• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 556 0

Coast groups of the day, and suggested a new pecking order, in which skills were honored but a stylish package was an equal priority. Hip-hop’s mainstream image in the bling era, to paraphrase the theme song to The Jeffersons, moved on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky. Sports jerseys were replaced by suits, and thuggish aliases gave way to pinkie-ring personas. Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy Records disseminated the style widely, transforming its artists from gangst-a to gangst-er. Puffy protégé Mase, formerly Mase Murder, became a white-suited Harlem mobster. Biggie Smalls’s cohorts, the Junior M.A.F.I.A., which launched Lil’ Kim and Lil’ Cease, towed the same line. Even Nas was caught up in the moment, mixing his literate street honesty with tales of gangster high life, and his street garb with fancier attire on two albums, I Am … The Autobiography and Nastradamus, both released in 1999. Many fans believed Nas’s classic first album, Illmatic (1994) to be a fluke until the rapper returned to his roots with Stillmatic in 2001.

At the same time, socially conscious hip-hop was left for dead. Acts such as Arrested Development and Digable Planets had charted hits in the early nineties, but aside from superstars like the Fugees, worthwhile “alternative” rappers like Black Sheep and Pharcyde received little record company promotion for their sophomore albums in the age of gangsta rap. Even the legacy of KRS-One—socially aware songs by rappers with a thug image—fell out of style, not to achieve any kind of mainstream chart success until Nas’s “I Can” in 2002.

Premillennial mainstream hip-hop was thug life lite: an allegiance to the fruits of rap success and violent imagery without a celebration of the violence and death-obsession that surrounded the Tupac-Biggie Smalls years. At the same time, hip-hop artists and fans were obsessed with “keeping it real”: not putting on airs, telling lies, or forgetting your roots, even as the scene moved inextricably further from those roots. From late 1997 through 1999, following the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, it was as if hip-hop went on spring break and sent MTV footage of the good times: pool parties, speedboats, and more squadrons of Hummer SUVs than the marines had in Operation Desert Storm. The climate was even sunny and friendly enough for the G-rated rap of Will Smith, who scored with “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” and “Miami” from 1997’s Big Willie Style, although by 1999’s Willennium he had become a punch line for that nice-guy image. The rare artist, such as Jay-Z, could be street and bling, while eccentrics like Busta Rhymes stood out from the pack with hits such as “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See.”

The dominant face of hip-hop in the late nineties reflected mainstream culture, whereas in the previous decades it had reflected a culture apart. Hip-hop’s material extravagance paralleled the technology-boom economy that turned lucky stockholders into lottery winners, while the benefits of a fatter economy were celebrated by all. Both the limitless Internet goldmine and the bling-bling universe broadcast on MTV portrayed a state of indelible rich bliss, but the high wore off and depression followed: The economy dipped, the dot-coms closed down or sold out, and hip-hop fans hungered for change.

Well-heeled rap imagery was soon mocked by fans and dropped by artists. Mase, Puffy and Bad Boy Records’ shining star, saw diminishing sales, as the label affiliation that once worked to his advantage became a hindrance. He was so disillusioned by his days in rap that after a multiplatinum debut, he retired and became a minister, just as his second album, Double Up, was released. The LOX, the Bad Boy Records act who wrote, among other hits, Puffy’s bling-bling anthem “It’s All About the Benjamins,” deserted Bad Boy publicly for a rap coalition closer to their thug-image roots, DMX’s Ruff Ryders. The LOX blamed Puff Daddy for their momentarily cleaned-up, well-suited image, and songs like “If You Think I’m Jiggy” (a reinterpretation of Rod Stewart’s “If You Think I’m Sexy”) and “Get This