Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of REDRUM (AYS).So, I loved Ta-Nehisi's piece on MF Doom in The New Yorker, which I won't link to because the full text isn't available online, and because if you're not subscribing already, it won't hurt you to buy a damn magazine from an actual newsstand. I promise! But I want to talk about it, because there's something about the piece that's nagged at me a bit, and that's part of the on-going conversation Ta-Nehisi has with his readers about how he's largely done with hip-hop. Nobody has the right to require that anyone keep writing about something he or she doesn't want to write about, of course, and Ta-Nehisi is no priest whose blessing any of us need to listen to, or love, whatever we choose. But I think this conversation made me realize that my hip-hop framework is just entirely different from Ta-Nehisi's, both emotionally and geographically.
He writes in the Doom piece "I kept the assembled works of Wu-Tang Clan on repeat and stewed, convinced that somewhere around 1998 hip-hop had run out of things to say. I was not alone. Disaffected music fans began to refer to the halcyon days of the eighties and nineties--when ever rapper had a d.j., and label owners didn't vamp in videos, confusing themselves with artists--as 'the Golden Era.'...I was worn down by the petty beefs between rappers, by the murders of Tupac and Biggie, and by the music's assumption of all the trappings of the celebrity culture in which it now existed." And while I can understand why as an adult, anyone would be sick of the need to constantly assert that you're the best that Kanye West is the epitome of, it's not what I ever looked to the music for.
I fell in love with hip-hop because of the doubt in it. Without question, the two seminal moments in my hip-hop education came in 2001 when I heard OutKast's "Ms. Jackson" on the radio during a Top 40 countdown, and in 2004, when I accidentally downloaded Cee-Lo Green's "Die Trying" (someone out there had a mislabeled file). Both of those songs slay me in entirely different ways. The anger and guilt in "Ms. Jackson" are kind of remarkable. The declaration "And yes I will be present on the first day of school and graduation" doesn't promise any involvement in between. "Let bygones be bygones, you can go on and get the hell on / You and your mama" is as much an admission of defeat as it is a brutal kiss-off. In the emotional equation of "Die Trying," the proportions are reversed, there's more resignation than arrogance. Of course, it takes some audacity to announce that you're "Preaching the very same power they killed Martin for saying," but when you immediately temper it by noting that "the Source couldn't find any microphones to rate me," it's more wistful than anything else. And the declaration that "If I died for you that would be an honorable death" is both wistful and insane.
I think it's not particularly a coincidence that the artists I fell in love with, who remain my deepest, truest loves in the genre, are from Georgia, rather than New York or California. Not that they aren't famous, and successful, and Georgia is hardly some sleepy little burg that hip-hop passed by. But I wonder if hip-hop untouched by the East Coast-West Coast dynamic, and by the East Coast-West Coast deaths, and money, and egos, has more room for doubt and nuance and tenderness. That's pure speculation, and bias--the dude who plays me "All Day Love Affair" or "Behold a Lady" near the beginning of a relationship will win my heart. I do think it's notable that Doom ended up in Atlanta. And I feel lucky that when I needed reassurance that the future held passion, and intelligence, and romance, rather than contemporary assertions of bravado, that a couple of guys from Georgia were there to tell me that it was true.