July 12, 2009
as nasty as they wanna be (chapter one excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
The accelerated culture war on hip-hop starts, arguably, with the obscenity charges filed against a clerk for selling a 2 Live Crew cassette to a minor in 1987; it blossoms with 2 Live Crew’s 1989 album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, which generated a staggeringly extended and complex legal history — including a trailing suit for sampling practices. Taken together, these render uniquely apparent the unity of aesthetic, legal and cultural attacks.
Given the critical and legal pressure brought to bear on sampling in particular, it would be impossible to overvalue the fact that hip-hop’s Golden Age is the golden age of sampling as well. As Hank Shocklee describes the development of composition strategies over the decade, “Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.”
The struggle for aesthetic recognition which pursued traditional versions of musicality, and the new regime of expensive licensing which preferred artists supported by major corporations, had in different ways the eventual effect undermining rap’s character of reproduction-as-production — a material character inseparable, as we have seen, from its social content. The bond between musical production and the social base of disenfranchised and untrained artists had defined rap’s genesis, as well as the development of self-empowerment discourses, Black Power, Black Nationalism, and confrontation as a mode; the counter-revolution beginning in the late eighties had the effect of sundering this bond.
However, in understanding how these showdowns husbanded the shift from Black Power to gangsta rap, one notes that gangsta scarcely appeared as an accommodation to the culture war, and was in fact the recipient of renewed vitriol in the form of decency crusades. As we’ll see, the pivotal moments of the culture war in this period nonetheless had the effect of disciplining gangsta’s emergence in a specific and curiously narrow direction en route to becoming hip-hop’s house style (which it remains, in considerable and calcified degree, to this day).