Chuck D wrote an interesting open letter about the state of hip hop. You can read it here.
A couple of things I’d like to get out of the way early…
1. Chuck D is as close to a “hero” as I have. Specifically, after reading his book Fight the Power: Race, Rap and Reality, I didn’t just want to write about music. I felt like I needed to. The reasons he mentioned were so clear, the point the game had reached seemed so critical, and somehow I concluded that I could help with what he thought was needed in the game.
2. I’m extra reluctant to get caught up in “good ol’ days” talk, and I’ll do my best to avoid it here. Just as we’ve got garbage on the radio now, we had garbage on the radio then. You act like Soulja Boi came from space rather than from a lineage that includes the MC Hammers of the world. Plus, your kids are gonna grow up and long for some of these cats you think stink now. That’s just how it goes.
3. This is not a direct response to the letter. More a look at my first immediate thought. So please don’t read this and think, “damn, Bomani slammed Chuck!” No, Chuck made me think, which is what he’s done for me for as long as I can remember. When I’m talking about Chuck, I will refer to him specifically. The stuff about the masses is about the masses, which may or may not include Chuck D.
I don’t disagree much with Chuck’s letter. The game has gotten out of hand, and control of what’s in the mainstream is so far removed from where the music comes from that one must wonder if/when it’ll get back in check. My problem, as I’ve stated for years, isn’t so much the quality of the music (because there’s still lots of heat) or the themes of the music. It’s the fact that you can talk about selling dope and strip clubs at 3:30 in the damn afternoon. And worse than that, it’s pretty much all you hear on the radio.
The question, of course, is how we got here. We could probably get all elaborate on it, but I’ve always contended that we could point to one moment when the game changed: when this album came out.

NWA drops this. Sells two million copies with next to no radio play, meaning a boatload of money for those getting a piece of it (Jerry Heller, Eazy-E and the folks at Priority Records) with very little investment. The folks running the labels aren’t stupid, yanno? They had to go find them some more NWAs.
So to me, this is where it gets fun (and fans of Chappelle will quickly notice this conundrum). If I were to tell you you to go find a new NWA, what are you looking for? What, a perfectly constructed hip hop boy band (which is really what they were, and a big reason why they blew up as they did)? Trying to find the next Ice Cube or Dr. Dre? Trying to find another act with the flexibility to do revolutionary tracks like “Fuck Tha Police” but set off the party like “Express Yourself?”
I don’t think it was that complex to the labels. To quote Wyclef, “more gun talk, more violence, more hardcore.”
Those two million copies NWA sold…those were white kids buying that stuff, many of whom have grown up to become people who would piss themselves at the thought of their children singing about shooting cops. They weren’t buying the revolution, or the plight of South Central Los Angeles. They were buying gunplay. Bitches. Hoes. Head. Bass. More bitches. More guns.
But while they bought that, we defended the anger of the album, which was pitch-perfect when that was the intent. Sure, Cube says “life ain’t nothing but bitches and money” on “Gangsta Gangsta,” but the FBI sent a letter, and they ain’t about to take down hip hop.
I wasn’t old enough to defend that album at the time, but I would have. I know I defended a lot of stuff subsequently for similar reasons, defensive about the notion that there was one more reason to blame my generation and demographic for what was wrong with the world.
Now, if I recall, Chuck defended Straight Outta Compton. Hell, we all did. We got caught up in how good it was to see what was really happening: hip hop was ghetto anger, and the suits were heard sex and violence.
Five years later, Public Enemy was being run out of the game, the subject of negative media like few we’ve ever seen (check the scathing, agenda-based review of Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age in The Source).
That’s why, to me, it’s disingenuous for much of the older crowd (which kinda includes me, at this point) now to try and ride to hip hop’s rescue after we definitely had a part in getting to where we are. At a time when those who were part of the culture had the power to sway the tastes of the mainstream — see the sudden death of Vanilla Ice’s career — we didn’t do nearly enough to curb the direction things were going in. When Calvin Butts and Delores Tucker were saying all the wrong things in trying to make salient points about the content of the music, we cheered the records that dissed them.
We lost sight of what was really going on, which was corporations shaping the future of the music and, by extension, how black people were viewed by the mainstream. We empowered Bob Johnson to center his station around the common denominator.
So, we can’t pretend now to be mortified by what has happened. We co-signed the shaky foundation the game is now built upon.
I didn’t see a mention of that in Chuck’s letter.
Of course, this isn’t to say Chuck hasn’t been critical of where the game went. Muse Sick addressed the negative elements of gangsta rap, and that was 17 years ago. But when this first happened, when the joke was on us, we can’t pretend for a second like we didn’t get fooled.
By whom? In large part by NWA. Check those disingenuous interviews with the group when they say they’re just talking about what’s going on in the street. I laugh the hardest hearing Eazy and Dre say those things, considering they barely did anything close to social commentary after Straight Outta Compton. You could make the argument that Efil4zaggin‘s skit about killing the hooker is the most problematic thing hip hop has ever done.
And those are the “revolutionaries” whom so many people rode for, including me and Chuck D.
To be clear: I’m not a moralist about this stuff. I listen to plenty of stuff that could be deemed indefensible, and I don’t think those that make that stuff need to apologize to anyone in particular. It’s a gray area when you start talking about the morality of art, and I’m not prepared to tackle that right now.
But when the more salacious became the norm, when standards of on-air decency changed to make it easier to mass market profanity, a whole lot of us just let it ride. Then, in 2005, we acted like we had no idea what happened when David Banner (who hilariously thinks his conscious, patronizing to make his records “a Bible with a Playboy cover” are really helping something) was saying “lemme see you play with yo monkey, bring it to me sweaty cuz I like it when it’s funky” on daytime radio.
Naw, we know what happened. We were right there. And most of us that were immersed in the then-current generation were too busy jamming to see what happened. Even Chuck D, who caught it early, peeped game a little too late.
Perhaps this is just what happens when an organic movement becomes commodified. It goes into the hands of those that control the distribution, and they wouldn’t care if hip hop was about double dutch so long as it sold. But we didn’t have to support it the way that we did, and we can’t pretend our hands aren’t bloody now.
So hell yes, I hope the day returns when I listen to the radio and hear the sort of energy and excitement from rap that holds such a nostalgic place in my heart. No, I have no earthly idea how to get there.
But I know enough about how we got here that I’m not wagging a finger at anyone else before I look at myself.