I Wear the Black Hat

by Chuck Klosterman

  But these people lost the war. And while all those ticket-buying bystanders could just move on and pretend they were never there, the Diceman would nay recover. He was a casualty, and his injuries were mortal.

  It was a war of attrition. The winners didn’t make a better argument, but they wore the culture down. [Here, again, we see the inevitable: Over time, the winners are always the progressives.] Almost everything that advocates of the speech-limitation movement wanted in 1990 have been adopted by the world at large; in virtually all situations, we err on the side of the potentially offended (this, more than anything else, is the best argument against the idea of an ever-coarsening culture). In 2012, the most talked-about piece of entertainment was the HBO show Girls, a high-end sitcom about four twenty-something women living in New York. Its second episode made jokes about abortion and date rape, but that wasn’t what made it problematic; what bothered people was the fact that all four of the main characters were affluent and Caucasian. Because the show felt generationally significant, a seemingly endless stream of writers complained that its unwillingness to reflect every kind of person living in Brooklyn made the essence of Girls slightly racist. For two bizarre weeks in April, there were insular media debates about the insidious danger of “ironic racism.” This prompted one of the writers on Girls (Lesley Arfin) to sarcastically Tweet the following: “What really bothered me most about [the movie] Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” Considering how the other omnipresent criticism of Girls was its self-conscious narcissism, this was pretty clever (and grounded in reality, since the concept of any fictional creation equally representing all manifestations of diversity is both irrational and impossible). But Arfin had to retract her quip, and The New Yorker deemed her “breathtakingly dismissive and intellectually dishonest.” This reaction surprised no one, including those who did not find her Tweet remotely troubling. I’m sure Arfin wasn’t surprised, since (I assume) she courted this negative attention on purpose. Every savvy person now accepts that uncomfortable ideas can’t be expressed in public without some consideration for how various levels of ideologue will misinterpret the message. Self-editing is far more important than creativity (and only Quentin Tarantino appears immune). If you want to experience a free-flowing discourse devoid of limitation, you need to seek the darkest fringes of the Internet (and none of that anonymous bile can bleed back into proper society, because the interpretation always ends up being worse than the original sentiment). As a whole, this has been a net positive for America. It had to happen. Modern people have been raised to personalize everything they encounter and absorb, even when it has nothing to do with their own life experience. I used to feel far differently about such realities; as a twenty-year-old, I was a full-on First Amendment fascist. I saw every possible conflict as a free speech issue: stand-up comedy, “Cop Killer,” the use of Native American nicknames by collegiate sports teams, local noise ordinances, seat belt laws, perjury, and the legal definition of “all the shrimp you can eat.” I was the Patrick Henry of Ponderosa Steakhouse. But I’ve mellowed over time, which is what all wine drunks and dope smokers say when trying to justify why they quit trying. The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it’s like Pet Sounds. The wide-scale adoption of political correctness was silly, but not unreasonable. The freedom that was lost was mostly theoretical and rarely necessary. No one is significantly worse off.

  Except, I suppose, Andrew Dice Clay.

  This, I must concede, is not exactly a tragedy. It doesn’t make me sad that Clay has not been rediscovered as some kind of game-changing genius, and I don’t think he necessarily deserves to have that happen (he can have a one-hour special on Showtime, but that’s probably enough). If we’re going to classify certain celebrities as villains based on the actual content of their art, the Diceman’s stand-up routine warrants inclusion. It was degrading and it was repetitive. But we all know that’s not how it works. Merit is always a factor in someone’s cultural memory, but rarely the main one. I can easily imagine many alternative scenarios where Andrew Clay is a beloved figure: if he’d had less commercial success; if his only known recording was The Day the Laughter Died; if Woody Allen had put him in a movie in 1983 instead of 2013; if he hadn’t embraced the sector of his fan base who refused to see him as a satirist. Any one of those hypotheticals might have reversed everything. But Dice had the wrong fans at the right time. He was mostly himself, but not totally. Somebody had to pay for how the world had changed.

  WITHOUT A GUN THEY CAN’T GET NONE

  Chuck D gets involved in all that black stuff. We don’t. Fuck that black power shit: We don’t give a fuck. Free South Africa? We don’t give a fuck. I bet there ain’t anybody in South Africa wearing a button saying “Free Compton” or “Free California.” They don’t give a damn about us, so why should we give a damn about them? We’re not into politics at all. N.W.A is just saying what other people are afraid to say.

  — Ice Cube, talking about his life  as if it were a movie.

  Don’t get a movie confused with real life. I’m a well-rounded human being like everyone else.

  — Ice Cube, talking about a movie  as if it were his life.

  If someone pretends to be nice (and if we know they’re pretending, either by their own admission or from past experience), we pretend not to give that person credit as a humanitarian. Such behavior is considered phony, and those who use niceness as currency are categorized as insincere. But this logic only applies in a vacuum, or in those rare real-life moments that have a vacuum-packed flavor. For the most part, holding people to this standard is an impossible way to exist. Most of what we classify as “niceness” is effortlessly fake. When I walk into a convenience store and give the kid behind the counter two dollars for a $1.50 bottle of Gatorade, I say thanks when he gives me my change. But what am I thankful for? He’s just doing his job, and the money he returns is mine. The kid behind the counter likewise says thanks to me, but I have done nothing to warrant his gratitude; I wanted something in the store and paid him exactly what it cost. It’s not like he brewed the Gatorade or invented the brand. I didn’t select his particular store for any reason beyond proximity, and he doesn’t own the building or the franchise. From either perspective, the relationship is no different from that of a human and a vending machine. We only say “thank you” to be seen as nice. We secretly know that being seen as nice is the same as being nice in actuality. If you present yourself as a nice person, that becomes the prism for how your other actions are judged. The deeper motives that drive you can only be questioned by those who know you exceptionally well, and (most of the time) not even by them. If you act nice, you’re nice. That’s the whole equation. Nobody cares why you say thank you. Nobody is supposed to care; weirdly, this is something we’re never supposed to question. It’s impractical to incessantly interrogate the veracity of every stranger who seems like a blandly nice citizen. It’s rude. Until proven otherwise, we just accept goodness at face value.

  But this is not how it works with badness.

  If someone wants to be perceived as a bad person, it’s immediately assumed to have a wider ulterior purpose. Decency is its own reward, but purposeful depravity requires an upside. Moreover, the authenticity of every self-constructed villain is always up for debate, particularly when their specific brand of villainy represents the bedrock of their identity; since we assume normal people would always prefer to be seen as good, those who seem proud of their badness are immediately suspect. They come across as contrived, and that bothers people more than whatever wickedness they assert. It’s a circular construction that sustains the intended reality: We question the sincerity of the man who wants to be evil, because the man who desires evil is almost certainly a liar (which validates his claim, because liars are evil). So perhaps badness is a little like goodness, at least in this one respect. Wanting it is enough to make it real.

  No major musical group put more effort into being vilified than the members of N.W.A. No o
ne else comes close, really; all the other examples fall too short or go too far (and thus drift into caricature). It’s like they wrote the villainy handbook, or at least stole the handbook and used it as a design for life. On their debut album, Straight Outta Compton, they directly use the word villain a repetitive thirteen times, although that’s partially because it was the nickname for one of their members.

  [Another (less symbolic) reason for the overabundant use of the word villain in hip-hop is because it so nicely rhymes with the words chillin’ and illin’. It’s the same reason pop-metal bands often find ways to use “action” and “satisfaction” within the same verse.]

  When deployed in rap vernacular, the word villain feels slightly anachronistic, particularly when prefaced by the adjective mother-fuckin’. It’s a little old-timey. But there simply wasn’t a word that better described N.W.A’s public aspirations with such accuracy. I suppose gangsta is the only other word that came close, a modifier so flexible it could even be used to describe how rappers operated their cars. If you lowered the seat and tilted your body toward the vehicle’s passenger side, the posture was referred to as the “gangsta lean.” Spawned in 1972 by forgotten R&B wunderkind William DeVaughn, “gangsta lean” is an amazingly evocative term, particularly to those who did not initially know what it meant. But once you unpacked the definition, it merely outlined a villainous way to drive your jalopy to White Castle, operating from the position that appearing villainous was an important way to appear at all possible times. This was very, very important to the members of N.W.A. It was the only thing they seemed to worry about. Everything they attempted had to possess criminal undertones. I can only assume they spent hours trying to deduce villainous ways to microwave popcorn (and if they’d succeeded, there would absolutely be a song about it, assumedly titled “Pop Goes the Corn Killa” or “45 Seconds to Bitch Snack”).

  Straight Outta Compton was released in 1988. Its cultural apex in America was 1989. I lived in North Dakota, so I never heard it until 1991 (around the same time Axl Rose was wearing an N.W.A hat in the “You Could Be Mine” video). The first person who played it for me was a Native American medical student, the closest thing to a black guy in my wing of the dormitory. When I asked him who it was, he said the full name as three one-word sentences. “Niggers. With. Attitude.” This, I immediately told him, was not correct. Though I’d never heard their music, I’d read about N.W.A in various magazines. I informed him that “Niggers” was actually pronounced “Niggaz” and that “with” was actually “wit” and that “Attitude” was supposed to be pluralized (although I can’t say he was really wrong about that last part, since the entire group seemed to share the same singular attitude about everything). I think his response to my correction was something along the lines of, “Well, good for you.” His next sentence was, “So what do you think of this fucking record?”

  Obviously, I can’t jump back into my body and totally relive the experience of hearing those songs for the first time. I wish I could. But my memory is that it followed this approximate trajectory, sequenced in five-minute intervals:

  1) “This sounds awesome.”

  2) “Hmm. Actually, this is more disturbing than I expected.”

  3) “This seems wrong to me. These ideas are bad for society.”

  4) “Wait — these dudes are into Steve Miller?”

  5) “Hmm. Perhaps this is important. Perhaps I should write about this for my Psychology of Communication class.”

  6) “Is this even real? Because it sure does sound awesome.”

  Now, on the day I first listened to Straight Outta Compton, I’d (critically) listened to only two other hip-hop albums: Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (on the advisement of Rolling Stone magazine) and Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet (based on the advisement of the group itself). I could not physically locate Yo! Bum Rush the Show anywhere in Fargo. [For whatever reason, I did not count the Beastie Boys, Tone Lōc’s Lōc’ed After Dark, or my mostly ignored copy of He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper as authentic rap; I unconsciously viewed these albums as Rap For White People, which my 1991 self viewed as “regular music.”] As a result, my collegiate perception of hip-hop was completely based on a two-artist continuum (Public Enemy on the left, N.W.A on the right). To me, PE was musical, smart, and impractical. They were outraged by historical problems that seemed impossible to verify, such as whoever killed Malcolm X and the culpability of the Jews in Christ’s crucifixion. It felt like art, or at least like people trying to be artful. I did not feel this way about N.W.A. They seemed way less complex, but that was because it was so easy to comprehend the lyrics on the very first listen. There was something untethered about the sonic velocity (Greil Marcus once joked that Robert Johnson would have been the producer of Straight Outta Compton had he somehow lived to the age of one hundred). I assumed the guys in N.W.A were crazy, and — at least in my unknowingly racist mind — accidentally smart, as if I was somehow inferring complex things that they were not intentionally implying. My deepest connection came during “Fuck tha Police,” where Ice Cube outlined a specific type of police confrontation I had never previously considered:

  And on the other hand, without a gun they can’t get none

  But don’t let it be a black and a white one

  ’cause they’ll slam ya down to the street top

  Black police showin’ out for the white cop

  The idea of a black policeman abusing a black citizen in order to impress his white coworker obliterated my nineteen-year-old mind. And if it had come off Fear of a Black Planet, I’m sure I would have thought, “Well, this is their intention. This group is educational. They are telling me about interesting theoretical possibilities that I need to consider when thinking about the world.” But that’s not what I thought when I heard it from N.W.A. Instead I thought, “Wow. That must happen all the time.” And this wasn’t because I trusted Ice Cube more than Chuck D, because I generally trusted him less; it was because N.W.A seemed totally devoid of a social agenda. Things just meant what they meant. If they wanted to express something, they simply said the words (seemingly without consideration for how those words might be received or misinterpreted). There were lots of contradictions, and I liked contradictions. For example: The line everyone remembers from Straight Outta Compton is Cube’s defining mantra, “Life ain’t nuthin’ but bitches and money.” It embodied the ethos of the entire genre, and — over time — I’ve heard it sardonically applied to just about every possible situation life can offer. Yet elsewhere on the very same record, Eazy-E asks, “So what about the bitch who got shot? Fuck her! You think I give a damn about a bitch? I ain’t a sucker.” In other words, life is only about bitches and money, but even the bitches don’t particularly matter. This is weapon-grade nihilism: There were only two meaningful elements within their entire worldview . . . and one could be totally eliminated without consequence!

  When pressed by the media (and in the rare instances when they took that media seriously), the guys in N.W.A deferred to “reality” (always the best available argument in any situation where no logical argument exists). They referred to their music as “reality rap” and argued that critics of Straight Outta Compton were simply afraid of what its overwhelming realness reflected about the condition of America. “Most people in Compton don’t give a fuck,” reiterated Eazy. “All we do is rap about it.” Years later, I would come to realize that N.W.A’s portrait of reality was not believed by anyone who took their music as seriously as it deserved, regardless of how they felt about it aesthetically. But the cumulative weight of that disbelief had the desired effect. It performed better than reality.

  The original lineup of N.W.A was composed of six members, but the meaningful lineup was only five: Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, MC Ren (aka the Ruthless Villain), and DJ Yella. [The group’s extraneous sixth member, Arabian Prince, exited before they became famous.] They were all different people, but they dressed like clones:
They wore black jackets and black hats promoting the Los Angeles Kings and the Los Angeles Raiders. By chance, N.W.A’s rise to power occurred during a strange period when hockey was extremely popular in L.A. (due to Wayne Gretzky’s 1988 arrival from Edmonton) and the awkward twelve-year stretch when the Raiders left Oakland to play football in the Los Angeles Coliseum. The Kings and the Raiders both wore black and silver. The Kings — who’d previously dressed in gold and purple, like the Lakers — started wearing black and silver in ’88 because they wanted to be more like the Raiders. It was the same thing N.W.A wanted.