Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Snoop Doggy Dogg, 1993

  Some 150 years before the rivalry between the Crips and the Bloods, America’s first street gang – the Forty Thieves – was active in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. So gangland America did not require hip hop, or the formation of the Black Panther Party, to spur it into life, although both have been blamed. Nor is gang membership a predominantly African-American trait: today Hispanic members outnumber their black counterparts approximately three to two. As urban deprivation and decay spread across inner-city America in the closing years of the last century, however, it was convenient for commentators to point at the drug addiction and casual violence, attribute it entirely to turf wars between African-American gangs, and then draw a thick black line towards the prominence of the provocatively named gangsta rap.

  US Vice-President Dan Quayle declared in 1992 that an album by rapper 2Pac (Tupac Shakur, the son of Black Panther activists) ‘has no place in our society29’. Soul singer and producer Barry White, who might have been presumed to be a political conservative, did not agree: ‘The greatest thing that ever happened30 to young people is rap music’, he told Vibe magazine. ‘It gives them an outlet to express their frustration – and get it out of them.’ Rapper/producer/entrepreneur Puff Daddy (Sean Combs) expressed similar sentiments in more vernacular language: ‘The young kids – all the real31 motherfuckers across the world that’s young and black – they need that real shit … They got to hear it. Like, if records stopped being made, motherfuckers would be jumping out of windows or something. That shit is almost like a drug.’

  Given the links between street gangs and narcotics, and the heavy influence of ‘weed’ on much 1990s hip hop, that was perhaps not the happiest of analogies, though no one could dispute its accuracy. Unfortunately, violent rivalry proved to be equally addictive. In the summer of 1996, sparring rap collectives released provocative declarations of geographical superiority: ‘New York, New York’ (Tha Dogg Pound) being answered by ‘LA, LA’ (Mobb Deep et al.) The latter was accompanied by a video in which the artists acted out the torture and killing of the Dogg Pound duo. With tensions already high between West and East Coast hip-hop outfits and their frequently more thuggish record companies, Puff Daddy called despairingly for an end to the violence.

  That September, 2Pac – who often came on stage to the sound of taped gunfire – was shot as he was driven away from a Las Vegas boxing event, and died six days later. His final words, to the policeman who was first on the scene of the shooting, were symbolic: ‘Fuck you.’ In the wake of the tragedy, a song called ‘Runnin’ (Dying to Live)’ was released, which featured 2Pac rapping alongside his supposed rival, the Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls, né Chris Wallace. (Both men were actually born in Brooklyn, although Shakur was raised in Oakland, California.) Six months later, Biggie too was shot dead. Puff Daddy expressed amazement that being a rapper could get you killed: he’d always thought it was ‘a way for the gangs to battle32 without violence’. ‘It just shows you how crazy times are’, he said. ‘Shit is fucked up … they wasn’t that gangsterish on the motherfucking records to deserve to die.’

  Regardless of their gang affiliation, rappers had been battling in clubs since the style was first invented; this was a genre founded on arrogant declarations of superiority, physical, sexual and regional. One of the first entirely coherent album-length rap statements, Boogie Down Productions’ Criminal Minded (1987), was not only self-promoting and rich with violent imagery, but it inspired a turf war with other South Bronx rap crews. (BDP member DJ Scott La Rock was shot dead less than six months after its release.) Before then, Schoolly D’s ‘PSK’ and (more humorously, sexism aside) Ice-T’s ‘6 in the Morning’ had depicted gang violence. Ice-T, whose persona was part gangsta, part pimp, was an inspired choice to deliver the theme song for Dennis Hopper’s 1988 movie Colors, a compelling study of street warfare in Los Angeles.

  The same city (or at least its near-neighbour, Compton) spawned the rap group who would not only carry gangsta culture into the artistic and commercial mainstream, but would arguably become one of the most important musical collectives in the history of American popular music. NWA (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) was a loose assembly of Compton rappers and DJs, whose first collaboration was Eazy-E’s 1987 single ‘Boyz-N-the-Hood’ (produced by Dr Dre; rap written by Ice Cube). With additional rapper MC Ren, NWA assembled Straight Outta Compton, which might have been designed to provoke outrage. ‘We knew the power of language33, especially profanity’, Ice Cube recalled. ‘We weren’t that sophisticated, but we knew the power we had.’ Yet the profanity merely sharpened a jagged saw, designed to slice through the frail threads connecting America’s ghettos to its political establishment. The album’s landscape was scattered with drug deals, unlicensed pistols, niggaz, motherfuckers, ho’s (or whores): ‘all about reality’, as the songs boasted. ‘Gangsta Gangsta’ laid out the options confronting black youth on the streets, while puncturing the soul tradition of musicians offering an alternative to urban warfare (‘Do I look like a motherfucking role model?’). But the killer blow was landed by ‘Fuck Tha Police’, confrontation explicit in every line.

  As if to outstrip NWA, Ice-T formed a thrash-metal band, Body Count, and released ‘Cop Killer’. ‘Rap is really funny34, man’, he protested. ‘But if you don’t see that it’s funny, it will scare the shit out of you.’ Warner Brothers could not decipher the humour, forcing the song to be removed from the Body Count album, and then dropping Ice-T from their label. Sensing an opportunity, a young black man named Ronald Ray Howard, who had been arrested for murdering a policeman, pleaded that his mind had been affected by listening to rap music: NWA, of course, and also 2Pac – ‘Trapped’, perhaps, which depicted a shoot-out between rapper and cops.

  The commercial potency of this music, to a multiracial audience, was demonstrated in 1991 when a tagging device known as Soundscan was introduced to provide a more accurate reflection of American album sales. Two genres benefited immediately from the change, at opposite ends of the musical and moral spectrum: country, and hip hop. Within a month, the second NWA album, EFIL4ZAGGIN (read it backwards), reached No. 1 in the US chart, having sold 1 million copies in less than two weeks. Violent and littered with expletives, of course, it also heightened the casual sexism which had been apparent on their debut. All women were ho’s; all ho’s deserved to be beaten or raped; therefore all women should take their punishment without complaint. The evidence for the prosecution was provided by the one-two combination of a sketch, ‘To Kill a Hooker’, and its musical enactment, ‘One Less Bitch’.

  There were other versions of rap available to the American public: rap as teenage lament, in the playful scenarios of Will Smith’s hits; rap as romance, in LL Cool J’s ‘I Need Love’ (though he was also involved in one of the first hip-hop feuds, against Kool Moe Dee); rap as mind expansion, from De La Soul and PM Dawn’s hippie grooves; rap for strong women (YoYo) and young women (TLC), and young kids (Another Bad Creation); even, for a year or so, gangsta rap which came close to representing a form of feminism, with 2Pac’s ‘Brenda’s Got a Baby’ and his pro-choice, pro-mom, anti-sexist ‘Keep Ya Head Up’. He followed through with ‘Dear Mama’, a sentiment that harked back to the days of Al Jolson, and ‘So Many Tears’, lamenting the casualties of the gangsta lifestyle. But at the time of 2Pac’s death, All Eyez On Me suggested that there was more profit in stoking macho bravado than in damping it down.

  Almost lost in the public debates over the ethics of hip hop – or, alternatively, rap as heinous social evil – was a sonic revolution perpetrated by NWA’s Dr Dre. Apparent, in retrospect, as early as ‘Boyz-N-the-Hood’ in 1987, it involved synthesised bass frequencies so low and eerie that they were almost felt subliminally; beats that were slow and stoned, rather than chattering and sharp; and an air of slightly removed spaciness, starkly at odds with the uncompromising violence voiced over his grooves. In the aftermath of NWA’s messy dissolution, Dre found the rapper to match his sound in Calvin
Broadus, alias Snoop Doggy Dogg. He unveiled his protégé on the theme song from the 1992 movie Deep Count, then allowed Snoop to dominate his epic solo album, The Chronic. Setting aside the inevitable glorification of violence and objectification-cum-hatred of women (and those are big concessions), one could not help but be caught up in the seductively lazy, weed-heavy ambience of the single ‘Nuthin’ But a G-Thang’: effectively an advertisement for the mental and physical pleasures of being a gangsta. Snoop Dogg impressed so many American teens that his later solo releases began to sell better to whites than to blacks.

  After The Chronic, any sense of hip hop as the music of the underground could not be preserved. In 1993 and 1994, there was a flurry of new, compelling voices, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas and Common among them, and equally magnetic combinations of sounds from the Wu-Tang Clan, the Roots, OutKast and the Digable Planets. Then the entire industry was caught up in the beefs between 2Pac and Biggie, Death Row and Bad Boy Records, West Coast and East. After which – said Tommy Mottola, COO of Sony Records, who had a vested interest in making it so – ‘Gangsta rap is over35, finally, thank God. [Hip hop] is becoming more and more pop music, as opposed to being segregated.’ By which he meant: there was money to be made if hip hop became a form of entertainment, rather than a chronicle of America’s deepest scars and most urgent problems.

  * * *

  fn1 The 1982 movie Wild Style neatly encapsulated all these elements within its naïve narrative.

  fn2 The album was ‘hosted’ by MTV’s animated stars Beavis and Butt-Head, stereotypically inarticulate teenagers who devoted their show to satirising the video clips that the network played, Nirvana included – a piece of self-sabotage Cobain must have enjoyed.

  fn3 It could stop very suddenly. The British band Napalm Death compressed the entire history of rock music into their 1.3-second-long recording ‘You Suffer’, though purists would note that Napalm Death were officially a grindcore band, mixing thrash with hardcore punk. Even that performance trundled by comparison with the single abrupt chord of the Electro Hippies’ ‘Mega Armageddon Time’. Bands in the post-punk tradition tended to go about their business more succinctly than those whose narrative began with metal.

  fn4 The Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte became the nation’s capital of death metal as many citizens took to the streets in 1983–4 to protest about the military government’s refusal to allow the return of democracy. Feeling themselves powerless, young people channelled their frustration into the most violent music they could imagine.

  1, 2

  FOR ANYONE SCHOOLED in the pop tradition of Frank Sinatra, Burt Bacharach or the Beatles, the 1990s was as confusing a landscape as Britain in 1940, with all its road signs removed or realigned to baffle an invading army. The popular song, with its recognisable structure of verses and choruses, had been smothered, subjected to a brutal post-mortem, and then sent back into the world with all its limbs awry and its organs missing. In place of melody, there were breakbeats and samples, synthesised pulses and sequenced keyboards – plenty to catch the ear, little for the proverbial milkman to sing on his rounds. Instead of romantic love and the joy of youth, contemporary music was filled to its razor-edged brim with self-loathing and despair, aggression and hatred. Vinyl was dying or dead, depending on your location; the cassette tape was being earmarked for destruction; even the video had lost its gleam, as MTV gradually sidelined its musical content in favour of comedy, game shows and a new strand of ‘reality’ programming which prioritised unknown members of the public over established stars.

  Decrying these changes was as pointless and anachronistic as lamenting the passing of the 78, or the crushing of the dance bands by the influx of personality vocalists and rock ’n’ roll. But the music industry had expanded with such rapidity that it could not afford to lose any of its audience, no matter how alienated or outdated they felt in the age of 2Pac and Nine Inch Nails.

  In 1980, nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s still seemed faintly ridiculous. That year, the British songwriter Dave Montague issued a concept LP entitled Supernova, intended to introduce a stage musical based around eight dead rock icons, from Buddy Holly to Marc Bolan. The project was quickly as inanimate as its inspirations, but later the theatrical recreation of a rock-star life provided a foolproof route to a West End hit, as musicals such as Buddy and Jersey Boys would demonstrate.

  In the same year, a desperate American manager placed an advertisement in a music trade paper, declaring bravely that ‘Big bands are young again3’. He raved about ‘the college kids who pack concert halls to hear Big Band superstars like Count Basie, Maynard Ferguson, Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, Harry James, Ellington and the Dorseys’, apparently forgetting that all but one of those bandleaders (Ferguson) was dead. No matter: the manager believed that he had unearthed ‘a huge young audience who flips the radio dials and scours the record bins for brand new sounds they never heard before’ – not hip hop, but 1930s swing reissues. To prove the point, he illustrated his ad with a bunch of college-age kids who could not have looked more exhilarated if they had seen all their favourite Hollywood idols walking naked down the street. Again, the sentiment was both hopelessly out of time, and premature. By the late 1980s, one of America’s biggest stars was Harry Connick Jr, in his early 20s, who claimed ‘I don’t want to be a revivalist4’ while reprising the sound of the 1940s. By the mid-1990s, Tony Bennett, without a hit record to his name since 1967, was the coolest name to drop on an American campus, while cynical British journalists were suddenly promoting the joys of easy-listening albums from Bennett’s prime, for their kitsch, ironic, wondrously wacky trademarks of blandness and simple melodies.

  The year 1980 was also when Beatles producer George Martin, quizzed before John Lennon’s death about the possibility that the group might reunite, asked contemptuously: ‘What material would they do5? Nobody wants to hear their old stuff anymore.’ Twenty years later, a record retailer noted, ‘The Beatles are still saving6 the industry’s ass’, as their greatest hits compilation 1 racked up the first of its perhaps 30 million sales – a figure which, if officially verified, would confirm it as the biggest-selling album of the twenty-first century. By 1995, the group had already concocted what Capitol Records called ‘the multimedia musical event of the [twentieth] century’ with their lavish Anthology project: a series of documentary TV programmes, three double CDs of material retrieved from the vaults and (eventually) a huge autobiography. The publicity coup was completed by one of the century’s most anticlimactic media events, a long-awaited reunion of the Beatles (Lennon present only on archive tape) for two pleasant but ultimately unconvincing singles. The Beatles’ attitude to money in the post-hippie, post-idealism era was instructive. When Paul McCartney toured America for the first time in more than a decade, he allowed his concerts to be sponsored by Visa. ‘I don’t see it as a sell-out7,’ he blustered, ‘and anybody who does ought to go live in Russia.’ Meanwhile, John Lennon’s widow sanctioned the manufacture of neckwear bearing colourised versions of his doodles, and authorised reproductions of his trademark round spectacles. The Beatles even lent their corporate approval to the Franklin Mint’s five-inch Sgt. Pepper figurines, ‘meticulously hand-painted8 in psychedelic colors just as you remember them’.

  If the Beatles could re-form, albeit only at a safe distance from their generations of fans, then no grave was deep enough to keep the nostalgia industry at bay. Elvis Presley, dead since 1977, was sent out on tour again twenty years later with his original Las Vegas band for Elvis – The Concert: live musicians accompanying a celluloid hero. Jim Morrison of the Doors was reawakened as a 1980s sex symbol, and then (in the person of Val Kilmer) as the star of an Oliver Stone biopic.fn1 The Eagles returned with the most expensive tickets in show business, and an album entitled Hell Freezes Over, because they had once insisted that they wouldn’t reunite until this happened (or their managers secured a lucrative enough deal). During the 1990s, almost every legendary band from the 1960s and 70s was reintroduced
to their old repertoire and their even more elderly comrades, whether or not they were still on speaking terms. Any vestige of hipness still attached to the inspirations and pioneers for the punk movement vanished when the Velvet Underground re-formed in 1993, followed by the Sex Pistols three years later – yesterday’s outrage becoming today’s pantomime. Paul Weller of the Jam remained one of the few major acts to refuse the lure of a seven-figure cheque, forcing his ex-colleagues to form an ersatz replica of the group called, rather pathetically, From The Jam.

  Other once-prestigious acts were forced to confront the absence of a figurehead. Bad Company, Queen and the Faces all re-formed with substitutes for their lead singers (Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers complicating matters by replacing Freddie Mercury in Queen). Others, like the fictional Spinal Tap, lost members to accident, illness and overdose and carried on regardless, the Grateful Dead enduring the demise of three keyboard players before the more sizeable absence of Jerry Garcia forced them to pause – and then regroup as the Other Ones (later the Dead). Few rock legends, however, could match the convoluted history of Jefferson Airplane, who metamorphosed into Jefferson Starship in the early 1970s, then slowly shed original members and, eventually, their ‘Jefferson’. As the denuded Starship, the former champions of psychedelic experimentation were reinvented as a generic AOR band, appalling anyone who remembered their past with the glib sloganising of ‘We Built This City (on Rock ’n’ Roll)’. After Starship finally disappeared into an intergalactic puff of irrelevance, founder member Paul Kantner relaunched Jefferson Starship on a miniature scale. He persuaded several of his fellow stalwarts to re-enlist, filling the crucial absence of lead singer Grace Slick with a succession of young women who, aurally and visually, resembled her late 1960s prime. Once again, the originals slipped away, leaving Kantner to carry his exhausted Starship, hippie ideals still aloft, around a circuit of tiny rock clubs far beneath his dignity. Meanwhile, his late 1960s compadres, such as Crosby, Stills & Nash and the surviving Dead, continued to fill arenas around the world – proof that business acumen was as important as nostalgia when it came to preserving the past.