The power of hip-hop

Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/18/2004 | Dan DeLuca: "The ascendancy of hip-hop as a positive social force might seem like sacrilege to anyone who pines for the days of Aretha Franklin and Earth, Wind and Fire, and believes that 'do-rag-wearing rappers are just a bunch of f-bomb-dropping gangstas fool enough, like 2003's best-selling artist, 50 Cent, to brag about surviving nine gunshot wounds.

But hold up. No matter what you think of the music - and I defy any open-eared listener to resist the sheer musicality of Outkast's Speakerboxx/The Love Below, or the pop muscularity of 50's Get Rich or Die Tryin - there's no denying the demographic reach of the biggest-selling hip-hop stars.

For young music fans, hip-hop is a given, something that's always existed and always will. Its penetration into the marketplace is total. That marketplace, like the nation as a whole, is segregated along racial lines, and corporate media giants do their best to market black product to black people, with sitcoms such as Eve and movies such as Love Don't Cost a Thing.

More than ever, though, black music crosses over to white audiences. According to SoundScan, which tracks sales in the music industry, as much as 70 percent of the paying (and downloading) hip-hop audience is white kids living in the suburbs. The pop-cultural firmament is a darker shade than its audience, not just in urban centers such as Philadelphia, but also throughout a country that's 77 percent white.

The archetypal American teenager's galaxy is full up with stars of the hip-hop generation. Sure, Britney Spears and Legolas the Elf are on their fair share of bedroom walls. But chances are they're alongside Beyoncé Knowles or Tupac Shakur or Mary J. Blige or Allen Iverson or Jay-Z or LeBron James.

In his 2002 book American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business and the End of White America, former Wall Street Journal columnist Leon E. Wynter writes of "a vision of the American dream in which we are liberated from the politics of race to openly embrace any style, cultural trope, or image of beauty that attracts us regardless of its origin." Like a rapper, he uses someone else as raw material: Michael Lind, whose concept of "transracial America" incorporates immigration and intermarriage as well as pop culture into a vision of a changing society.

Since the late 1970s, there's been a radical shift in what Americans think "all-American" looks like, thanks in large part to big business' discovery that faces of color can move product. Big ups go to pioneers such as Michael Jordan, Oprah and Tiger Woods. But the current hip-hop generation, from athletes such as Iverson and James to rapper moguls such as Jay-Z and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs lately have been flexing their merchandising muscles.

To be sure, celebrity trumps race in the pop-cultural arena: When a hormone-addled boy sees Beyoncé on the cover of Maxim, he's more likely to think "she's hot" than "she's black."

Cornrowed Caucasians who say "fo' shizzle, my nizzle" - translation: "that is indeed true, my good man" - aren't necessarily acquiring insight along with the gangsta pose. (Conversation overheard in a suburban high school parking lot last month: "Dude, you're a contradiction." "Why?" "Because you're a white supremacist, but you listen to rap music.")

White artists and audiences have been "blacking up" since the 19th-century days of Stephen Foster minstrel songs. Or Elvis Presley interpreted the music he loved and was labeled a king - or a cultural thief, depending on your point of view. Musicians from the Righteous Brothers to Justin Timberlake have absorbed the styles and sounds of black music, taking on "everything but the burden," as longtime Village Voice staff writer and essayist Greg Tate put it in his anthology subtitled What White People Are Taking From Black Culture.

And while hip-hop is today's Sound of Young America, that also was Motown's slogan in the 1960s.

I certainly don't believe that, just because an art form founded by and still dominated by African Americans and Latino Americans provides the sound track for young Americans' lives, racial identities will automatically become more fluid, or racial understanding more profound. Listening to an Outkast album hardly qualifies as "deep contact" between the races, to use W.E.B. DuBois' phrase. The 50 Cent and Eminem duet in "Patiently Waiting" - the "Ebony and Ivory" of our time - is not going to stop people from hating one another. Even if hip-hop can bring people to the same table, open-minded teenagers often grow up as stuck-in-their-ignorant-ways adults.

And yet, some of those open-minded teenagers are bound to grow into open-minded adults. When Tavis Smiley, who is doing his best to "black up" public television and radio, came to Philadelphia last month, he talked about the effect of seeing people of color wielding power in Bill Clinton's cabinet. That "you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it" phenomenon applies as well in the synergistic media world of movies and sports and TV and fashion.

Before the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and its interracial sound track, artists such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard were breaking through to the pop charts and leaving "race music" behind. That gave way to the golden age of protest music, with Sam Cooke singing "A Change Is Gonna Come" and Bob Dylan strumming "Blowin' in the Wind."

Now, when rappers protest, it's usually to complain that the world doesn't recognize their obvious greatness.

It doesn't matter that they're not out to change the world - they're doing it anyway.

With so many hip-hop heroes living large, rapping in the dream lives of white, black, Latino, Asian and other kids, it stands to reason that that shared culture will have its impact. Slowly, surely, incrementally, a change is bound to come.

In other words, never mind General Motors: What's good for hip-hop is what's good for America."