Assessing a musical genre on moral criteria is simplistic. It is narrow-minded. Most often, it means setting useless boundaries, spoiling one's pleasure and, at the end of the day, missing the point. It is legitimate, though. Sure, hip-hop is many other things. Nonetheless, is has lyrics, images, and meanings. For better or, more frequently, for worse, in the US or elsewhere, it often intrudes into public debates, tearing apart those who consider it a moral disaster, and the others.
Tricia Rose is a professor of African Studies at the Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and she authored an important book about hip-hop called Black Noise and published in 1994. And a decade later, she decided to engage into the rap debate, or the hip-hop wars, as she calls them. She did not choose side, though. She decided to analyze the arguments of both camps: the detractors of hip-hop, who think it incites to violence and spoils the American values, or the status of women; but also its defenders, those who consider that rap only reveals the realities of the American society, or more particularly its African-American segment.
In her book, Tricia Rose dismisses both camps. The detractors, according to her, come mostly from the retrograde side of America. Their criticism of hip-hop only renews old racist prejudices and clichés, related to the Black community. But she also criticizes the supporters of rap, whom she considers equally blind and irresponsible. She believes that both factions play a similar role: they both promote a negative and degrading image of the African-American culture.
Truth be told, rap has significantly changed since Rose supported it in Black Noise. By the beginning of the new century, one kind of hip-hop supplanted all others: the gangsta one, in its most extreme, dirty and immoral forms; a sort of rap limited to the mindless celebration of a harmful trinity: the gangster, the pimp, and the ho. According to the author, this is a perversion, a cancer, an evil thing. By comforting all the old fantasies and prejudices about the black people, it ruins all efforts to emancipate the African-Americans.
To address this, Rose would like to promote other forms of hip-hop, she considers as more progressive, positive, and respectful of women; forms that have been marginalized over time, and rejected into the underground. She is not opposed to an ardent and protesting kind of rap. But she wants it to be constructive, and not complacent to the flaws of the human kind, mentioning the likes of Mos Def, Jean Grae, and Lupe Fiasco as potential role models. By the end of the book, she goes as far as listing a set of initiatives she considers as worthwhile, and on par with her own agenda.
This, actually, is an old song. This is the never-ending fight between the Ancients and the Moderns. Between the supporters of conscious hip-hop and the fans of gangsta rap. Between the educated urban centers à la New-York, and the more carnal Dirty South. Tricia Rose - nothing surprising with an intellectual based in New-England, also a mixed-raced person, possibly torn by her dual identity - is only formalizing the point of view of the first camp, the losing one.
She seems to attribute the defeat of progressive over ignorant rap to some plot from the entertainment industry. According to her, record companies snubbed the conscious rappers, preferring to promote gangsta ones, considered as easier to market. This is lazy thinking. By saying so, the author uses the argument of losers: the conspiracy theory. She blames others. The failure of "intelligent rap" is attributed to the leftists' nemesis: the big business, corporate America.
This is wrong. The industry, originally, did not welcome gangsta rap. It finally used it, but under market pressure. As usual - i.e., quite late - it only followed trends set by fans. Jerry Heller, Jimmy Iovine and others had to fight against peers, to have the potential of gangsta rap recognized. And it is thanks to labels such as No Limit and Cash Money that hip-hop finally turned über-gangsta. The industry, in reality, loves polished rappers. Even when they go the gangster way, commercial rappers need to display well-thought social content. Please refer to the recent hype around Black Hippy.
Tricia Rose sets a so-called underground - which would be sane, pure and conscientious - against the perversion, demagogy and amorality of mainstream rap. This is that same story, that old cliché. The reality, though, is more complex.
The underground she refers to, actually, is just one underground among many others. It is even not a real underground: it is largely sponsored by mainstream media, and the industry itself. Several rappers she is listing as role models, are on major labels. On the opposite, the underground is full of paroxysmal gangsta rappers, exploring to the extreme the esthetics of evil. One just has to compare the underground mixtapes of some rap stars, to their more civilized albums, to realize how much her theory is flawed.
This truth hurts Rose, a scholar whose aim is to promote the African-Americans, and to save them from stereotypes coming from the slavery and segregation times. It is not new, though, that Black artists play with characters such as gangsters, pimps and hoes. They existed way before rap music, in the 60's and 70's, in novels authored by the likes of Iceberg Slim or Donald Goines, or in Blaxploitation movies. And these were all Black works, made by Black people, for Black people. At that stage, these were definitely not White fantasies aimed at young White guys living in the suburbs.
Other points in this book are questionable, starting with its very fundament: the assumption that gangsta rap has a deep influence on its audience. Some people, it is true, may take hip-hop's clichés at face value. The author mentions some examples among her own students, White fans of rap, who believed that it was a reliable reflection of the African-American realities. As a matter of fact, in his own book, the rapper J-Zone, admitted he had made his own the sexist and homophobic mentality of rap; he doesn't believe that all rap fans were able to appraise it with a distant and critical view.
But how deep does such an influence really operate? We just don't know, and Tricia Rose neither. Her thesis is based on no study, no proven fact, no number. She just relies on random examples, and her own feelings. We can easily quote others, who claim the complete opposite. Dan Charnas (The Big Payback) for example, and Steve Toute (The Tanning Of America), both pretend that hip-hop, despite its bad reputation, contributed like no other to the ascent of Black people; that no-one is less racist than a rap music fan.
The author opts for a comfortable position: the arbiter's, the judge's. She wants to be equidistant from the reactionaries who despise rap, and from its numbest fans. But we could do the same with her, and chose to lump together the first party, and Rose's own. We could present them for what they are: two sides of the same coin. Both kinds of criticisms of hip-hop, indeed, the conservative and the liberal, are built on the same postulate. They overestimate the message; they consider that rap would be, inherently, the musical translation of the Black social realities; that it would be its spokesperson, or perceived this way. But is this really true?
Tricia Rose explores in many ways the relationship between hip-hop and its audience. She questions its impacts on both its Black and White fans. She wonders about what it says of the African-Americans. But she omits another question, arguably the major one: what does rap say about the White majority? What does it say about the young middle-class people who are its consumers? What does their fascination for hip-hop characters tell about them? What does satisfy them with the gaudy display of gangsters, pimps and hoes?
Music, as all arts, belongs to the world of dreams and fantasies. It offers ways out to people. It helps them to escape from their trivial lives and the weight of social norms. The success of the most absurd forms of gangsta rap shows, actually, that the winner is its total opposite: an excessively moral society, where sexual impulses are under control, where gender equality and the normalization of homosexuality are - though not fully realized - largely accepted as moral obligations; in other words, a society where the progressive precepts favored by Rose have become a standard.
She is perfectly right, when she considers that rap music is, partly, a reaction to progressive values. Rap is an asylum, that provides people with the bliss of the forbidden; a bliss strengthened by its rooting into the reality of the ghetto, a world perceived, rightly or wrongly, as parallel to ours.
Tricia Rose, actually, is like these people who just found out that their lovers are different from what they dreamed of. She would like rap music to be her own fantasy. Negating its strengths and originality, she would like to entrust it with missions that, traditionally, the elite wants to give to cultural movements: she would like to change it into a propaganda channel. Or, on the contrary, she would like it to be pure art, something entirely focused on its esthetical side.
Tricia Rose would like that hip-hop goes the jazz way, that it becomes something clean and respectable, on par with the liberal standards of its time; in other words, a dead music.