Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [65]
The East Coast acts, from Public Enemy to De La Soul, made huge inroads with white American teens, feeding the interest Run-D.M.C. had sparked. The sociopolitical agenda and hard edge of Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions in particular dovetailed with the tastes of white punk-rock fans hooked on the Clash, and of those suburban rebels looking for a more extreme expression of anti-authoritarianism. By the release of their second album, 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy’s bombastic sonics and Chuck D’s lyrical rhetoric had set African-American pride to a revolutionary beat. They combined the social consciousness of Martin Luther King Jr., the stoic call for change of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the military imagery of the Black Panther Party. The group’s dense musical collage, Chuck D’s forceful baritone, and Flavor Flav’s comic foil coalesced the entirety of hip-hop: its roots, the conditions of its present, and the possibilities of its future. In the same late-eighties “golden age,” avant-garde groups such as De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers, and A Tribe Called Quest—three groups who collaborated with other artists and collectively dubbed themselves the Native Tongues—expressed Afrocentricity through a bohemian perspective. The Tongues’ intellectual cynicism and humor took center stage, backed by a musical palette that integrated everything from jazz to Steely Dan. The Native Tongues and the artists like them who followed (Brand Nubian, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Arrested Development, and Digable Planets), crossed over with white college audiences. Literary-minded music fans of all ages and backgrounds dove deep into De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, a masterwork of pop music snippits and wit made in the brief age before music publishing lawyers realized the profit potential in sample clearances. Whether it was the smooth, soulful storytelling of A Tribe Called Quest or the blood sport of N.W.A, in the late eighties and early nineties, rap won a tremendous number of fans, mostly male, in white American suburbs. It was an obvious match. At a time when more young black men were convicted of crimes in America than any other demographic group, even rap that wasn’t overtly violent sounded like black men shouting, a sound that scared parents and peers more than the fastest punk rock or heavy metal. At the same time that rap appealed to its new fans for its message, it spoke of real American issues—poverty, crime, racism—that hadn’t quite filtered out to many quaint suburbs. Compared to rap music, the rock-and-roll rebellion of Metallica and Guns n’ Roses safely basked in its own excess.
Public Enemy wound down after member Professor Griff’s anti-Semitic remarks in 1989 (Jews were “responsible for the majority of wickedness around the globe”) did irreparable damage to the group creatively and publicly. The thirst for shocking, hardcore rap was soon to be quenched by West Coast gangsta rap. Over party-hearty James Brown and Parliament/Funkadelic samples, gangland storytelling equated social consciousness with a glorified view of the outlaw reality that has dominated hip-hop since the nineties.
Gangsta rap celebrated ghetto outlaw tales, both real and imagined, stories of men thriving by their own design in the face of every conceivable obstacle. In the early eighties, Kool G Rap, Too short, and Ice-T personified the stance that would become gangsta, but it was Andre “Dr. Dre” Young’s musicality that perfected it and, like Run-D.M.C., connected