Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [58]
It is sunny and brisk, and the road is busy. The snowbanks lining the road gleam under the blue winter sky. A rusted-out red Toyota sputters next to me; I hear the tattered muffler above the noise of the road and the stereo. Two black men in the car talk intently and nod. They lag behind, then cross from the left lane to the right. They drive beside me, then ahead. A red light stops the traffic, and the Toyota stops next to the Mercedes. The driver leans out of his window and talks to the one-way glass. Eminem rolls his window down and nods slowly as he talks. He is handed a tape. The traffic light changes and the cars drive off.
“Those guys shopping for a record deal?” I ask him later.
“Yeah. They had a tape they wanted to give me,” Eminem says. “That’s cool. I did that shit, too. Everywhere that I might meet someone, I’d show up with a tape. I never gave them to rappers, but everybody else that I could. That’s what you gotta do, man. You gotta stay hungry, you gotta get your shit out there, you gotta show up places. You gotta just live for rappin’, man. After my uncle Ronnie got me into it, that was it for me. As fucked up as shit got for me, I just lived for rap. It’s the only thing that got me through the day.”
FROM DAY ZERO, hip-hop was built on alienation and freedom. The freedom of expression in the face of oppression, the freedom to chronicle an unseen history. It was and remains the voice of the minority majority living in cities, born in a mecca wasteland called the South Bronx. Today it also speaks to citizens from Kalamazoo to Cambodia. In its earliest incarnation, hip-hop reflected the mores and traditions of a fragment of society within a greater one, and like other grassroots influences that altered the majority culture, from the blues to outsider art, it was created in isolation. Today hip-hop is an attitude, a lifestyle, a stance against the mainstream, and a voice of anger, frustration, alienation, sex, and rebellion for youth of all ages and backgrounds.
“To me, hip-hop is modern, mainstream, young, urban American culture,” Russell Simmons, hip-hop godfather and Def Jam CEO, wrote in his autobiography, Life and Def. “I know there’s a lot of ideas there, but hip-hop’s impact is as broad as that description suggests.… The beauty of hip-hop, and a key to its longevity, is that within the culture there is a lot of flexibility. So Run-D.M.C. and A Tribe Called Quest and N.W.A and Mary J. Blige and Luther Campbell and the Beastie Boys can all wear different clothes, use different slang, and have a different kind of cultural significance. Yet all are recognizable as being part of hip-hop.”
You can’t knock the hustle: Jay-Z in 2000.
Hip-hop, in comparison to other African-American musical traditions—blues, jazz, and rock and roll—has remained closest to its roots for the thirty years it has existed. It is possibly the most potent, least altered African-American cultural expression in history. Hip-hop has evolved technically, but its basic theme has remained: self-improvement with style. The earliest rap records, like those released a week ago, were about getting money, living better, having a party, having sex, defying mainstream society, and looking really good while you do it. In the beginning, hip-hop culture and rap music unified young black and Hispanic men and women, the original b-boys and -girls, at DIY parties in parks throughout New York City’s five boroughs. It was celebratory, an alternative form of dance music to the synthetic disco and formulaic R&B of the time. It grew into sonic reportage with a scope that embraced the world the same way it did the end of the block. Rap broadcast inner-city realities and established a rebel stance—that no hardship would keep the minorities who pioneered hip-hop from living, to the fullest, on