Sam Han | Eportfolio

We’ve all heard the complaints. We may even have some ourselves, depending on how old we are and what “era” of hip hop we consider to be the one we grew up on. “Where are the Rakims, the BDK’s or the KRS’s?” is a kind of line you hear from someone who, while scratching his or her head, claims that today’s rap sucks. “Blog rap” is a dis even on some of our favorite blogs! We hear it after the concert, outside of the venues, when people are congregating, wanting to debrief.

What is the charge leveled at today’s crop of rappers by the old guard?

Dart Adams, of Blogger House, hinted at an answer: the over-emoizaiton of hip hop. In a recent Tumblr post, he offers a wideranging genealogy of the emoization-issue. Linking everything from Sean Price’s Wale-line and “We Don’t Fuck with You, Musically” to the emergence of hipsterism and its seepage into hip hop, Dart does a fair job of giving a report of the state of things. In many ways, I agree with Dart’s assessment. One needs to look no further than Drake, who has, along with Cudi, fielded many “emo” criticisms, centered on him singing too much or his lyrics being introspective and a bit too self-vulnerable (which, by the way, I think the former-Degrassi star is acutely aware of as he has abruptly halted work on his R&B mixtape. “I’m just in zone rapping now. Just want to keep it going,” he says. Yeah okay dude.). 

But is it all about the rise of emotional content? Or, is this emoization a symptom of a larger trend in hip hop in the Internet age—the crisis of gender categories and identities of not only performers but of the audience and fans, who now are increasingly part of the production of the culture that they consume. I believe there is a rising plume of discourse among hip hop fans, critics, bloggers and industry types, that hip hop is not only Downy-status but becoming…feminine. Could not all of this emo-talk be a euphemization of a particularly masculinist (and in turn homophobic) backlash against a feminine quality of contemporary hip hop culture? More to the point, is the emoization-issue grating to many older hip hop fans because it’s “men” (and all the assumed cultural values and norms that lie within that label) acting like “women” (and all the assumed cultural values and norms that lie within that label)? How much of the discussion is about “emotion”—long the weapon of choice to categorize women as irrational and hysterical—as it is about the crisis which the young cadre of rappers that dominate the hip hop blogs are acting outside of their prescribed “masculine” place? How else would skinny jeans, sagging, metrosexuality, homosexuality and the social propioception of contemporary social networks such as Twitter be all lumped in together as responsible for the demise of hip hop?

Perhaps this is why there is so much backlash against both skinny jeans and sagging. What a funny thing if you think about it, no? Be damned if your pants are too tight. Be damned if your pants don’t fit at all. The former is perceived as the taking of the hipster-logic to the nth degree. It is the perfect example of the shift away from oversized everything in hip hop street wear to an emphasis on cut and form, an emphasis which had undoubtedly existed in women’s wear. It was the GQ-Details-Esquire-izaiton of hip hop clothing. Be gone Maurice Malone! Welcome American Apparel! It was the metrosexualization of hip hop culture. The latter, sagging, as largely reported, is rumored to be some extension of prison culture, where inmates cannot wear belts. Interestingly enough, opponents of both skinny jeans and sagging have used homophobia as a strategy to discourage the wearing of either. Opponents of both have basically suggested that skinny jeans and sagging are both “gay,” by associating hipsterism (as a proxy for metrosexuality) to skinny jeans and prison rape to sagging.

(NOTE: Now, what these folks make of sagging, skinny jeans, I don’t know although that’s definitely hot in the streets of East Harlem, where I live.)

But it seems hip hop sometimes wants it both ways. (You see what I did there?) My buddy Despot, a fine rapper and collector of ‘Lo gear, tweeted that nearly every single rapper at the most recent Def Jam cipher session at SOB’s had a line about wearing skinny but were not hipsters. Why not just say I wear skinny jeans? What’s with the neurotic obsession with skinny jeans? Why must a rapper qualify that he wears skinny jeans but can still rap? Is it a way of saying, “I wear skinny jeans but nah, I’m not gay”?

Or is it also something to do with not being stuck with the dreaded label of “hipster,” which too holds a whole cosmos of racial signifiers, as the widely-circulated excerpt in New York Magazine from Mark Greif’s sociological study of the hipster suggests. A figure that hovers as a specter in that article is of course Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes, who is clearly one of the major proto-hipsters in hip hop culture; the father of all hipster hoppers’ style if you will. But even Pharrell, who has been the target of homophobic comments about him by rappers, notably NORE and Beanie Sigel, is heard in a recently leaked CRS(his super group with Kanye and Lupe) track “Don’t Stop!’ dropping the F-A-G bomb. Can we just simply chalk this up to “Oh, we in hip hop use the word differently. It’s not homophobic.” Really? Is that the consensus? Though I’m not suggesting an equivalence but isn’t that kind of justification, which I see as prevalent, akin to dropping the n-bomb and saying, “Not in the antebellum way but in the hip hop way.” How much can we chalk up to cultural difference and specificity and how much can we chalk it up to homophobia? I fully appreciate the complexity of homophobia. I would even cede a gradation or spectrum of the ways in which homophobia takes shape. But it’s hard to miss the glaring irony of Pharrell of all people dropping the f-bomb.

One could undoubtedly look at the fraught state of hip hop cultural politics as reflective of the resurgence of a particularly Moynihanian fight in broader black cultural politics regarding black motherhood, masculinity and the family as exemplified by “No Wedding, No Womb” movement. Is this the seeping in of reactionary cultural politics into hip hop? Even my friend Combat Jack, who I respect immensely, has somehow linked the very existence of a figure like Lil B, who recently tweeted that he would engage in anal sex with Kanye West (voluntarily or not) if ‘Ye did not acknowledge him on Twitter, to the lack of black fathers. 

But is not my friend CJ, and others who collectively discharged a “Pause” to Lil’ B’s tweet, missing the point completely? Lil B, everyone’s favorite object of contempt, disinterest, pity or voyeuristic intrigue (and of course a combination of all of the above) is perhaps the most interesting rapper when it comes to the overturning of gender identities in hip hop. He refers to himself as “Pretty Boy Bitch.” He has yet to dispel rumors about his sexuality…on purpose. It is a shtick in the best sense possible. His whole thing is to turn the figure of “the rapper” on its ear. He is a postmodern trickster whose “existence” as rapper is 100% digital, pure simulacrum. To put it in philosophical terms, there is no there there with Lil B, just a carefully crafted, Internet-version of him.

And this brings me back to a point that Dart, in his post, touches on. Perhaps it’s not that rappers and fans are not in fact much “softer” or more “emo” than their forefathers but that the imbrication of social networking and social media into the hip hop landscape have given these characteristics more visibility. I believe it is this point that needs to be repeated. Perhaps the emoization of rap is not so much the softening of hip hop culture but the opening up and proliferation of possibilities for what it means to be a rapper and also a fan of hip hop culture. And indeed, this may very well mean the toppling of the gendered categories of the old guard. The Internet, it seems, has helped this.

So, for all the old heads, the purists who hold hip hop to be sacred and feel a sense of ennui as they see a bunch of young rappers and hip hop fans who act like (1) girls (2) gay or (3) a combination of the two, good luck surviving in the wave of profanations that has already started to rush into shore. Hope you brought rain boots.

Forgot to mention on here that I’ve started a new Tumblr devoted to mostly long-form cultural criticism. The first piece on masculinity, homophobia and hip hop debuted last week. This week’s piece will be on Kanye and Bush, which will be debuted over at my friend Nehru Jackets(nehrujackets.tumblr.com), the blog of my friend Himanshu Suri of Das Racist and cross-posted at Scattered Speculations.