loosie: words: Sleeping with the Enemy

Sleeping with the Enemy

Finally accepted by the mass media, hiphop has lost its rebellious edge.

by Douglas Passion | 2002.10.18

Hiphop used to be dangerous. It was only a few short years ago that magazines grimly predicted the musical genre's predilection for violence and sexual depravity would inevitably corrupt the impressionable minds of America's youth. Radio stations proudly advertised that their rotations contained "absolutely no rap" and legions of poll-watching politicians were quick to flambé popular rappers as effigies of moral decay, urban violence and casual drug abuse.

The media's relationship with hiphop has dramatically changed since Bill Clinton feuded on the campaign trail with Sista Souljah and the law-enforcement community was thrust into uproar by Ice-T's "Cop Killer" track. Hiphop emerged unscathed and defiant from the furnace of public scrutiny during the early nineties and has since evolved into the most dominant influence on current global youth culture.

As hiphop's influence spread through American culture unabated, the same media that branded the classic album The Great Adventures of Slick Rick a "truly hateful record" (Rolling Stone, 1989) had little choice but to accept the music's validity as a force to be reckoned with. Elements of the once-counter-culture movement now materialized in fashion, sports and language. Rappers became actors. Rock music, once the recipient of similar contempt, adopted many trademarks of hiphop and rode the fusion to striking commercial success.

Despite the astounding advancement of a musical form widely considered by skeptics to be little more than a pelvis-thrusting and foul-mouthed upstart, none of the dire predictions claimed by such incendiary articles as Newsweek's "Rap Rage" came to fruition. With a distinct dearth of white teens shooting up crackhouses on the cul-de-sacs of suburbia while hopped up on a potent blend of profanity and black rage, the mass media moved on to other apocalyptical Caucasian-endangering trends such as goth nihilism and the scourge of ecstasy tabs. Thus, despite an occasional flare up of half-hearted protest, the business of hiphop presently operates essentially unfettered by the opposition of a hysterical media.

Whereas the saccharine anthems of Heavy D. and The Fresh Prince were once the only songs to garner commercial radio play, the current charts are chock-full of material referencing drug-peddling, violence and sex. While the abatement of puritanical restrictions and outright censorship is unquestionably a positive development, the mass media's acceptance of music once deemed controversial also took the wind out of the "fuck the radio and the popcharts" mentality. Now hiphop is in a kingsized bed noisily fucking the radio and the popcharts.

In the days of yore, when hiphop was still viewed as a pervasive threat, a sort of bunker mentality took root within the music's community of artists and listeners. With critics and jazz musicians denounced rap artists as untalented pirates who plundered other people's catalogues in lieu of playing their own instruments and the media slanderously portraying the music's participants as violent and oversexed hate-mongers, hiphop celebrated its outsider status. The quest for respectability helped foster an environment in which an artist's work was viewed not only as indicative of their personal talents but also as a representation of hiphop's authenticity as a musical genre. Victories for artists became victories for hiphop. When the Digable Planets received a Grammy Award in 1993, there was a collective head-nod from the hiphop community - finally, a "real" representative had been recognized. Yet Dr. Dre's The Chronic was unfortunately overlooked.

While one could conceivably argue the image of Ja-Rule hobnobbing with Pauly Shore and a bevy of blonde beauties at the Viper Room is more socio-economically threatening to white America than Chuck D. scowling from behind prison bars on the It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back album cover, the newest generation of artists emanate a decided lack of anti-establishment zeal in comparison to their rap forefathers. The current zeitgeist of hiphop is steeped in an undeniable complacency - and for good reason. Sales have never been higher, the payola-fueled radio makes songs instant chart-toppers and the mainstream media appears to have finally acknowledged the cultural importance of the artform (or at least called off their attack dogs). As one would expect, few artists seem concerned with rocking the luxury yacht.

As a result of the newfound comfort zone in which hiphop happily finds itself, current artists no longer deal with the dreaded quandary that their kindred faced a decade ago - anyone who became too popular risked the alienating label of "sell-out". The same commercial aspirations that sent Big Daddy Kane's career spiraling into the abyss of irrelevance (and certainly produced some horrid musical results) are now routinely embraced by today's performers. The symbiotic relationships between self-described "thugs" such as Jadakiss and Styles of the Lox and international shoe companies come quickly to mind as examples of alliances that would have been nearly unthinkable in the early Nineties. It's doubtful Reebok would have chosen to be represented by dudes who talked about moving so much cocaine that it needed to be weighed on whale-scales.

And although the increased freedom of expression has at times yielded exciting dividends, the lax restrictions on codes of conduct and diminished sense of self-policing appear to have sapped the artform of its fist-raising edginess. Hiphop went from angrily pounding on the door to relaxing on the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace sipping a glass of Courvoisier.

Without the venomous pen of a biased and woefully misinformed media to rebel against, hiphop is no longer forced to proverbially circle the wagons. But instead of exploring new terrain or building anything of true substance, hiphop has essentially basked in the serenity of its newly earned respectability. In order for rap music to again become a tangible threat to the status-quo sensibilities of America, hiphop must risk its coveted position in the spotlight to rally against a new enemy -- complacency.