Who’s carrying the political torch in hip-hop today?
OPINION - While hip-hop's critics are lament the lack of political substance in rap, some artists like Styles P find their commentary silenced by record labels...
By Seandra Sims
AllHipHop.com
Gina Torres and Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur contributed to this report.
An interesting thing happened to Styles P in 2005.
The rapper released “I’m Black,” a song that lit a fire in the heart and minds of hip-hop fans of all colors and cultures. Fans waited and waited – for a video and a formal single, which never materialized. “I’m Black,” featuring singer Marsha Ambrosius, was a ‘hood hit without question.
The song was true to the streets, had a catchy hook and was a true inspiration to people of all colors.
Styles never fully explained what happened, chalking it up to “politics and bulls**t” in an interview after his album Time Is Money dropped a year later.
Rap veteran Willie Dee of the Geto Boys agrees and explains there is a concerted effort to stop music like Style P’s from getting to the masses.
“It’s still out there – they just aren’t playing it on the radio. Way back when, [radio] program directors didn’t hesitate to play the music if it was good,” Willie Dee said during the recent Hip-Hop Honors in New York. “You could not deny Public Enemy’s sound.” Rapper Ice Cube, whose longevity in the game was cemented by smart personal and business transitions over the years, concurs with the Geto Boy’s reasoning.
“At some point, they didn’t want their kids to praise Chuck D (of Public Enemy). They didn’t want a poster of KRS-One or Ice-T or some of the more political rappers on their kid’s walls,” Cube says. “They didn’t want their kid’s to idolize these guys that were talking about equality when its all said and done. So they decided to push that kind of rap to the back, not letting us have those outlets. By 93-94, it was escapism rap…everything that was destructive…that became mainstream.”
At a time when hip-hop’s critics are lamenting over the lack of political substance in rap, some artists like Styles P find their commentary silenced by record labels or overshadowed by mainstream consumer demands.
“People are still making political rap — you’ve got people like Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Common, and definitely people like Immoral Technique who are still trying to tell people what’s going on in the world,” says UGK’s Bun B, who is known for sharing his political views. “But, I think the fact is people just don’t want to hear it. People are scared of the truth — you’d be surprised,” he adds.
Few would argue that hip-hop is filled with gritty truth, with most rappers hailing from poor inner cities, where crime, drugs, and injustice have always provided content for songs. In the golden age of political hip-hop – mid-to-late 80’s, and the red-black-and-green days of the early 90’s – the protest on songs like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” was clearly a response to harsh economic times and political leaders who didn’t seem to care about the plight of the ghetto.
During the happier, materialistic Clinton years, some say the political content in rap disappeared. In the late 90s, bling became king, and many rappers took a more “me-centric,” competitive stance that was less focused on the stories of oppressed people. The new “ghetto fabulous” lifestyle was personified best in the Hot Boys song “Bling Bling,” where Manny Fresh bragged to a mainly low-income audience that he was “tha n***a with tha Lex bubble/Candy coated helicopter/With tha leather cover.”
Cash Money Records co-founder Birdman defends the apolitical image the Hot Boys portrayed to youth, telling AllHipHop, “To me, I think music is an art and a culture. To me, a message and who it comes from are two different things. Guidance comes from your home – music can’t do that.”
Kaine from Atlanta’s Ying Yang Twins argues that the political messages are still there, even in that type of contemporary rap: “Our songs all have messages — never mind if you agree with them or not. There’s two sides to every story. So who cares if they love or hate, as long as they tune in — that’s how the industry looks at it.” Adds Birdman, “All rap still has a message — the message is to try to make it, ‘cause it’s hard out in these streets.”
Along with the bling, the mid-to-late 1990s was an unprecedented growth period for overtly “conscious” rap that played heavily on musicianship. It had a lighter, more acceptable sound, but the ‘hard in the streets’ message still played heavy. Within conscious rap, artists such as Black Star and Common painted lyrical pictures of the souls of ghetto people in their songs.
DJ Kid Capri notes that during that time, MCs with mainstream political marketability like Nas also emerged: ”[Nas] makes records that make you think, and make you change and see things in different ways,” Kid Capri tells AllHipHop.com. “It’s that you have to get it across to the masses, and how you do that is to have the perfect beat and hook.”
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