Decoded (22 page)

Until hip-hop came along. Run-DMC said it in one of their early songs, “Rock Box”:
I never, ever wore a braid / got the peasiest hair and still get paid.
Public Enemy made it even clearer:
I’m black and I’m proud / I’m ready, I’m hyped, plus I’m amped.
Even the Jheri curl came back hard with hip-hop: Ice Cube did Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, one of the hardest albums of all time, with a curl dripping down his neck. He turned it from a symbol of self-hatred to the uniform of a black man at the bottom, which is really what it had become. (He still cut that shit off by the time his next album came around.) MCs were taking it back to the images from our childhoods—the blaxploitation heroes, the black power activists, the black aesthetic movement of the 1970s.

I was never on that nationalist tip as an MC, but MCs I looked up to, like Rakim, Kane, and Cube, whatever their politics, were unambiguously black, with no concession to any other standard of appearance. They didn’t hate themselves. They knew how to be strong and stylish but stay black in a way that wasn’t self-conscious or contrived. Just by being true to who they were, they obliterated the ideal of the light-skinned singer with the S-curl, which, for a lot of kids of my generation, took the edge off the kind of color consciousness that’s always lurking for black people in America. Even when hip-hop aired some of the ongoing colorism among black people—like Biggie rapping that he was black and ugly as ever—the point is that we were airing it out, not sweeping it under the rug and letting it drive us crazy trying to pretend it didn’t exist. Just one more way that hip-hop kept us sane.

THE WHITE BOY BLOSSOMED

In 2008 I headlined at another big rock festival, the All Points West show in New York. Unlike Glastonbury, there wasn’t any real controversy. I wasn’t even supposed to be on the bill. I was filling in at the last minute for the original headliners, the Beastie Boys, because Ad Rock, one of the Boys, had to drop out for cancer treatments. In their honor, I opened my show with a cover of their classic Brooklyn anthem, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” The crowd—which was standing in inches of mud after a torrential rain earlier in the day—was electrified and maybe a little surprised.

I’d known the Beastie Boys for a while—we had a lot in common. We were all from New York and had a strong connection to the legendary Def Jam label. They were its bestselling act in the early years and I spent three years as its CEO. We’d both worked closely with Rick Rubin—Rick produced their first album, Licensed To Ill; he produced “99 Problems” for me on The Black Album (in fact, Mike D of the Beasties was in the studio for that recording session).

But before I ever met them, I listened to their music. They were a different sort of group from the other acts of the mid-1980s, hip-hop’s first golden age. They started off as a hardcore band in the New York punk scene.

Back then punk mixed easily with hip-hop, and Rick and Russell were like mad scientists, mixing elements of big-beat hip-hop with the crunching guitars of heavy metal. That was an element in the sound of a lot their first big acts, like Run-DMC, LL Cool J, and even some Public Enemy. But when these three Jewish boys from New York worked it, they became the biggest act in America.

The evolution of the Beastie Boys has been very strange to watch. I remember first seeing their bootleg little videos for early songs like “She’s on It” on the local New York video shows: They wandered up and down the beach in Coney Island like a trio of sloppy, drunken punks, while a gaggle of Brooklyn girls in bikinis did the classic white-girl bop. The music was grinding guitars and the flow was extremely elementary with long pauses: there’s no confusion / in her conclusion. It had the kind of smirking, smart-ass style that was very New York and very punk rock, but it also had girls in bikinis and Led Zeppelin riffs that any American boy could get behind. When they started working with Rick Rubin, they perfected that formula.

Hip-hop gave a generation a common ground that didn’t require either race to lose anything; everyone gained. Black people never had to debase themselves in hip-hop. A lot have, but it was never obligatory. In fact, the most successful albums from black artists have come from artists who are among the most culturally and politically conscious, whether it’s Lauryn and the Fugees or Outkast or Tupac or Public Enemy. And the white acts who were the biggest—Eminem and the Beasties, for example—largely came with respect for the culture and its roots. Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.

[
Intro
] And out of the mercy of Allah and the lord written in our nature / We call an individual into existence and when that individual comes /
I make no apologies for what I’m about to do
¹
 / [
Jay-Z
] I’m America’s worst nightmare / I’m young black and holding my nuts like shh-yeah / Y’all was in the pub having a light beer /
I was in the club having a fight there
²
 / Y’all can go home / Husband and wife there /
My momma at work trying to buy me the right gear
³
 / Nine years old uncle lost his life there / Grew up thinking life ain’t fair / How can I get a real job / China white right there /
Right in front of my sight like here, yeah
⁴
 / There’s your ticket out the ghetto / Take flight right here /
Sell me, you go bye-bye here yeah
⁵
 / Damn there’s a different set of rules we abide by here / You need a gun niggas might drive by here / You’re having fun racing all your hot rods there / Downloading all our music on your iPods there /
I’m Chuck D standing in the crosshairs here
⁶
 / Y’all straight, chicks got horsehair here
⁷
 / You ain’t gotta be in fear of your bosses there /
Y’all lose your job, your pop’s rich, y’all don’t care
⁸
 / So I don’t care, y’all acting like y’all don’t hear /
Hear all the screams from the ghetto all the teens ducking metal here
⁹
 / Trying to take they mind to a whole different level here  /
Yeah, we’re real close to the devil here
¹⁰
 / There gotta be a better way. Somebody call the reverend here / Yeah, y’all must really be in Heaven there / Somebody tell God that we got a couple questions here /
My little cuz never got to see his seventh year
¹¹
 / And I’m so used to pain that I ain’t even shed a tear

I’m a Fan of Clear Ideas. (1:49)

[
Jay-Z
] As long as there’s drugs to be sold / I ain’t waiting for the system to plug up these holes /
I ain’t slipping through the cracks
²
/
So I’m at Portland, Oregon tryin to slip you these raps /
The first black in the suburbs
³
/ You’d think I had Ecstasy, Percocet, and plus syrup /
The way the cops converged,
⁴
they fucked up my swerve / The first young buck that I served / I thought back to the block / I never seen a cop when I was out there / They never came out there /
And out there, I was slingin crack to live
⁵
/ I’m only slingin raps to your kids / I’m only tryin to show you how black niggaz live / But you don’t want your little ones acting like this / Lil Amy told Becky, Becky told Jenny /
And now they all know the skinny
⁶
/ Lil Joey got his do-rag on /
Driving down the street blasting Tupac’s song (Thug Life baby!)
⁷
/ But Billy like Snoop, got his blue rag on /
Now before you know it, you back in ’Nam
⁸
/ Now the police got me in the middle of the street / Trying to beat me blue, black and orange / I’m like hold up, who you smacking on? /
I’m only trying to eat what you snacking on
⁹
/ [
Chorus: Jay-Z
]
/
Hell yeah (y’all don’t like that do you?) / Hell yeah (you fucked up the hood nigga right back to you) / Hell yeah (you know we tired of starving my nigga) / Hell yeah (let’s ride) hell yeahhh (let’s ride) / [
Bridge with Jay-Z ad-libs
]
/
If you claiming gangsta / Then bang on the system / And show that you ready to ride / Till we get our freedom / We got to get over / We steady on the grind