [Brooklyn] projects on welfare until he was a child of thirteen was a total lie,” he added. When Jones talked to his wife about their son’s bogus claims of ghettoship, her response was simple: “He did it for publicity.” Of course he did. ODB understood that boasting racist and classist stereotypes about Blacks would reaffirm them in the minds of a largely white consumer market. This would explain the correlation between ODB’s run-ins with the law and simultaneous spikes in record sales.

ODB’s story reminds us that most artists feel that in order to “make it,” they need to portray a stereotypical image that is marketable to white America. As a result, artists like ODB downplay their middleclass origins and artists who are from the ghetto avoid portraying and calling out the savage injustices that created their condition. When
Time
magazine covered gangsta rapper Ice-T’s upbringing, they noted that “Although he lived in Windsor Hill, a middle-class section of L.A., he claims he began hanging with a rough crowd. He plays up these tough-guy roots to legitimize his hard raps.”