A Different Class

I'm struggling a bit trying to solidify some ideas in my head. Many of them involve plans and strategies I don't want to completely reveal just yet, but if you'll bear with me i feel like airing some of my internal convolutions.

I keep having imaginary conversations in my head with people that I haven't seen in a long time that I have more or less internalized as ethical and strategic mentors. Usually any new idea that I decide to execute goes through a pretty rigorous process of 'what would so-and-so think if I were explaining this to them one afternoon?'. I've come to a point in life and in what I'm doing that I have to evaluate the proper way to proceed. This conflict arises from the fact that there is something that I learned from punk that I don't deem necessary to ever discard or give up on. This is something elusive, and sometimes seems like a personal issue, other times an ethical imperative, or even an aesthetic standard. At present I wonder what my greensboro punk connects would think of 'limited colorways' or of the 'brand aspect' that, for my understanding, rap has entailed. If you've got time, i'd like to roughly sketch what underlies this problem in some suppositions (it's been a minute, things may get a bit clunky).

Rap music, by and large, is a form that is meant to be mis-understood by a large percentage of the people who come in contact with it to some degree. There are, within every kind of rap lyric, meanings which are meant to be latent until someone who possesses the right skill or information set to decode it comes along and listens. In this respect, rap music doesn't differ from any other discourse of art or design. Crypticism, subtlety and layering have always been a part of these kinds of human articulations, especially those rooted ultimately in subversion. So far, no problem right?

But rap music is special in two ways. The first is that it is the largest and most visible strain of writing/speech that holds an internal conversation: it’s the reigning meta-discourse (outside the fold of polite academic circle,s that is). It is also music that is rooted in subversion, but focuses not so much on critique as on strategies for the acquisition of wealth and status by those who do not have it (this isn’t to say that the ‘hustler’s utopia’ picture of reality that rap music paints isn’t often a pie-in-the-sky).

Consider it self-serving or naive if you wish, but I’d be willing to hazard that the rapper-as-entrepreneur does the cottage industry that punk offered in the 1970s and 1980s one better. Where (for lack of better vocabulary) the punk business leaders and their business models of these prior decades created very successful record companies, they also did many things to intentionally get between themselves and future expansion. You could say that the result of this is the phenomenon of major-label platinum artists (who are by all accounts other than image merely radio rock bands) headlining and thriving on an endorsement-dense Warped tour, year after year. After enough time, it appears that the ‘punk’ listeners will tolerate any amount of commercial saturation. Punk writ large has basically been invaded thoroughly by money.

Alright, so you’re probably thinkng, ‘what’s the big difference?’ What music if any, is more commercial than rap music? None, probably. So-called urban is one of the biggest and most lucrative markets there is. But there are different aspirations held by the artists, the fans, and the culture around the industry is very different. Rappers are trying to invade money, nevermind money indvading them. The crucial difference is encapsulated in a comparison of this point. If your culture has a built-in plan for artist driven enterpreneurship, you will be ready to cope with the money when It comes. If they are, then artists will remain in charge of the discourse (not to mention the market) for much longer and will make decisions based on this.

Now, back to where it all began. Rap music, the thriving meta-discourse and multi-million dollar industry that it is, is now a field that is ripe to create shifts in the landscape of the American media (and the world to a waning degree). This can be done if the ones arrogating themselves to positions of influence in this arena are aware of the ramifications. To quote a notable articulation of this: “If skills sold/ truth be told/ I’d probably be/ Lyrically Talib Kweli…We as rappers must decide what’s most important… I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them/ I got rich and gave back/ to me that’s the win win.” (Jay-Z, Moment of Clarity, from The Black Album).

Pair that with the injunction to ‘overcharge labels for what they did to the cold crush’ and this espousal of achievement on behalf of a greater good is a very powerful and motivating cultural technology. There are many examples of this strategy pervasive in Rap, and they all articulate something similar to the passages above. In short, rather than starting a punk label and winding up in a scenario where we are becoming successful despite ourselves, we are entreated to start a rap label and become successful in order to spite the established successful media engines. Need I spell out which strategy is more potentially successful? The former strikes me as about as futile as screaming at a wall, so that said… Let’s get it.

jamz