Wretched cankerous filth.




 

A-oooga.




 

The critics didn't like this one because critics are stooopid.  Wiki couldn't even afford bigger artwork.  Just for that, you get two cuts.







 

Don't I wish I never met her.




 

It was a sentimental year, after all.




 

Speaking of grunge more generally, but maybe specifically just the audacity, looking back on it, at how much improbable music actually made it to major labels.  Amazingly, The Melvins got picked up by Atlantic Records for a couple of years where they managed to only give the label one middle finger (Stag) before getting dropped.  I mentioned Elektra as a shining example of a brave label scouting new talent.  They were a-courting Daniel Johnston for awhile, but Johnston was scared that Elektra-mates Metallica were agents of Satan and would naturally come after him with horns blazing.  Well, Johnston inevitably signed with Atlantic too.  Guess Johnston didn't know about The Melvins.




 

I don't know if I should include this simply because it was the band's only release in 1993, even though it's all '89-'91 EPs reissued in a new package.  Well, yeah, I'm gonna do it anyway because Pavement was another band whose earlier stuff was pretty much in constant rotation at this time.




 

I haven't gotten to much hip hop yet, despite the fact the 1993 was still right in the epicenter of its 'golden age'.  At this point, I really had no use for more commerical hip hop - Cypress Hill, Dr. Dre, Tupac (Thug Life) and what was seen as the growing 'gangsta rap' subgenre, based more on hardcore poses, criminal paraphernalia, macho fascism than musical quality.  It was basically, to my ears, the black parallel to what was emerging in metal with groups like Pantera, hyperaggressive and threatening, sonically shrill and abrasive.  I had very little interest in either.  In terms of early 90s hip hop, I liked "conscious" rap (Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions), what Bernie Mac called 'happy rap' (Digital Underground, Biz Markie) and the more recently emerged Native Tongues, mixing the conscious lyrics with less bombastic, jazz/soul sampled productions.  1993 saw excellent records from Tribe Called Quest (Midnight Marauders), Digable Planets (Reaching...), De La Soul (Bahloone Mindstate), Jungle Brothers (J Beez), The Roots (Organix), Guru (Jazzmatazz Vol. 1), KRS-One (Revenge of the Boom Bap), Digital Underground (The Body-Hat Syndrome), Ultramagnetic MCs (The Four Horsemen), Us3 (Hand on the Torch) and what's probably the only gangsta release worth its salt, Wu-Tang Clan (Enter the 36 Chambers), given RZA's more off-the-wall, visionary production.  Among this type of mellow but intelligent rap, but those who didn't specifically have 1993 releases, were The Pharcyde, The Fu-schnikens, Nas, Arrested Development, Da Bush Babees, KMD, Common Sense, Del the Funky Homosapien, Brand Nubian (they did have a release but it was not good so we went back to One For All instead).

All in all, a very productive era of young black talent.  Just this week, it was announced that Tribe Called Quest has become eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I don't really care much about that.  But this did inspire TheRoot to ask the unwanted and ill-conceived question "Why Do White People Love A Tribe Called Quest?"  (Here's a better question...why do I keep reading TheRoot?)  Well, I'm not entirely sure that *white people* love Tribe any more than any other of their favorite hip hop artists.  Tribe certainly never sold as well Dre or Snoop or Pac or LL Cool J.  They never had a hit as big as Tone Loc, Sir Mix A-Lot, 2 Live Crew or Cypress Hill.  Q-Tip is not the household name in white homes as Ice-T or Ice Cube.  Maybe the author should be clearer in defining exactly which white people he's referring to - "college-educated white people", or even more specifically "white college students".  (And maybe they weren't "frightened" by Ice Cube so much as disgusted by his embrace of Farrakhan anti-semitism, a fact that was somehow ignored for 30 years until recently rearing its ugly head again.)  While Tribe caught on with young, hip and aware white students, it's absurd to say they were ever embraced by "white people" writ large, and their sales record shows that.

The writer basically presents a contradictory frame for what it is about hip hop that attracts white listeners.  "In the 80s, hip-hop replaced metal as the music white parents did not want their children listening to."  I'm sure that there was a large number of white shitheads who had no better reason to listen to hip hop in the 80s than because it pissed off their parents.  A lot of people don't properly appreciate the music when they only use it for non-musical reasons.  And it's long been well-known that the reason why gangsta rap became the predominant style in the 90s was due to its popularity among white audiences precisely because it presented some taboo tourism through the ghetto that could be vicariously exciting from the safety of a suburban basement.  And guess what?  Maybe this is also exactly why a pseudo-gangsta group like Cypress Hill sold triple the number of copies than Tribe in 1993, and had the distinction of having the highest selling hip hop album up until that time.  So it seems weird to me why TheRoot isn't interested in asking "Why Do White People Love Gangsta Rap?", a more pertinent and sociologically interesting question.

As I pointed out above, the symmetry between white kids' love of gangsta rap and their love of hardcore metal is not surprising.  It's the reason why another huge hit from 1993, the Judgment Night soundtrack, was so successful, being a shrewd hybrid of these contemporary styles.  The album is hit-and-miss.  Helmet and Faith No More are more creative bands than Biohazard; Boo-Yaa Tribe is a lot more interesting than Onyx, and a few tracks sound like cash-in toss-off efforts.  But as a marketing gimmick, it was a goldmine.

So we've established that this subset of suburban white kids love both gangsta rap and metal, because they're oppressively hyperviolent, hypermasculine and because they provoke repulsion in the people they hope to irritate.  I can only speak for myself, but for me it was always about the music.  2 Live Crew is musically trash, but it sold more than Public Enemy and Tribe because it was provocative and taboo.  Geto Boys is trash, somehow gets more respect today than the genius productions of Shock G, Prince Paul or DJ Premier.

"When Black artists are not 'cool' in a stereotypical way, it makes it a lot easier for their music to be accepted (by white people)".  This is clearly bullshit based on everything presented above.  The article just laid out the case for why hip hop had become so successful among white kids - because it's "anti-establishment", "raw and in-your-face".  Tribe presented an antidote to all of that - "soulful, positive, jazzy, fun and uplifting".  And most white audiences throughout the 90s would continue to purchase gangsta rap in exponential amounts to what this fertile but commercially smaller subgenre was able to sell.  There is no metric available to show otherwise.   Black audiences make up about 12-15% of the American consumer market.  White people were buying these gangsta albums.

"Outside of other artists in the Native Tongues collective, Tribe was the only group that was making popular jazzy and soulful hip-hop for a widespread audience."  This is a bit more conditional, considering how Tribe's most successful competitors in the genre are other Native Tongue members (De La Sul, Queen Latifah), or could be roundabout associated with someone from the collective (Digable Planets, The Roots, Common).  But in the more general sense of hip hop, this is still a pretty small slice of the overall genre, and the overall sales among the white audience, in no way commercially threatening to far more lucrative and dominant enterprises like Def Jam, Bad Boy, Death Row or Roc-A-Fella.  White people have spent more money on Kanye's shoes in the last decade (1.8 billion dollars) than all of the Native Tongue records combined.  Let's ask that question?

Jinnistan wrote:

At this point, I really had no use for more commerical hip hop - Cypress Hill, Dr. Dre, Tupac (Thug Life) and what was seen as the growing 'gangsta rap' subgenre, based more on hardcore poses, criminal paraphernalia, macho fascism than musical quality.  It was basically, to my ears, the black parallel to what was emerging in metal with groups like Pantera, hyperaggressive and threatening, sonically shrill and abrasive. 

I don't find anything musically or lyrically or substantitively lacking in gangsta rap. It certainly isn't my favorite subgenre of the form (I've actually never even listened to The Chronic before) but I find the MCing skill of Shakur, the lyricism of Cube, the sonic template Dre used in NWA, the brooding atmosphere of Cypress Hill all pretty much top notch. Sure, there is a lot of chest puffing going on here, which I would find obnoxious in a friend or some cunt at the end of a bar, but I think that macho bullshit has a lot to say about the environment it was born out of. As does the aggression, the nihilism, the despair. All elements that I find just as humane as anything that tries to think outside of the streets.

That said, I completely agree that the fanbase it attracts doesn't look good. It's always white kids. In university I would sit in rooms with bros who thought these ganster poses were either hilarious or badass, both attitudes which felt to me extremely demeaning towards the black experience they were depicting. This was a situation that, in its exagerrated form, became something to snicker down at, or make one see thuglife as the ideal condition for  a black man. Years later, I mentioned this to some hip hop head friend of mine, that it seemed to me this music was allowing white eyeballs to see something like "How I Could Just Kill a Man" or "Straight Outta Compton" as a being sung by modern Step n Fetchits'. Let's just say I was vehemently disagreed with, and that me evoking minstrelsy sounded kinda racist. Which was annoying.

But, while I think that this kind of music basically being marketed by white people to white audiences has a lot of gross and exploitative aspect to it, and that the fanbase is certainly suspect, I find Ice-T's description of gangsta rap as 'reporting' pretty fair. This is music that has to exist, and I think it would be weird if it didn't. I think there is serious value in lyrics that document a communities experience through the eyes and vernacular and emotional state of those who live there. Sure, these sometimes devolve into poses, but we can also recognize those poses as armour. A very specific tactic one needs to survive on the street. An element that makes sense if it keeps reappearing in songs about gang life.

And maybe its also possible that sometimes a certain kind of message would never infiltrate the crowds it needs to unless it doesn't adopt a pose. During my brothers racist phase he listened to lots of gansta rap. And when he listened to it it was clear he was doing so in the broish way I outlined above. It wasn't because he had a very good outlook on the black community.

But over the years he shook his racist nonsense, he continued to listen to this kind of music. And I sometimes think its partially responsible for pulling him out from looking at blacks in the derogatory way he once did. I think after sometime, it dawned on him the rage and hurt and sense of helplessness that was burbling beneath the boasts and gun sound effects, and he recognized something of his own tragic existence in theirs. I think on that level of 'fuck the world' and 'I'll survive it anyways' he could see himself. And that is the kind of building block you need to stop seeing people for the color of their skin, and see the similarities that might matter most.