Coincidentally, I was watching the concert movie Dave Chappelle's Block Party the other night, in which he puts on a bunch of these alternative hip-hop artists that you talk about in your book — Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Kanye West. Other than Kanye, why don't these artists sell as well as the Jay-Zs or the 50 Cents?
There's a long history of a particular pleasure in consuming the ideas of black-ghetto-excess dysfunction. It used to not be ghettoized in setting because black people weren't always urban people, but the same images can be found in American history for centuries. So this idea that a certain kind of sexual deviance or violent behavior defines black culture has had a huge market in commercial mainstream culture for at least 200 years. Also, sexist images, which hip-hop has a lot of, seem to do very well across the cultural spectrum. So sexuality and sexual domination sell. Racial stereotypes sell. The market is more consolidated, which makes it easier for those images to perpetuate themselves.
And those artists we just mentioned don't traffic in those stereotypes, so they don't fit into that corporate, consolidated structure, don't get airplay and therefore don't sell, right?
That's right. And of course it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. They deny this. They say that they don't influence sales, that there's no payola, that there's no influence on content. But there's ample evidence that that's false. If you play a song enough, you start singing it. It's really almost that simple. From what I understand, stations used to play a song on average about 40 times a week. It's up to 140 times a week now.
Look, I don't want it to seem like I'm bashing everything about Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, because I'm not. I think they're both very talented. If you look at the metaphors Lil Wayne produces, they're amazing; they're very creative. It's the substance. What are you making metaphors
about 24 hours a day? Same thing with Jay-Z. Even he has acknowledged that he's "dumbed his music down" so that he can sell records. This economic imperative has had more of an impact on hip-hop than [on] rock or soul or R&B.
In these hip-hop wars, what's one of the more prominent arguments from critics that you counter in your book?
Hip-hop causes violence. This is a very common argument that's been made pretty much from the beginning. There are a number of things that are wrong with this. One is that it posits an incredibly simpleminded causal relationship between music that has violent narrative in it and actual violent action. Hip-hop takes the bigger weight for this problem than anyone else. And the reason it takes such a big weight is not because it's any more violent than slasher movies or than horror movies or action movies in general but because there is a denial about the violent world that we created in post-1960s black America. These are communities whose stability has been profoundly disrupted. And when you destabilize communities, violence always goes up.
The hip-hop-causes-violence camp is incredibly dishonest about the profound role of structural racism, of economic disadvantange that has been produced over decades. It's not just personal, lazy behavior. It's a dishonest way of dumping on hip-hop a set of conditions that we are responsible for as a nation. That being said, that doesn't mean that a constantly violent narrative is a good thing. I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be a challenge to it to some degreee. But it's not the source of the problem. It's a red herring.
So, are both sides wrong then?
Definitely. The critics are a little bit more wrong than the defenders. But overall, both arguments have enormous flaws. The defenders are the most wrong about gender and sexism, and the haters are most wrong about issues of violence and culture. I'm very upset about both sides in this war, and I think the only way out is for the rest of us on the sidelines to get involved with an educated, sophisticated position. You have to be subtle, not extreme, in thinking about what's right and what's wrong when it comes to hip-hop.
