OUGD505 - SB2 - Cause Research - Walk This Way, The Commodification of Hip-Hop; Quentin B. Huff

“I’ll never have dinner with the President,” was one of O’shea “Ice Cube” Jackson’s insults in his song “No Vaseline” against former NWA band mates Andre “Dr. Dre” Young, Lorenzo “MC Ren” Patterson, Antoine “DJ Yella” Carraby, and Eric “Eazy-E” Wright and their manager Jerry Heller. It was 1991 and Ice Cube, citing financial and management issues, had split from the group to launch a solo career. “No Vaseline” was return fire for NWA’s lyrical shots, including the warning on NWA’s Niggaz4Life album that the group would cut Ice Cube’s hair off and sodomize him with a broomstick. Eazy-E had received, and accepted, an invitation to a Republican fundraising luncheon at the White House, during President George H. W. Bush’s term. Apparently, an effective way to discredit those taking an anti-establishment stance is to link them with the norm, the status quo—the dreaded establishment itself. Therefore, pointing out that a “gangsta” rapper had a meal with the President of the United States was a way to tarnish said rapper’s street cred. It was a diss.

Fast-forward to the 21st century and the election of Barack Obama as the 44th US President. There isn’t a hip-hopper around who would diss you for having dinner with that President. Well, maybe Immortal Technique would.  Even when we take into account the things that make President Obama distinctive as a president—his ethnicity, the historical and symbolic nature of his election, the rap artists he says he has on his mp3 player—a president, any president is still the president, still part of the government, still a component of what we conspiracy theorists like to call “The Powers That Be”. Somewhere between 1991 and 2008, something changed, something dramatic that made hip-hoppers feel like “insiders” instead of outcasts.  Rappers are “players” now, no longer “rebels” or “revolutionaries” who weren’t invited to the game.

Some argue that hip-hop has deteriorated. Where the “positive” and “uplifting” side of the art once balanced its excesses, the argument is that it has been riddled with violence and moral decay precipitated by its commercial and corporate annexation.

First, there are no filters for the products hip-hop can be used to promote. From videogames to vodka, you can find a rap, a rapper, a phat beat, or a hip-hop producer to help sell it.  As such, the naysayers would argue that hip-hop no longer operates as an art form that serves an underrepresented community. At one point, it provided a mode of expression for the politically voiceless, now it is a vehicle for selling products to the world as well as back to its original demographic. Drinking “Sprinkle” isn’t going to aid in expressing the views of the underrepresented, not even if you synchronize Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” throughout the commercial. Hip-hop may reference products and pop culture in its rhymes, but that’s arguably part of the art. Becoming spokespeople for a multinational corporation, on the other hand, changes the game considerably, and it’s this type of “change” that warrants this whole discussion. How could a once rebellious art form become the corporate commodity it is today?