MUSIC-U.S.: Rappers Question Genre’s Bleak State

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Sep 24 1996 (IPS) - The death of a prominent star, attacks from politicians, declining sales and critical dismay: Rap music has had to face just about every indicator of decline this summer.

Seven years after the group Niggaz With Attitude shocked the rap world by breaking previous limits on obscenity and violence with the first ‘gangsta rap’ album, ‘Straight Outta Compton’ (on Ruthless Records), the world of the gangstas seems dim indeed.

The businessman/rapper behind that album, Eric ‘Eazy-E’ Wright, died of AIDS last year, and his death lingers over one of this year’s few hit albums, ‘E 1999 Eternal’, made on Ruthless by his proteges, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.

One of the few other hits this month, ironically enough, also involves a dead rapper: ‘All Eyez on Me’ (Death Row/Interscope), by the young rapper Tupac ‘2Pac’ Shakur, who died last week after being shot four times by unknown assailants in a passing car.

Shakur was just one of several artists repeatedly criticised by politicians, including Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole, for his violent lyrics and anti-authority, and sometimes anti-police, lyrics.

This election year, the level of invective has stepped up again, with Shakur’s Death Row label only one of many prominent targets of politicians and parents’ groups nationwide.

But the sorry state of the genre also reflects the fall-out from years of image-building in which college-educated lyricists like O’Shea ‘Ice Cube’ Jackson, or the ballet-trained accomplished actor Shakur, were made to pose as thugs.

Meanwhile, rap audiences — including a surprising number of suburban, white teenagers — have stuck loyally to gangsta rap, shunning much of the politically-charged music provided years ago by black nationalist acts like Public Enemy and KRS-One.

The need for tougher images may have helped to fuel a war, conducted largely in the media, between the California-based Death Row record label and a New York competitor, Bad Boy Entertainment. (Police have not found any suspects in Shakur’s killing, and deny evidence of any connection to the feud.)

Some rappers are learning the lesson of the cost of such non- stop posing. “Hip-hop could never be a way of life,” rap the group A Tribe Called Quest on their new album, ‘Beats, Rhymes and Life’ (Jive/Arista). “It can’t teach you how to raise a child, or treat a wife.”

Tribe’s peers, the suburban New York group De La Soul, offer a similar sentiment on their new album, ‘Stakes Is High’ (Tommy Boy), in which they seek to replace the ghetto stance of “keeping it real” with one of “keeping it right”.

“Keeping it real”, slang for behaving with integrity and loyalty to one’s neighbourhood, has over the years frequently become a synonym for macho posturing. That attitude, Tribe argues on a recent song, has merely produced “phony rappers”, who sacrifice insight and lyrical wit in favour of cliches about guns, girls and gangs.

Many of the recent successes in the rap world have come from groups who consciously shun the gangsta pose, including the Fugees, a reggae-influenced, Haitian-American trio, and Coolio, whose latest album ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ (Tommy Boy) offers cautionary tales about the consequences of violence and unsafe sex.

Significantly, all the above groups dismiss the macho world of the gangsta, from the Fugee’s putdown of them as “cowboys” to A Tribe Called Quest’s increasingly harsh broadsides against the marketing of would-be thugs.

But the non-gangsta groups are just as trapped as their more violent companions in a dilemma created by gangsta rap’s rise: with the shock value of obscene rap now diminishing, the whole genre is unable to garner listeners’ interest as easily as before.

As a result, Coolio’s latest songs have included ‘Too Hot’, which combines an anti-AIDS message with an old soul hit by the group Kool and the Gang.

The Fugees were one of the most dominant groups on the radio this summer, as well — but that was mostly because of a somewhat sappy ballad, ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’, that is most closely linked with pop singer Roberta Flack.