Good Booty
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We don’t have an account of the interview from LL Cool J himself, but it’s clear that neither party ever settled into a groove. Gordon, the underground rock star, pushed back when LL revealed his favorite band was the hair metal-ish Bon Jovi. LL, raised Christian and still relatively devout, got a terse “good luck with that” from Gordon when he said he hoped “that God gives me strength to crush everything in my path.” Gordon ultimately concluded that their differences at least partly lay in the racialized hierarchies that make whites into consumers of black culture while leaving blacks largely isolated. “I have more access to his world—even if it is superficial . . . than L.L. will ever have to mine,” she wrote in Spin.
Time eventually has proven Gordon wrong about LL Cool J’s access to a world beyond hip-hop. After his reign as a rap sex symbol faded, he continued to be one of its biggest crossover stars, hosting the Grammy Awards telecast for years, collaborating with the country artist Brad Paisley, and starring in a prime-time detective show aimed largely at white senior citizens. Gordon, conversely, stuck with the art world, a smaller sphere. She became an exhibiting visual artist and a writer and continued to make experimental rock within and outside of Sonic Youth. Only a brief go at a fashion line and the minor fame that came with Sonic Youth’s two early-1990s Top 10 Billboard Modern Rock hits had her “crushing” in a way LL Cool J would have recognized.
At a certain point in the late 1980s and early 1990s, hip-hop and post-punk rock seemed like equal forces within popular music, but their trajectories soon diverged. Hip-hop became a massive commercial force, shifting the axis of global popular music. Its rise restructured pop, its samplers and synthesizers replacing rock’s guitar, bass, and drums as the basic tools of youthful music making. Hip-hop recast the rock star as a rapper, reclaiming for African American men the central charismatic role usurped by white performers since the age of minstrelsy. Within hip-hop’s complicated ecosystem of instrumentation, style, dance, and historical knowledge, rappers became envoys and icons. And most did so without compromising. Rappers said no to the assumption that they would have to outgrow their origins to make it in the mainstream. Their slang, their dress style, the things they found sensual or sentimental, all came from deep within African American urban experience. Rap required listeners to either get these references or do the work.
From the birth of the genre in the disco era, rappers had always been eloquent—the life and the voice of the party. Their thickly witty rhymes contradicted the racist view, newly reinvigorated in the Reagan era, that young black men were illiterate thugs. “Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood / and it’s still all good / If you don’t know, now you know, nigga,” Brooklyn’s the Notorious B.I.G. (also known as “Biggie Smalls”) spit in his 1994 breakthrough single, “Juicy.” He proved his point in the rest of the song, with dazzling internal rhymes and Shakespearean scene-building. Rappers didn’t run from stereotypes; they confronted them directly and imbued them with humor, psychological depth, and, sometimes, revolutionary spirit. The one-armed bandit Bras-Coupé of old New Orleans lived again in the voices of these rappers. Finally, he spoke for himself.
The most charismatic ’90s rappers included Tupac Shakur, the California son of black nationalists whose lyrics examined the psychic wounds of racism, and who became a matinee idol as well as the genre’s creative standard bearer; and Smalls, his rival, an enormous man with an incomparably deft lyrical touch. Both Shakur and Smalls fell victim to the real gang violence that intersected with hip-hop’s gangster dreams, murdered within six months of each other in the mid-1990s. Their short lives showed that rappers’ affected swagger could sometimes have real consequences. Another self-made ghetto don, Jay Z survived his own past as a Brooklyn drug dealer to become a legitimate mogul, running the multimillion-dollar Roc Nation company; in time, he married the R&B queen Beyoncé Knowles and formed a friendship with President Barack Obama, becoming rap’s ultimate patriarch. His career was paralleled by that of Sean Combs—the rapper alternately known as “Puffy,” “Puff Daddy,” and “P. Diddy”—who, like Jay Z, mentored a carefully constructed family of protégés while expanding his empire to include fashion, alcohol brands, and ventures connected to virtually every other aspect of popular entertainment. Producer Dr. Dre did the same thing on the West Coast, inventing a new hip-hop style grounded in marijuana-steeped slow beats and parlaying that “G-Funk” sound (and the careers of superstars like Snoop Dogg and the white rapper Eminem) to a multimillion-dollar empire.
“We do dirt like worms, produce G’s like sperm,” Jay Z said on his 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt, connecting the grime of his criminal past with the dream of his executive future (the “G” stands for a grand, or a thousand dollars) and milking both images as signs of his virility. An assertion of African Americans’ right to excel within both shadow and mainstream capitalism, rap made money sexy—sometimes sexier than sex itself.
As hip-hop expanded its empire and rap became the new lingua franca, rock got smaller. Its devotees tried on new names like “indie,” “modern,” “alternative,” and the much-derided “grunge,” but, after one confusing, glorious, ultimately inconclusive moment in the early 1990s, the scene itself remained relatively contained. (For this reason, “indie,” a term that designates modesty, remains the most resonant.) Yet Gordon had been onto something when she went in search of commonalities between hip-hop and rock. In the ways each engaged with popular music’s ongoing conversation about desire, eroticism, and identity, both became catalysts for reformation. This was the music of the generation who’d inherited the AIDS crisis along with many other sobering realities: the urban decay resulting from the Reagan administration’s gutting of social services; feminism’s uncovering of the realities of rape and sexual abuse; the rise of street drugs, especially crack and heroin, that could turn the body from a source of pleasure into a site of self-destruction; the religious right’s campaign to stigmatize any but the narrowest definitions of sexual fulfillment. Rap brought the noise, a confrontational, highly masculine sonic barrage based on the inorganic art of sampling, which rendered its warrior voices fully armored and ready to battle. Indie rock reveled in the dirt of amateurism, rejecting pop’s polish and sentimentality in favor of rougher approaches. Practitioners of both styles believed in the power of refusal.
“I don’t think so,” LL Cool J muttered in his hit, “Goin’ Back to Cali,” which satirized the superficiality of sunny Top 40 pop. “I don’t wanna, I don’t think so,” murmured Gordon in Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing,” which she wrote after her frustrated attempt to connect with LL Cool J. The phrase suits both parties. What rappers and indie rockers shared was a need to say no: sometimes to each other, but mostly to a status quo they experienced as a threat.
Pleasure did soften the boundaries set by hip-hop and indie rock’s young zealots. In their earliest years, both genres made room for sex, often using humor. “He can’t satisfy you with his little worm, but I can bust you out with my super-sperm!” rapper Big Bank Hank boasted in the genre’s first national smash, “Rapper’s Delight,” in 1979. The Southern California hardcore scene that was one bridge from punk to indie rock traded in similar broad strokes, as it were, though these white kids from LA’s poorer suburbs tended to be more crude and openly misogynist than their rapper counterparts. Songs like Nig-Heist’s “Hot Muff” and Black Flag’s “Slip It In” made fun of their male protagonist’s Neanderthal tendencies even as they reinforced them. Though certainly offensive to women, these cartoonish efforts also ridiculed the peacocks and superstuds who’d dominated rock and soul discourse throughout the sexual revolution and its aftermath.
Those superstuds did matter to rappers, especially comical ones who played on the image of the pimp, the flashy inner-city entrepreneur who made his living by managing a “stable” of female sex workers. The pimp had long been a folk hero known for his verbal dexterity; in the 1960s, celebrated by comedians like Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor and militant writers like El
dridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown, the figure had become heroic.44 Pimps traded in sex, and ostensibly enjoyed it, but in rap, the trade—an exchange between men—became the focal point. Male rappers talked about women incessantly, but they were talking to each other, absorbed in each other’s technical prowess and power plays. The essence of rap, as it developed, became male competition. In a 1980 interview with the longtime music journalist Nelson George, a then-twenty-year-old Kurtis Blow told of discovering rap’s potential at a Midtown New York disco where the DJ spun tales over song breaks. Blow said he was something different: a “coordinated rapper,” more precise and keyed in to an audience. One way to view this tightening up of skills is as a reaction against the looseness of a previous era. The free mood of disco and the hallucinogenic fancies of funk weren’t as relevant to this new generation, steeling itself to face welfare cutbacks and the rising impact of drug use and disease—problems they experienced as a legacy from more open-ended times.45
The proto-indie rockers of hardcore punk were even more uptight. (Hardcore, in this subculture, didn’t signal anything pornographic; the word was more evocative of the sweat of military training or a punishing gym routine.) In the late 1970s and 1980s, punk took hold in outposts across America because kids were disgusted with their parents’ excesses, which, in their view, had led to broken marriages, chemical dependencies, and the general bloat of mainstream pop, rife with arena rock excess and vapid novelty singles like “Disco Duck.” “We were fed up with all the crap of the seventies, with disco, with country rock, with posy glam bands and people like Jeff Lynne of ELO [the Beatlesque Electric Light Orchestra] saying he looked forward to the day when they could send holograms of themselves to arenas to ‘play’ all over the world,” Jello Biafra, singer for the San Francisco hardcore band the Dead Kennedys, told writer Gina Arnold. “Something drastic needed to be done about these people, and punk was it.”46
Unlike early punks, who were mostly in their twenties or thirties, most hardcore kids were still close enough to their parents to really despise them. Damaged, the first album by Southern California hardcore favorite Black Flag, came with a sticker attached, containing a quote from a horrified record executive who’d tried to keep it from stores. It read: AS A PARENT I FOUND THIS TO BE AN ANTI-PARENT RECORD. “It was then that I knew that I had to have it because I didn’t want to be anything like my parents,” said one devoted fan.47
These hardcore kids felt let down by their parents, whose own coming of age in the easy-living post-countercultural era often left them ill-equipped to deal with their children’s needs. In a 1985 profile of a seventeen-year-old female punk DJ named Shaggy, Texas Monthly reporter David Seeley noted that she’d left her suburban home not merely due to the usual mother-daughter squabbles, but because her disabled dad and working mom had let the house fill up with trash; the stove didn’t work, and everyone fended for themselves, living on fast food. “Sometimes I think my dad’s really messed up a lot,” she told Seeley, holding a photograph of him helping her take her first toddler steps. “He didn’t save any money or buy much insurance, didn’t plan in case something happened, and so he can’t put me through college. But I look at that picture, and I know he taught me to walk, you know? It means a lot to me.”48
As the 1980s wore on, rap and indie rock reflected the disappointment and frustration of a generation toddling amidst the wadded-up waste their parents left behind. Reagan’s policies were hard on white working-class families, and even harder on most families of color. The music industry reflected America’s income gap. Major labels and a few massively popular blockbuster artists were earning millions and spending them as quickly as they could ingest the cocaine their dollars bought. (The 1980s “hair metal” bands who emerged in glam’s wake epitomized this hedonistic spirit on MTV and in teen fans’ hearts.) Hip-hop and indie rock presented alternatives to corporate music industry bloat. These lean youths made themselves mobile with portable DJ setups or “jammed econo” (as indie band the Minutemen put it) in broken-down touring vans, aiming to succeed on their own terms. Artists and their independent managers formed their own labels, booked their own shows, and cultivated an oppositional attitude. The indie ideal was to avoid excess, though people certainly still indulged in all kinds of it. Rappers welcomed excess, but presented themselves as keeping cool in the midst of it: “Never let me slip, cos if I slip, then I’m slippin’,” in the words of Dr. Dre.
Sex was problematic because it was an occasion to slip. “I wasn’t anti-sex, but if everybody spent all their time trying to get laid, we’d never be able to build anything,” Ian MacKaye of the foundational DC hardcore band Minor Threat told scene documentarian Steven Blush. “Sex was a diversion every teen did, so I thought it was stupid.” Attitudes like MacKaye’s, however deeply felt, masked the fact that people were still having sex, often in great quantities. Hardcore musicians would grab assignations where they could, often in the vans they drove from town to town. “Many nights I had sex in that van, sometimes next to another guy having sex in the van,” Henry Rollins told the journalist Michael Azerrad about his glory days fronting Black Flag. “And you have to have a very understanding or very enthusiastic partner to get together with you in such close proximity.”49
Unlike in earlier punk scenes, in hardcore, women remained hidden in plain sight, often organizing shows, hosting visiting bands, and providing that sweet one-night succor, but keeping their sensibilities largely to themselves. As the scene grew broader and became indie rock, many more women would participate, but overt femininity remained an uncomfortable subject. This repression would bubble under until the mid-1990s, when a counter-reformation led by female punks through with being marginalized would emerge.
Rap, meanwhile, did acknowledge women—as objects of its boasting rhymes, anyway—but also remained an overwhelmingly masculine enclave. Female-friendly lover men like LL Cool J were rarities. This was partly because rap’s creators desperately needed a cultural space of their own. “Hip-hop will always be remembered as that bittersweet moment when young black men captured the ears of America and defined themselves on their own terms,” wrote the critic Joan Morgan, who would play a major role in the music’s late-1990s reckoning with the feminine. “Regenerating themselves as seemingly invincible bass gods, gangsta griots, and rhythm warriors, they turned a defiant middle finger to a history that racistly ignored or misrepresented them.” As for the women of color who loved rap and tried to find their own place in it, Morgan wrote: “Selfishly we chose to ignore the dangers of rappers believing their own myths.”50
These celebrations of the masculine had little room for gay men (or, needless to say, queer women). Both rap and hardcore punk were openly homophobic. On both coasts, 1970s punk had a strong gay element, with the transgender performer Jayne (Wayne) County playing a major role in New York, and LA’s Masque club owner Brendan Mullen serving as the central spoke in a scene that, he once estimated, was “thirty to thirty-five percent gay, maybe even more.” But few punk songs celebrated same-sex love until a joyfully defiant “queercore” scene surfaced in the early 1990s, led by bands like the pop-loving Pansy Division and the astounding Tribe 8, whose dyke (now trans) leader, Lynn Breedlove, wore leather chaps and a dildo during performances. Mostly, LGBTQ people in punk kept their desires private, both before and after AIDS became a threat. Grant Hart of the Minneapolis indie-punk band Hüsker Dü compared his and bandmate Bob Mould’s closeted homosexuality to the discipline of warriors: “It was a superiority type of thing, like the Spartans of ancient days or something.”51
In rap, an antigay bias was woven into lyrics from the beginning. Early singles “Rapper’s Delight” and “The Message” included references to “fags” and “fairies.” In time these toss-offs would grow more virulent, sometimes focusing directly on AIDS, as in the pop-rapper (and later movie star) Will Smith’s 1988 demand that “all the homeboys that got AIDS be quiet” or the otherwise politically progressive and musically groundbreaking Public E
nemy’s fearful “Meet the G That Killed Me,” which contained the lines “Man to man / I don’t know if they can / From what I know / The parts don’t fit.” African American culture in general had grown more openly homophobic since the days when semi-closeted “angels” had flourished in the gospel world, partly because the black church became more conservative, and partly due to fear. As the epidemic developed, AIDS wreaked havoc in the African American community, proliferating through shared needles as well as sexual transmission, affecting heterosexual women most of all. These factors all fed the misperception that homosexuality, and even any kind of open acknowledgment of sexual activity, was a threat to African American values. “In the black community, we host panel discussions, town hall meetings, and forums about acquiring wealth, politics, and community service, but we never openly discuss sex, sexuality, or HIV/AIDS,” wrote the scholar Terrance Dean—himself a gay man trying to reconcile his sexuality with his love of rap—in his 2008 memoir. “We live by the ‘don’t air your dirty laundry in the street’ code.”52