June 7, 2023 • 46 mins
Ben and Khalil are joined by their friend Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia Journalism School and New Yorker staff writer, to talk about 50 years of hip hop. They discuss what the music meant to them growing up in Chicago and New York. They talk about the documentary Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, and also about how the music’s legacy lives on.
Additional links:
Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, Chuck D’s PBS documentary
Hip Hop at 50: An Elegy by Jelani Cobb for The New Yorker
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushing.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, Hey, Hey, Mike Cheka one too. We got we
got the MC from back in the day, from Queens Hollis,
Queen's in the house.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
We can't. You gotta be talking to people who have like,
know your history, you know against you.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I'm Khalil Jibron Muhammad.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I'm Ben Austin. We are two best friends.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
One black, one white. I'm a historian and I'm a journalist.
And this is some of my best friends are.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Some of my best friends are in this show. We
wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply
divided and unequal country.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
In today's show, we're talking to Jelani Cobb, my great
friend from grad school, one of my favorite people to tease,
dean of Columbia Journalism School, and New Yorker staff writer.
Man the list goes on, I'm so proud of this guy.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Oh wow, Jelani Cobb. We got like quiet storm Jilani on.
We are going to talk to him about a subject
that all three of us love, hip hop. We're going
to talk about the evolution of the genre over the
last fifty years and what it means to us.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
This is gonna be great, but first, before we talk
to Jilani, I want to share something. You know, hip
hop is fifty when we're old heads, but it lives
on and your nephew, Jabron Mchael Maho is rocking his
own beats, his own flow, and so check check this out.
Listen to his music right now?
Speaker 4 (02:04):
All right? All right, yeah, all right, brody last, all right?
So this is your music? Right yeah, alright?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
So what's your what's your hip hop's origin story?
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Like I started getting into hip hop and I was
about maybe six or seven. I was allowed to listen
to explicit music, so I was listening to unexplicit versions.
I think Outcasts and Graduation or some of the earliest
(02:50):
hip hop albums.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Man Khalil, I'm almost in tears over here. I can't
think of a better way to start this conversation than
my nephew and thinking about thinking about you know, these
generations we're talking about us being in our fifties and
a fifty year old genre. So man, let's just I've
been in with Jelani.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
That's right, that's my boy, proud of him.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Let's do it, hey, Jelani, I actually wanted to start
with a question going back to when you first met Khalil,
and you two guys were in graduate school together at Rutgers,
(03:33):
and I had and this is both like an origin
story but also like a who were you story? And
I had heard in the past that people described the
two of you as Malcolm and Martin. That's right, meaning
people people thought that Khalil was like Malcolm X, the
(03:54):
equivalent to your Martin Luther King. What did that mean?
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, it's funny because in retrospect, you know, that might
have actually just been like a lazy overlay of Khalil's
family's history. You know, is the great grandson of Elijah Muhammad.
But also dispositionally, you know, Khalil kind of waged a
(04:21):
scorched earth campaign in those states. I was a more
conciliatory figure, which you know, I think that it wasn't
really so much a difference in our politics though, because
I think our politics were like roughly parallel.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
So, Julanni, you know, you have been a hip hop
hit as a writer, as a listener. You went to
the Mecca Howard University, and I know from the nineteen
nineties that you started writing for the City Paper and
you started doing music criticism and you wrote a book
in two thousand and seven called Break of Dawn Freestyle
(04:58):
on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, And it's a book that
basically you talk about the music itself. And so even
though I wasn't really into to hip hop at that age,
I was listening, you know, to these other things. You know,
since I didn't get this in the way that you
did early on what is the hip hop aesthetic?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
You know, I think that hip hop is a revisiting
of the aesthetic that created the blues, which is heavily improvisational,
derived from West African music and traveled with us through
the slave trade and you know, became the foundation of
all of those musics. And you know, I'll say what
(05:36):
I said in that book, which is that hip hop
is the blues filtered through a century of experience in
a thousand miles of asphalt.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Wow, all right, all right, all right, man, we got
we got Jelani Cobb by the show this week.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
The Nuggets dropping Jewels. I just want to say, you know,
I met you in the summer before grad school in
nineteen ninety five, and that was also the same fall
when there was a million man March. Hip hop was,
you know, all the rage and country. But like, when
did you fall in love with hip hop?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
What?
Speaker 2 (06:12):
What is your hip hop origin story?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Oh? My early, it's really early. I was like seven
or eight, you know, I was born in nineteen sixty nine,
and so hip hop, you know, people can consider like
the origins of hip hop to be nineteen seventy three,
you know, if you believe, like you know, there's a
single origin point. So this is like nineteen seventy six,
(06:40):
seventy seven maybe, And what happened? And I remember that
my brother, who's seven years older than me, you know,
who was you know, starting to kind of have his
teenage explorations of New York City and so on, came
home with a mixtape one time, and you know, we
had these people playing music, but they weren't singing, you know,
(07:03):
they were like talking and like everything they said was rhyming.
I had never heard anything like. It was like shocking
to me something like that could even exist, you know.
And then you know, of course, and short on, my
brother started rapping. And then you know, being a little brother,
you wanted to do everything that your big brother did.
(07:23):
And it was an incredible time because you know, we
grew up in Queens, New York and Hollis and so,
you know, one of my my brother had to pick
me up from school, like a lot of older brothers,
and I have distinct recollections of his friend Joseph, you know,
who used to also walk home with us in the
same general direction. You know, Joseph became better alone later
(07:45):
as run you DJ run.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
All right, you are like throwing down credentials just.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
In case run wasn't good enough for somebody.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Exactly, yeah, run DMC. And so it gets more interesting
because you know, I ran into Run maybe let's pop
about ten years ago at Harlem and I said my
name and he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Victor's brother. I was like yeah, and he was like, yeah,
(08:19):
we used to walk you home from school. So I
did not think he would remember that, but you know,
for whatever reason, he did. And so then, you know,
when I got a little bit older. In eighth grade,
I had we had this kind of quirk where we
had to line up in height order before we'd be
dismissed from school. And you know, I was the third
(08:41):
tallest boy in my class.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
It was me.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
There's a dude named James, and then there was a
dude named Anthony Weeks. I think Anthony Weeks wound up
going to be like six six or six seven, really tall,
but James was just like, you know, a quarter inch
taller than me or so. And one day in class,
you know, we're lining up before we can be dismissed,
and James gives me a sheet of paper and he's
(09:06):
written his name on it, and I was like, what's
this and he said that's my autograph. What he said,
you should keep it because I'm gonna be real famous.
And I remember crumbling it up and throwing it away
in front of him. Do you like that?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
And punk ass?
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Right? Whatever?
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Now, who is James James's l ocal Jane exactly exactly
anything but right, Okay, I just want to say I
think you still did the right move of crupling up
the paper.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
That was just like for street cred like you had
to like, you know, not be sweating. But I said
to say that hip hop was ambient in my life,
like it was that's informed as I was.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, so Johnny, you talking ambient in your life too?
Speaker 1 (09:53):
No, I mean we're like well ship And after hearing Jolowney,
it wasn't like, you know, my next door neighbor was.
But you know, my story happens like five years after Jolwanny,
like about eighty two, eighty three, I'd say it's eighty three,
And it's also involved an older brother, Jelanny. I have
an older brother name Jake, and he was a total
bee boy at that point. He's a great artist, and
(10:14):
he was a graffiti artist. He was going around with
spray paint around around the South side of Chicago. Wow,
he was. He was break dancing, he was. He was
in a nascent rap group with two of his friends,
one of whom was Thriller that's what everyone called him,
and the other guy, Donald Cumberpats. And there were two
black guys and one white guy, so they were called,
(10:34):
of course the Oreo Crew, and you know, we would
go around with like a big, you know, boombox with
cassette tapes. But like in eighty three, he was like, hey,
come to this concert with me. And it was at
a tiny venue on the South Side and I was
like twelve, and it was Run DMC and their first album,
(10:58):
which is just called run DMC had not even dropped yet.
And I remember being at that show and the music,
you know, feeling the pulsing energy of like being at
the like the eye of a tornado, feeling of just
like being engulfed by the music, the power of it.
You know, hard times are coming to your town. Oh
(11:21):
you know which you know, like yeah, just like the
you know, I guess it was about austerity measurements. It
something I wasn't even thinking about necessarily the lyrics, but
it just felt like this power and that for me
was the first time. And Khalil for you, this was today, right,
this is right now hearing these stories, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
I mean, it is true that long ago I outed myself,
I was listening to a culture club and Phil Phil
Collins and Madonna back in the eighties. This is true.
But but my hip hop origin story starts first with
my older cousin, guy named Khali. He's five years older
than me, and I'll never forget in his like he
(12:03):
had kind of a porch bedroom as a big family
and he lived on the porch. And I just to
this day can see the album or that I should say,
I guess it was an album over forty five. I
can't remember, but the label of rappers the like of
the Sugarhail Gang, I can see it. I can just
see it.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
That was like Loope bubblegum writer exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
That was the first time I remember seeing something and
listening to music like that for the first time. And
then at seven, because my cousin's father was a radio
station owner, black radio station owner, Curtis I'm sorry, Curtis
Purvis Spans the Bluesman own w V one O three
in Chicago, and somehow he was promoting a concert and
(12:49):
I got to tag along with family and we saw
Curtis blow in concert and a small venue in like
nineteen seventy nine. It was unbelievable. So that's when I
first got exposed to hip hop, but it was many
years later that I would embrace the genre fully and entirely.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
You're like, this is not for me, No, it was
just it was just.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
A tension there, you know, like you've been when you
and I were in high school. You know, you really
were listening to KRS one and like rapping lyrics, and
I was like, oh, you know, I know that song,
but it wasn't like it was on my playlist necessarily.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Yeah, right, it was do you really want to hurt me?
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Right? Culture CLUBB exactly, Jelani, we are going to take
a short break and we're going to come back and
we're going to talk about hip hop at fifty. All right,
(13:56):
we are back on. Some of my best friends are
with the amazing Jelani Can and one of our producers
bragging yeah. And one of our producers was like, his
voice is the greatest voice I ever heard. So now
everyone gets to get the piece of that here. So
so Jelani, hip hop, you know, we can say turned
roughly fifty this year, like you can maybe dated to
(14:18):
nineteen seventy three, which is also the same year as
the start of mass incarceration. Go figure. But there's this
documentary that Chuck d of Public Enemy executive produced and
hosts called Fight the Power How Hip Hop Changed the World.
It's on PBS, and so we watched that, and you know,
(14:39):
you were talking about some of your own sense of
origins of being in Queens and sort of having these
sort of like you know, like greatest you know, Hall
of Famers of hip hop and rap being right around
you in school and your neighbors and your brother's friends.
And so I want to ask this question, like does
hip hop start in Queens or does it start in
(15:00):
the Bronx.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
And you got to think about who you might lose
in this answer, what friends of yours might.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
Like.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Without question, the hip hop starts in the bronx, all right, but.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
But that's where we want we want them, we want
complexity here.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, exactly, Queens was at the cornerstone of its founding
and the reason for that is that Queens was what
made hip hop go from being a regional phenomenon to
being a national and then an international one. You know,
hip hop existed in the Bronx in Manhattan, you know,
in the early nineteen seventies, mid nineteen seventies. That began
(15:38):
to change in the late nineteen seventies into the early
nineteen eighties, you know, partly because it landed in Queens
where there was a class difference. So like when hip
hop started out in the music in like apartment buildings
and housing projects in the Bronx. And you know, it
was fun, it was expressive, some of it was political,
(15:59):
some of it talked about what was going on, but
you know, we just talked about run and DMC. Their
father taught black history, you know, which is way that
song at a community local college, community college, which is
where that song I'm Proud to Be Black came from.
You know, their father was a clergy member, They had
a home, they made records in their basement. L Ocol
(16:23):
j who I mentioned earlier. I remember he later like
incorporated this into his memoir. But I literally remember the
day that he came to school and said, my grandfather
bought me two thousand dollars worth of DJ equipment because
you know, he wants to support my music. And he
later used that equipment and his basement. Again, people had
(16:46):
homes with basements to make the demo that landed on
Rick Rubin's desk. You know, tribe called Quest revolutionized hip
hop by infusing jazz with it. And you know Q
Tip had his father had a father zz collection, all
that jazz collection, which was at that time a very
(17:08):
middle class preoccupation, you know, on pastime and and so
because they had a little bit more stability that parents
may have had a blue collar union job or a
civil service job, they had access to things that kids
in other parts of the city didn't and were able
(17:28):
to help shape you know, I mean Russell Simmons starting
Deaf Gem in his dorm room. The really central part
of that story is that he had a dorm room, right,
So all of those things that make Queen's a really
crucial place in the founding of hip hop.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah. Well that's interesting because, as you know, having having
led the Schomberg Center and being proximate to the Bronx,
you know, I was hearing all this Harlem centric storytelling
about about about the origins of hip hop. But I
think I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean,
the thing we know for sure is that the music
certainly didn't start in Chicago where we were where we
(18:09):
were listening to house music. But of course house music
coming out of disco and also breakbeats, you know, all
share in common. You know, this kind of sampling culture
that helps to make hip hop what it is.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
And before the term hip hop really got popularized, people
used to refer to it as disco. Yeah, and then
like this was why they have rappers like the Disco
three like.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
So one of the things that this documentary focuses on
is the social and political aspects of the music and
all these places in the eighties and nineties, from Chicago
to New York to Philadelphia to everywhere you know in
the North and even in the South, there are these
there's a crisis of violence, a crisis of community violence,
(18:58):
a crisis of gun violence. And you know, I know
you tell this story in a recent New Yorker article
where you talk about hip hop at fifty of seeing
a young man killed in front of your home. What happened?
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Yeah, So my parents met in Harlem. You know, my
father was an electrician in the apartment building where my
mother lived, and you know, kept making excuses to check
her lights, and so, you know, eventually my mother was like,
I don't think there's anything wrong with my electricity. And
that's how they met. But one of the things that
they wanted to do, they knew they want to do
(19:37):
early on, was move out of Harlem. And because of
some of the things that happened in the Civil rights movement,
more opportunity opening up, they were able to get a
house in Queen's which was a big deal at that time,
you know, And so there's this kind of narrative of
achieving that that goes along with that. But you know,
(20:01):
they're not really always clean breaks with the past. Because
I remember when I was you know, eight, or I
was around eight, a day when you know, there was
this gunfire outside. This is in residential Queens And you know,
there was a guy who was shot, who died in
front of our house, collapsed, you know, on the curb,
(20:24):
and and you know, someone covered him up with a sheet,
and you know, the police came, and you know, my
father went out and to see if it was my
older brother. I mean, as a child, this is just
like a horrific thing that you see. But as I
later came to understand, it was a generational experience that
the tides of violence that were increasing, you know, partly
(20:46):
in concert with you know, the influx of herowin into communities.
And so as I got older and I met people
from Chicago, I met people from la I met people
from d C. I met people from Detroit, and we
had all seen we all witnessed these scenes of warfare,
(21:07):
you know, in our youth. And that's when you start
to understand that like what hip hop was talking about,
the violence that hip hop was talking about was almost reportage,
you know, from the front lines of like what people
were seeing in their communities.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Toilana, You're making me think of Grandmaster Flash and the
Furious Fives. The message and so this, you know, in
the in the like mid nineteen eighties, and so this
is a story about me and that song, which is
when I was in Miss Paris's eighth grade class at
William H. Ray School, we had to all recite a
(21:42):
poem out loud, you know, memorize it. And I chose
the message, you know, I was gonna and and you know,
hearing you in and seeing this documentary of like, now,
why the fuck would I do that? You know, like
like I thought it sounded really cool.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
You were also wearing a gold chain back then, so
you know, it all was part of part of.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
It, wasn't it wasn't you know, like what you just
said about it being sort of like reportage or like
you know, documenting experience or a sound track. Like I
knew those things are going on, but like you know,
broken glass everywhere is like a jungle. Sometimes it makes
me wonder those aren't my experiences exactly, but it but
(22:22):
it resonated with me. I wanted to Yeah, I was.
I was. I was totally interested in this music and
in this and in the story it was telling and
in the sense of even injustice and like the kind
of violence that I knew at least was in the
periphery and that I was passing through. I was struck.
In this documentary, Mellie Mel talks about that who is
(22:43):
you know, one of the writers of the song and
part of Grandmaster Flash, And he talks about, you know,
thinking about that song and thinking about it in terms
of protest music, and he was like, I wrote that
and I was thinking of Bob Dylan music. I was
thinking of Marvin Gay, I was thinking of Stevie Wonder,
like he is consciously thinking about making music that is
(23:05):
protest music.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
And so when people have like the tiresome debate about
who's the greatest rapper of all time, I always have
an unconventional pick, which is Melly Mel, you know, because
he introduced extended metaphor into recorded hip hop.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
You listen to John Dolomite's version of it, oh.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah, beyond the version of it, right, Like Dolomite is like,
you know.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Because because that's a different kind.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
That's a different kind of that's a different kind of thing.
Like my father, my father knew like those those toasts
and boasts that like that Dolomite Rudy Ray Moore used
to like recite and my mother when my mother wasn't around.
He would tell me some of them we should not
look back and go like, oh my god, I couldnot
believe you told me that filthy poetry Like you know,
(24:01):
I will just say, like all of it centered around
like orifices. So but Melle Mel introduced like extended metaphor
and you know, the overtly political like frames of references
in music, and like really revolutionized what it could be.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
What were the so you said, you know, political references
like in his music.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
So you know they have a song, you know, the
message is the best known of them. You know. Then
after that they had you know, White Lines, which is
an anti drug song. And so when you had the message,
I remember being like blown out of my seat by
that because especially like when you think about the last
line of that song where he talks about this person
(24:51):
who's grown up in like slum conditions and he winds
up you live in a difficult life and then committing
suicide in his cell, and it's the last line is
now your eyes sing the sad, sad song of how
you live so fast and die so young? Nobody else
this was going to say, your eyes sing a sad
(25:12):
song in hip hop in that timeframe.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Right, That's why Miss Paris gave me an as.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
So Jelannie, I want, I want to just say, you know,
the thing about this moment with the message, the thing
about the period in time which it emerges Melly Mel's
vision of like protest music, with this new genre is
places like New York were coming undone, particularly for black people.
There's violence and gangs, there's a heroin epidemic. The state
(25:41):
is using the hammer of the law in a way
that it had never used it before. Nelson Rockefeller, the
heyday of the Rockefeller that's right in nineteen seventy. So
basically people are being thrown out like the trash. There's
no redemption, there's no rehabilitation, is only incapacitation. Moynihan, who
by then had already sort of defined the black family
as a pathological one, engages as a Senator of New
(26:05):
York like he's like, we need to just do a
period of neglect, of benign neglect in these communities. And
so by the time Reagan is president and elected in
nineteen eighty one and the message comes out in nineteen
eighty two, we basically get a fucking drug war enacted
on the black community. I spend every summer of the
nineteen eighties in New York City, and I mean, aside
(26:27):
from like seeing everything that was part of the moment,
the graffiti, the break dancing, particularly on the subway, the
music was everywhere. I also remember stepping on crack vials,
something that I actually don't remember from Chicago, but I
remember walking the streets of New York and literally stepping
on crack vials crunching under my feet. It's just yeah,
(26:47):
so of course that music made so much. It's a
time stamp.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Yep, yeah, that's a time stamp. Yeah, there are people
who know what that's like. And you know, you go
to the park to play, the playground would be littered
with crack vials, you know, from people who they are
getting getting high the night before. But to the thing
that you were talking about, it was really all arms
of the state, you know, pointing in the same direction.
(27:12):
You know, there was the public policy element of it.
There was the police and policing element of it. There
was a judicial element of it. There was even the
cultural element of it. When you see like films that
depicted New York in like this apocalyptic light, you know,
like the Warriors right.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
You know, Jelanney, I want to talk about here from
both of you, about you know, what the music is
actually saying. Like here, if this music is socially conscious,
if it's political, we're talking about you know, music that's
that's going from breakbeats and extending a good time to
actually like social commentary and maybe a way to think
about this as we got East Coast rap and West
(27:50):
Coast rap and let's talk about East Coast first because
that's where we are. We're talking about New York and
being there, and I want to ask about just like
Public Enemy in a way and to think about, like,
you know, what is the importance of Public Enemy in
this transition to social commentary.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Inestimable man public Public Enemy again going back to this
by the way, you know this kind of middle class dynamic.
Public Enemy was from Long Island, you know, which is
a more suburban environment. And you know they started out
on college radio, and you know, Chuck d explicitly talked
(28:29):
about incorporating the things that he learned in his African
American Studies class into his music. And you know, this
is the apartheid era. You know, this is the point
where people are learning like who Nelson Mandela is. This
is the also dawning of the HIV AIDS crisis, which
is also disproportionately affecting black communities. Uh. And the general
(28:51):
kind of economic stagnation is hitting uh, you know, community
after community along with violence.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
And Public Enemy comes out with a kind of moral clarity,
you know, almost like a Jeremiah, you know, a voice.
And then also I think the other thing about Public
m me it was not something what Chuck d was saying,
but literally the voice he was saying it in right, Yeah,
you know, the huge booming voice that comes out. You know,
(29:20):
it sounds like a stern parent admonishing you for something
like you know, the beginning of Night of the Living
base heads who goes here?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
It is bam, You're like, wait, well, there's a there's
a total urgency. It's like right, you know, it's a
you don't even know what it's a call to action.
You don't know what the call is, but it's a
fucking call to action. It's like wake up. Yeah right
yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
And so I mean I think all those things, like
they just completely changed the whole zeitgeist, you know a
hip hop at that point.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, obviously, fight the Power became
an anthem of an entire moment for youth culture. I
mean it was also the moment when people rediscovered the
Nation of Islam. Far Khan was, of course already in
nineteen eighty nine, Yes, is nineteen ninety nine. Far Khan
is already a popular leader. But for young people who
had not come of aid necessarily with malc them, they
(30:10):
now rediscover through this Public Enemy, through its evocation of
the Nation of Islam, takes a nation of millions to
hold us back. So it's sort of celebration of black nationalism.
And then all of a sudden, Malcolm X gets kind
of quote unquote rediscovered for our generation and his face
becomes part of the iconography of the moment the Public
(30:33):
Enemy borrows it. I mean, it's just just an incredible
time for how Public Enemy embodied so much for that moment.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
I have to tell you, I don't know if I
ever told you this, but like that album came out,
Nation Millions came out right before my sophomore year in college,
and there were two things that completely set the path
of the subsequent years of my life that I experienced.
(31:03):
One was that I took my first African American studies
course with a professor Adel Patton. The other was that
I listened to Public Enemies Nation of Millions incessantly, And
you know, those two things that point kind of lit
this fire in my imagination, in my sense of like
(31:25):
who I was going to be and like what I
was called to do in my life.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
You probably wouldn't be on some of my best friends
are today if it wasn't for that enough moment.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
I remember a picture of Jilyni from that time period.
He here in my memory, you wearing a tank top.
You are super buff, you have like you you are
clean and mean, and you have a huge flat top
and I think I'm pretty sure you're wearing an African red,
black and green medallion chest. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah right.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
That was like vintage Public Enemy era Jelani. Yeah. As
a matter of fact, that's how it even became Jolynni.
Up to that point, I was will you know that
changed my name to Julyanni.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
There it is, there, it is.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
So I want to go to Los Angeles. Yeah, I
want to go West coast right here real quick. And
and to think about Los Angeles in the eighties and
the music that the hip hop that's coming out of there,
and it is so closely focused on police abuse in
a different way than East Coast music. And we're talking
about you know, what became called gangster rap, you know,
(32:26):
begin maybe by iced tea and then NW a sort
of bringing it to its you know, kind of like apotheosis.
It's a it's a different kind of uh of attack.
It's a different kind of of voice, right.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Yeah, it is. It is like you know, you have
at the same time, like everybody, I think hid their
own kind of iteration of it, you know. But Los
Angeles had, you know, the huge amounts of carnage that
were happening as a result of like the gang warfare
that was happening, you know, among various constituencies, as most
(33:01):
notably to crypts and bloods, and you know, a kind
of corresponding draconian level of policing. They would bulldoze the
whole front of someone's home off, you know, under the
name of like trying to stop a drug deal or
or some such and so I think that you know,
this is experienced even more intensely, like we were seeing
(33:23):
things happening in New York City that was certainly like
you know, we think back to it, it's like Michael Griffith,
you know, who's killed by the police, I don't know, Bumpers,
you know, a black woman who's killed by the housing
police and so on. We had those kinds of things.
I think that the L A. P. D was even
more egregious, you know, and the behavior that they were committing,
and you heard that in the music. You know, as
(33:47):
political as Chuck d was, who was like within a
certain set of real constraints of propriety, the so called
gangster rap that came out of La dispensed with all.
Speaker 6 (33:59):
That in the police get metaphor, you know, we're not
making like it's been kind of cloak this, you know,
like the poetry is mainly going to be in the
rhyme just but basically, in case you didn't understand the
sentiment we were trying to express, it is fuck the police.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Yeah, yeah, no, It's it's such a rich moment for
what becomes this contrast, and in some ways gangster rap
takes over the ethos of hip hop in the way
that both the media understand the evolition of the music,
the way the criticisms start to emerge about the music itself,
(34:40):
particularly criticisms about the said hyper celebration of black masculinity
and violence, the display of guns, and of course all
of that just furtheres like a vicious cycle, where then
Chief Darryl Gates, you know, who sort of uses the
Swat team to militarize policing. You get the ubiquitous presence
of helicopters, you know, covering every part of black Los
(35:03):
Angeles and its surrounding suburbs. And it's just a moment
when you can actually feel the ground of Black America
began to shift as the nineteen nineties take over from
the eighties of Reaganism to the nineteen nineties, and we
also get a change in the music.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Yeah, I think that one of the important things about
that that I was trying to bring out in the
piece that I wrote in The New Yorker was that
people critiqued the kind of hyper masculinity of hip hop
at that point, which I understand. I think there's a
fair critique, but I also think that most people missed
(35:42):
the fact that that hyper masculinity was clearly in response
to the astounding vulnerability of the people who were creating
the music. And what I say vulnerability. I mean, they
belonged to the demographic that was most likely to die
of homicide in the United States, young black men, and
(36:04):
they were almost kind of armoring themselves in kind of
cell breating the masculinity and vulnerability because the reality was
so much to the contrary.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
So we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back
and talk about how the music changed and the choices
it makes going forward. At least it's artists. We'll be
right back after the break. So Jilani, I mean, listen,
(36:49):
hip hop is a global phenomenon. I mean, you can't
go anywhere in the world and not either hear the
music or see the influence of the music. But one
thing that I know a lot of people are talking
about I've certainly considered it over the years, is like,
how does the music go from agitation where there's this
social commentary and even though thanks to rap, has all
(37:10):
of these problems, you know, hyper masculinity, misogyny, I mean it,
you know, all of this, but it goes to this
period where it's really glorifying money making and materialism and
getting paid and it's like I got mine, you get yours.
I mean, the music really does change to some degree
at least I would say, do you think that's true?
(37:30):
I mean, do you think the music change or those
elements were sort of always intention.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
You know, it's like genealogy, you know, like you have
kids that like don't look like the mother or father,
but it looked like the great uncle. Like those things
had always been present. They had always been part, you know,
of the music, you know, and so when you listen
(37:55):
to like early hip hop, there was like, you know,
I got a fly oj which is like you know,
a car back then, or like I got this many
girls of this.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
It just became the subject of the music. The subject
of the muse has always been the music too, Like
I'm great, I'm great at what I do. I mean
clearly telling my rappers delight and so. But but but
we're talking about something shifting, right, Let's.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Just s be clear. Like I'm thinking about Tupac and Biggie,
like their rise in the nineteen nineties, and and although
Tupac has a lot of music that is you know,
social commentary, he is also part of this broader shift
where you start to get this celebration of like your
own personal agency to be successful and Biggie Smalls. You know,
(38:43):
it leans into this I'm thinking about Get Money by
Junior Mafia featuring Little Kim and Biggie.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
And my My Howard classmate, you know, Sean Combs. So
Diddy was as responsible for that as anybody. You know,
money making.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Problems, right, more money, more problems, nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah, let's let's be real though, like this is still
music that was made in America. You know, the ethic
of acquisition had always been there, Like, I don't think
it's conspiratorial to say that very much. The capitalist acquisition
ethos replaced like the militant ethos that you saw on
the East or the West coast. You know, they just
(39:23):
became about luxury, you know, and brands and designer goods
like jay Z.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Jay Z that's first billionaire, right, right, I'm a business man, right.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
And so when you said when when you know jay
Z hit the line he said, you know, put me
anywhere on God's green Earth, I'll triple my worth. And
I was like, that's the ethos of venture capital. Put
me anywhere I can make money. Yeah, you know that
is there's no more clear distillation of the creed of
(39:58):
capitalism than that.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Well then then, I mean this raises the question we're
talking about how music reflects a moment. I mean, in Khalil,
I know that you do all this work about the
nineteen eighties and sort of this kind of individualist ethos
taking over, and to imagine that that hip hop is
is accurately depicting how much this has become mainstream, how
(40:22):
much of this has sort of imbued in all of
our cultures, that this being sort of this sense of
acquisition of sort of get mine.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Yeah, I mean, the best selling album of two thousand
and three is fifty cents Get paid, And you have
to like, I know, I'll put this back to you, like,
I know, we can never really suss out the chicken
and egg part of this, but I mean, what are
your what is your take on the role of the
music industry itself in glorifying a certain narrative of black hypercapitalism,
(40:54):
along with all the misogyny and madness that goes along
with it, to cater to white listeners sensibilities about like
some kind of authentically black culture.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Yeah, I mean I think that you know, the industry
was predominantly driven by what would sell like they had
the same ethos that the musicians had, but it also
sold with fewer headaches. You know, like the more militant
edge of things could be difficult, could be dangerous, could
create you know, turbulence for your for you as a company,
(41:26):
people talking about how much money they had and all
those other things. That wasn't going to be the same
sort of problem. But you know, also I think fundamentally, uh,
you know, what that reflected was the fact that so
many people in black life recognized, you know, we live
(41:46):
in proximity as a comparatively poor or a poorer class
of Americans in proximity to the wealthiest nation in the world.
Is it really that complicated for people to like make
songs about like I want, I want that, I want
to cut I want part of that. You know, it's
(42:07):
not that shocking.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
Yeah, it's not that yeahhleil.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
I actually have a question for you sort of similarly,
you know, sort of going from the seventies to the eighties,
the nineties to the two thousand, sort of the changing
sort of hyper capitalism. How do you think Phil collins
music changed over that time?
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Well, probably the sample of in there Tonight has has
kept his bills paid for for probably more than anything
else that he made. So that's that's how his life changed.
So Jelani, we we want to know.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
We got one last question.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Got one last question, right, So where is the music
now and where is it headed? That's a two parter.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
You know, it's really hard for me to say. Like
one is that I'm like not as closely connected to
it as I was. My kind of recreational time that
have been engaged and listening to music is now, uh,
watching Paw Patrol with my children.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
So yes has the three year old, twin boys and
a five year old daughter, right.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
Six year olds? Six? Yeah, yeah, yeah, big girl. And
so there's there's that part of it. The other part
is that I think that hip hop was smaller than
like now. It's such a huge, sprawling thing that it's
hard to even categorize what it is or where it's going,
(43:36):
and so it's going in five different directions simultaneously. But
I think that, you know, the one thing that we
can say definitively that we couldn't say the early parts
of its history is that it's permanent. You know, people
were always waiting for the moment when hip hop would
die or you know what it would go away. I
think at the half century mark we can say that
(43:57):
this is a genre that has, you know, fought for
its place in the cultural landscape, and that it's not
going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah so so, Delattie. This has been fabulous. Thanks so
much for joining us on Some of My Best Friends Are.
And as you know, on every episode we express our
love for each other and I love you, brother.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
Oh, I love you too, Love you brother. Thank you
for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
If you look you too.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of
Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me
Khalil Dbron Mohammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
It's produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our associate producer is Rachel Yang.
It's edited by Sarah Nix with help from Keishel Williams.
Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our managing producer
is Constanza Guyardo.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
At Pushkin thanks to Letal Molad, Julia Martin, Heather Fain,
Carly Migliori, John Schnarz, Retta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the
Brilliant Avery R. Young from his album Tubman definitely want
to check out his music at his website, Averyaryong dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dott them To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen. Even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it.
Speaker 4 (45:38):
Thank you, all right?
Speaker 2 (45:53):
And how do you think about the history of hip hop?
Like when you think about music back.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
In the day, what comes to mind?
Speaker 5 (46:01):
I feel like hip hop is as important to black
people as jazz is. It's sets the tone for a
lot of the youth black culture. And every generation has
their hip hop gods who set the tone for them.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
All right, all right, all right, all right, son, thank
you man. I appreciate that some of my best friends
are my son.
Speaker 5 (46:32):
I'm sorry these shows
Pushing.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, Hey, Hey, Mike Cheka one too. We got we
got the MC from back in the day, from Queens Hollis,
Queen's in the house.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
We can't. You gotta be talking to people who have like,
know your history, you know against you.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I'm Khalil Jibron Muhammad.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I'm Ben Austin. We are two best friends.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
One black, one white. I'm a historian and I'm a journalist.
And this is some of my best friends are.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Some of my best friends are in this show. We
wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply
divided and unequal country.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
In today's show, we're talking to Jelani Cobb, my great
friend from grad school, one of my favorite people to tease,
dean of Columbia Journalism School, and New Yorker staff writer.
Man the list goes on, I'm so proud of this guy.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Oh wow, Jelani Cobb. We got like quiet storm Jilani on.
We are going to talk to him about a subject
that all three of us love, hip hop. We're going
to talk about the evolution of the genre over the
last fifty years and what it means to us.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
This is gonna be great, but first, before we talk
to Jilani, I want to share something. You know, hip
hop is fifty when we're old heads, but it lives
on and your nephew, Jabron Mchael Maho is rocking his
own beats, his own flow, and so check check this out.
Listen to his music right now?
Speaker 4 (02:04):
All right? All right, yeah, all right, brody last, all right?
So this is your music? Right yeah, alright?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
So what's your what's your hip hop's origin story?
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Like I started getting into hip hop and I was
about maybe six or seven. I was allowed to listen
to explicit music, so I was listening to unexplicit versions.
I think Outcasts and Graduation or some of the earliest
(02:50):
hip hop albums.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Man Khalil, I'm almost in tears over here. I can't
think of a better way to start this conversation than
my nephew and thinking about thinking about you know, these
generations we're talking about us being in our fifties and
a fifty year old genre. So man, let's just I've
been in with Jelani.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
That's right, that's my boy, proud of him.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Let's do it, hey, Jelani, I actually wanted to start
with a question going back to when you first met Khalil,
and you two guys were in graduate school together at Rutgers,
(03:33):
and I had and this is both like an origin
story but also like a who were you story? And
I had heard in the past that people described the
two of you as Malcolm and Martin. That's right, meaning
people people thought that Khalil was like Malcolm X, the
(03:54):
equivalent to your Martin Luther King. What did that mean?
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, it's funny because in retrospect, you know, that might
have actually just been like a lazy overlay of Khalil's
family's history. You know, is the great grandson of Elijah Muhammad.
But also dispositionally, you know, Khalil kind of waged a
(04:21):
scorched earth campaign in those states. I was a more
conciliatory figure, which you know, I think that it wasn't
really so much a difference in our politics though, because
I think our politics were like roughly parallel.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
So, Julanni, you know, you have been a hip hop
hit as a writer, as a listener. You went to
the Mecca Howard University, and I know from the nineteen
nineties that you started writing for the City Paper and
you started doing music criticism and you wrote a book
in two thousand and seven called Break of Dawn Freestyle
(04:58):
on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, And it's a book that
basically you talk about the music itself. And so even
though I wasn't really into to hip hop at that age,
I was listening, you know, to these other things. You know,
since I didn't get this in the way that you
did early on what is the hip hop aesthetic?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
You know, I think that hip hop is a revisiting
of the aesthetic that created the blues, which is heavily improvisational,
derived from West African music and traveled with us through
the slave trade and you know, became the foundation of
all of those musics. And you know, I'll say what
(05:36):
I said in that book, which is that hip hop
is the blues filtered through a century of experience in
a thousand miles of asphalt.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Wow, all right, all right, all right, man, we got
we got Jelani Cobb by the show this week.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
The Nuggets dropping Jewels. I just want to say, you know,
I met you in the summer before grad school in
nineteen ninety five, and that was also the same fall
when there was a million man March. Hip hop was,
you know, all the rage and country. But like, when
did you fall in love with hip hop?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
What?
Speaker 2 (06:12):
What is your hip hop origin story?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Oh? My early, it's really early. I was like seven
or eight, you know, I was born in nineteen sixty nine,
and so hip hop, you know, people can consider like
the origins of hip hop to be nineteen seventy three,
you know, if you believe, like you know, there's a
single origin point. So this is like nineteen seventy six,
(06:40):
seventy seven maybe, And what happened? And I remember that
my brother, who's seven years older than me, you know,
who was you know, starting to kind of have his
teenage explorations of New York City and so on, came
home with a mixtape one time, and you know, we
had these people playing music, but they weren't singing, you know,
(07:03):
they were like talking and like everything they said was rhyming.
I had never heard anything like. It was like shocking
to me something like that could even exist, you know.
And then you know, of course, and short on, my
brother started rapping. And then you know, being a little brother,
you wanted to do everything that your big brother did.
(07:23):
And it was an incredible time because you know, we
grew up in Queens, New York and Hollis and so,
you know, one of my my brother had to pick
me up from school, like a lot of older brothers,
and I have distinct recollections of his friend Joseph, you know,
who used to also walk home with us in the
same general direction. You know, Joseph became better alone later
(07:45):
as run you DJ run.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
All right, you are like throwing down credentials just.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
In case run wasn't good enough for somebody.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Exactly, yeah, run DMC. And so it gets more interesting
because you know, I ran into Run maybe let's pop
about ten years ago at Harlem and I said my
name and he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Victor's brother. I was like yeah, and he was like, yeah,
(08:19):
we used to walk you home from school. So I
did not think he would remember that, but you know,
for whatever reason, he did. And so then, you know,
when I got a little bit older. In eighth grade,
I had we had this kind of quirk where we
had to line up in height order before we'd be
dismissed from school. And you know, I was the third
(08:41):
tallest boy in my class.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
It was me.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
There's a dude named James, and then there was a
dude named Anthony Weeks. I think Anthony Weeks wound up
going to be like six six or six seven, really tall,
but James was just like, you know, a quarter inch
taller than me or so. And one day in class,
you know, we're lining up before we can be dismissed,
and James gives me a sheet of paper and he's
(09:06):
written his name on it, and I was like, what's
this and he said that's my autograph. What he said,
you should keep it because I'm gonna be real famous.
And I remember crumbling it up and throwing it away
in front of him. Do you like that?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
And punk ass?
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Right? Whatever?
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Now, who is James James's l ocal Jane exactly exactly
anything but right, Okay, I just want to say I
think you still did the right move of crupling up
the paper.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
That was just like for street cred like you had
to like, you know, not be sweating. But I said
to say that hip hop was ambient in my life,
like it was that's informed as I was.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, so Johnny, you talking ambient in your life too?
Speaker 1 (09:53):
No, I mean we're like well ship And after hearing Jolowney,
it wasn't like, you know, my next door neighbor was.
But you know, my story happens like five years after Jolwanny,
like about eighty two, eighty three, I'd say it's eighty three,
And it's also involved an older brother, Jelanny. I have
an older brother name Jake, and he was a total
bee boy at that point. He's a great artist, and
(10:14):
he was a graffiti artist. He was going around with
spray paint around around the South side of Chicago. Wow,
he was. He was break dancing, he was. He was
in a nascent rap group with two of his friends,
one of whom was Thriller that's what everyone called him,
and the other guy, Donald Cumberpats. And there were two
black guys and one white guy, so they were called,
(10:34):
of course the Oreo Crew, and you know, we would
go around with like a big, you know, boombox with
cassette tapes. But like in eighty three, he was like, hey,
come to this concert with me. And it was at
a tiny venue on the South Side and I was
like twelve, and it was Run DMC and their first album,
(10:58):
which is just called run DMC had not even dropped yet.
And I remember being at that show and the music,
you know, feeling the pulsing energy of like being at
the like the eye of a tornado, feeling of just
like being engulfed by the music, the power of it.
You know, hard times are coming to your town. Oh
(11:21):
you know which you know, like yeah, just like the
you know, I guess it was about austerity measurements. It
something I wasn't even thinking about necessarily the lyrics, but
it just felt like this power and that for me
was the first time. And Khalil for you, this was today, right,
this is right now hearing these stories, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
I mean, it is true that long ago I outed myself,
I was listening to a culture club and Phil Phil
Collins and Madonna back in the eighties. This is true.
But but my hip hop origin story starts first with
my older cousin, guy named Khali. He's five years older
than me, and I'll never forget in his like he
(12:03):
had kind of a porch bedroom as a big family
and he lived on the porch. And I just to
this day can see the album or that I should say,
I guess it was an album over forty five. I
can't remember, but the label of rappers the like of
the Sugarhail Gang, I can see it. I can just
see it.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
That was like Loope bubblegum writer exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
That was the first time I remember seeing something and
listening to music like that for the first time. And
then at seven, because my cousin's father was a radio
station owner, black radio station owner, Curtis I'm sorry, Curtis
Purvis Spans the Bluesman own w V one O three
in Chicago, and somehow he was promoting a concert and
(12:49):
I got to tag along with family and we saw
Curtis blow in concert and a small venue in like
nineteen seventy nine. It was unbelievable. So that's when I
first got exposed to hip hop, but it was many
years later that I would embrace the genre fully and entirely.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
You're like, this is not for me, No, it was
just it was just.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
A tension there, you know, like you've been when you
and I were in high school. You know, you really
were listening to KRS one and like rapping lyrics, and
I was like, oh, you know, I know that song,
but it wasn't like it was on my playlist necessarily.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Yeah, right, it was do you really want to hurt me?
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Right? Culture CLUBB exactly, Jelani, we are going to take
a short break and we're going to come back and
we're going to talk about hip hop at fifty. All right,
(13:56):
we are back on. Some of my best friends are
with the amazing Jelani Can and one of our producers
bragging yeah. And one of our producers was like, his
voice is the greatest voice I ever heard. So now
everyone gets to get the piece of that here. So
so Jelani, hip hop, you know, we can say turned
roughly fifty this year, like you can maybe dated to
(14:18):
nineteen seventy three, which is also the same year as
the start of mass incarceration. Go figure. But there's this
documentary that Chuck d of Public Enemy executive produced and
hosts called Fight the Power How Hip Hop Changed the World.
It's on PBS, and so we watched that, and you know,
(14:39):
you were talking about some of your own sense of
origins of being in Queens and sort of having these
sort of like you know, like greatest you know, Hall
of Famers of hip hop and rap being right around
you in school and your neighbors and your brother's friends.
And so I want to ask this question, like does
hip hop start in Queens or does it start in
(15:00):
the Bronx.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
And you got to think about who you might lose
in this answer, what friends of yours might.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
Like.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Without question, the hip hop starts in the bronx, all right, but.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
But that's where we want we want them, we want
complexity here.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, exactly, Queens was at the cornerstone of its founding
and the reason for that is that Queens was what
made hip hop go from being a regional phenomenon to
being a national and then an international one. You know,
hip hop existed in the Bronx in Manhattan, you know,
in the early nineteen seventies, mid nineteen seventies. That began
(15:38):
to change in the late nineteen seventies into the early
nineteen eighties, you know, partly because it landed in Queens
where there was a class difference. So like when hip
hop started out in the music in like apartment buildings
and housing projects in the Bronx. And you know, it
was fun, it was expressive, some of it was political,
(15:59):
some of it talked about what was going on, but
you know, we just talked about run and DMC. Their
father taught black history, you know, which is way that
song at a community local college, community college, which is
where that song I'm Proud to Be Black came from.
You know, their father was a clergy member, They had
a home, they made records in their basement. L Ocol
(16:23):
j who I mentioned earlier. I remember he later like
incorporated this into his memoir. But I literally remember the
day that he came to school and said, my grandfather
bought me two thousand dollars worth of DJ equipment because
you know, he wants to support my music. And he
later used that equipment and his basement. Again, people had
(16:46):
homes with basements to make the demo that landed on
Rick Rubin's desk. You know, tribe called Quest revolutionized hip
hop by infusing jazz with it. And you know Q
Tip had his father had a father zz collection, all
that jazz collection, which was at that time a very
(17:08):
middle class preoccupation, you know, on pastime and and so
because they had a little bit more stability that parents
may have had a blue collar union job or a
civil service job, they had access to things that kids
in other parts of the city didn't and were able
(17:28):
to help shape you know, I mean Russell Simmons starting
Deaf Gem in his dorm room. The really central part
of that story is that he had a dorm room, right,
So all of those things that make Queen's a really
crucial place in the founding of hip hop.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah. Well that's interesting because, as you know, having having
led the Schomberg Center and being proximate to the Bronx,
you know, I was hearing all this Harlem centric storytelling
about about about the origins of hip hop. But I
think I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean,
the thing we know for sure is that the music
certainly didn't start in Chicago where we were where we
(18:09):
were listening to house music. But of course house music
coming out of disco and also breakbeats, you know, all
share in common. You know, this kind of sampling culture
that helps to make hip hop what it is.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
And before the term hip hop really got popularized, people
used to refer to it as disco. Yeah, and then
like this was why they have rappers like the Disco
three like.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
So one of the things that this documentary focuses on
is the social and political aspects of the music and
all these places in the eighties and nineties, from Chicago
to New York to Philadelphia to everywhere you know in
the North and even in the South, there are these
there's a crisis of violence, a crisis of community violence,
(18:58):
a crisis of gun violence. And you know, I know
you tell this story in a recent New Yorker article
where you talk about hip hop at fifty of seeing
a young man killed in front of your home. What happened?
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Yeah, So my parents met in Harlem. You know, my
father was an electrician in the apartment building where my
mother lived, and you know, kept making excuses to check
her lights, and so, you know, eventually my mother was like,
I don't think there's anything wrong with my electricity. And
that's how they met. But one of the things that
they wanted to do, they knew they want to do
(19:37):
early on, was move out of Harlem. And because of
some of the things that happened in the Civil rights movement,
more opportunity opening up, they were able to get a
house in Queen's which was a big deal at that time,
you know, And so there's this kind of narrative of
achieving that that goes along with that. But you know,
(20:01):
they're not really always clean breaks with the past. Because
I remember when I was you know, eight, or I
was around eight, a day when you know, there was
this gunfire outside. This is in residential Queens And you know,
there was a guy who was shot, who died in
front of our house, collapsed, you know, on the curb,
(20:24):
and and you know, someone covered him up with a sheet,
and you know, the police came, and you know, my
father went out and to see if it was my
older brother. I mean, as a child, this is just
like a horrific thing that you see. But as I
later came to understand, it was a generational experience that
the tides of violence that were increasing, you know, partly
(20:46):
in concert with you know, the influx of herowin into communities.
And so as I got older and I met people
from Chicago, I met people from la I met people
from d C. I met people from Detroit, and we
had all seen we all witnessed these scenes of warfare,
(21:07):
you know, in our youth. And that's when you start
to understand that like what hip hop was talking about,
the violence that hip hop was talking about was almost reportage,
you know, from the front lines of like what people
were seeing in their communities.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Toilana, You're making me think of Grandmaster Flash and the
Furious Fives. The message and so this, you know, in
the in the like mid nineteen eighties, and so this
is a story about me and that song, which is
when I was in Miss Paris's eighth grade class at
William H. Ray School, we had to all recite a
(21:42):
poem out loud, you know, memorize it. And I chose
the message, you know, I was gonna and and you know,
hearing you in and seeing this documentary of like, now,
why the fuck would I do that? You know, like
like I thought it sounded really cool.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
You were also wearing a gold chain back then, so
you know, it all was part of part of.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
It, wasn't it wasn't you know, like what you just
said about it being sort of like reportage or like
you know, documenting experience or a sound track. Like I
knew those things are going on, but like you know,
broken glass everywhere is like a jungle. Sometimes it makes
me wonder those aren't my experiences exactly, but it but
(22:22):
it resonated with me. I wanted to Yeah, I was.
I was. I was totally interested in this music and
in this and in the story it was telling and
in the sense of even injustice and like the kind
of violence that I knew at least was in the
periphery and that I was passing through. I was struck.
In this documentary, Mellie Mel talks about that who is
(22:43):
you know, one of the writers of the song and
part of Grandmaster Flash, And he talks about, you know,
thinking about that song and thinking about it in terms
of protest music, and he was like, I wrote that
and I was thinking of Bob Dylan music. I was
thinking of Marvin Gay, I was thinking of Stevie Wonder,
like he is consciously thinking about making music that is
(23:05):
protest music.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
And so when people have like the tiresome debate about
who's the greatest rapper of all time, I always have
an unconventional pick, which is Melly Mel, you know, because
he introduced extended metaphor into recorded hip hop.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
You listen to John Dolomite's version of it, oh.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah, beyond the version of it, right, Like Dolomite is like,
you know.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Because because that's a different kind.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
That's a different kind of that's a different kind of thing.
Like my father, my father knew like those those toasts
and boasts that like that Dolomite Rudy Ray Moore used
to like recite and my mother when my mother wasn't around.
He would tell me some of them we should not
look back and go like, oh my god, I couldnot
believe you told me that filthy poetry Like you know,
(24:01):
I will just say, like all of it centered around
like orifices. So but Melle Mel introduced like extended metaphor
and you know, the overtly political like frames of references
in music, and like really revolutionized what it could be.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
What were the so you said, you know, political references
like in his music.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
So you know they have a song, you know, the
message is the best known of them. You know. Then
after that they had you know, White Lines, which is
an anti drug song. And so when you had the message,
I remember being like blown out of my seat by
that because especially like when you think about the last
line of that song where he talks about this person
(24:51):
who's grown up in like slum conditions and he winds
up you live in a difficult life and then committing
suicide in his cell, and it's the last line is
now your eyes sing the sad, sad song of how
you live so fast and die so young? Nobody else
this was going to say, your eyes sing a sad
(25:12):
song in hip hop in that timeframe.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Right, That's why Miss Paris gave me an as.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
So Jelannie, I want, I want to just say, you know,
the thing about this moment with the message, the thing
about the period in time which it emerges Melly Mel's
vision of like protest music, with this new genre is
places like New York were coming undone, particularly for black people.
There's violence and gangs, there's a heroin epidemic. The state
(25:41):
is using the hammer of the law in a way
that it had never used it before. Nelson Rockefeller, the
heyday of the Rockefeller that's right in nineteen seventy. So
basically people are being thrown out like the trash. There's
no redemption, there's no rehabilitation, is only incapacitation. Moynihan, who
by then had already sort of defined the black family
as a pathological one, engages as a Senator of New
(26:05):
York like he's like, we need to just do a
period of neglect, of benign neglect in these communities. And
so by the time Reagan is president and elected in
nineteen eighty one and the message comes out in nineteen
eighty two, we basically get a fucking drug war enacted
on the black community. I spend every summer of the
nineteen eighties in New York City, and I mean, aside
(26:27):
from like seeing everything that was part of the moment,
the graffiti, the break dancing, particularly on the subway, the
music was everywhere. I also remember stepping on crack vials,
something that I actually don't remember from Chicago, but I
remember walking the streets of New York and literally stepping
on crack vials crunching under my feet. It's just yeah,
(26:47):
so of course that music made so much. It's a
time stamp.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Yep, yeah, that's a time stamp. Yeah, there are people
who know what that's like. And you know, you go
to the park to play, the playground would be littered
with crack vials, you know, from people who they are
getting getting high the night before. But to the thing
that you were talking about, it was really all arms
of the state, you know, pointing in the same direction.
(27:12):
You know, there was the public policy element of it.
There was the police and policing element of it. There
was a judicial element of it. There was even the
cultural element of it. When you see like films that
depicted New York in like this apocalyptic light, you know,
like the Warriors right.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
You know, Jelanney, I want to talk about here from
both of you, about you know, what the music is
actually saying. Like here, if this music is socially conscious,
if it's political, we're talking about you know, music that's
that's going from breakbeats and extending a good time to
actually like social commentary and maybe a way to think
about this as we got East Coast rap and West
(27:50):
Coast rap and let's talk about East Coast first because
that's where we are. We're talking about New York and
being there, and I want to ask about just like
Public Enemy in a way and to think about, like,
you know, what is the importance of Public Enemy in
this transition to social commentary.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Inestimable man public Public Enemy again going back to this
by the way, you know this kind of middle class dynamic.
Public Enemy was from Long Island, you know, which is
a more suburban environment. And you know they started out
on college radio, and you know, Chuck d explicitly talked
(28:29):
about incorporating the things that he learned in his African
American Studies class into his music. And you know, this
is the apartheid era. You know, this is the point
where people are learning like who Nelson Mandela is. This
is the also dawning of the HIV AIDS crisis, which
is also disproportionately affecting black communities. Uh. And the general
(28:51):
kind of economic stagnation is hitting uh, you know, community
after community along with violence.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
And Public Enemy comes out with a kind of moral clarity,
you know, almost like a Jeremiah, you know, a voice.
And then also I think the other thing about Public
m me it was not something what Chuck d was saying,
but literally the voice he was saying it in right, Yeah,
you know, the huge booming voice that comes out. You know,
(29:20):
it sounds like a stern parent admonishing you for something
like you know, the beginning of Night of the Living
base heads who goes here?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
It is bam, You're like, wait, well, there's a there's
a total urgency. It's like right, you know, it's a
you don't even know what it's a call to action.
You don't know what the call is, but it's a
fucking call to action. It's like wake up. Yeah right
yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
And so I mean I think all those things, like
they just completely changed the whole zeitgeist, you know a
hip hop at that point.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, obviously, fight the Power became
an anthem of an entire moment for youth culture. I
mean it was also the moment when people rediscovered the
Nation of Islam. Far Khan was, of course already in
nineteen eighty nine, Yes, is nineteen ninety nine. Far Khan
is already a popular leader. But for young people who
had not come of aid necessarily with malc them, they
(30:10):
now rediscover through this Public Enemy, through its evocation of
the Nation of Islam, takes a nation of millions to
hold us back. So it's sort of celebration of black nationalism.
And then all of a sudden, Malcolm X gets kind
of quote unquote rediscovered for our generation and his face
becomes part of the iconography of the moment the Public
(30:33):
Enemy borrows it. I mean, it's just just an incredible
time for how Public Enemy embodied so much for that moment.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
I have to tell you, I don't know if I
ever told you this, but like that album came out,
Nation Millions came out right before my sophomore year in college,
and there were two things that completely set the path
of the subsequent years of my life that I experienced.
(31:03):
One was that I took my first African American studies
course with a professor Adel Patton. The other was that
I listened to Public Enemies Nation of Millions incessantly, And
you know, those two things that point kind of lit
this fire in my imagination, in my sense of like
(31:25):
who I was going to be and like what I
was called to do in my life.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
You probably wouldn't be on some of my best friends
are today if it wasn't for that enough moment.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
I remember a picture of Jilyni from that time period.
He here in my memory, you wearing a tank top.
You are super buff, you have like you you are
clean and mean, and you have a huge flat top
and I think I'm pretty sure you're wearing an African red,
black and green medallion chest. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah right.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
That was like vintage Public Enemy era Jelani. Yeah. As
a matter of fact, that's how it even became Jolynni.
Up to that point, I was will you know that
changed my name to Julyanni.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
There it is, there, it is.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
So I want to go to Los Angeles. Yeah, I
want to go West coast right here real quick. And
and to think about Los Angeles in the eighties and
the music that the hip hop that's coming out of there,
and it is so closely focused on police abuse in
a different way than East Coast music. And we're talking
about you know, what became called gangster rap, you know,
(32:26):
begin maybe by iced tea and then NW a sort
of bringing it to its you know, kind of like apotheosis.
It's a it's a different kind of uh of attack.
It's a different kind of of voice, right.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Yeah, it is. It is like you know, you have
at the same time, like everybody, I think hid their
own kind of iteration of it, you know. But Los
Angeles had, you know, the huge amounts of carnage that
were happening as a result of like the gang warfare
that was happening, you know, among various constituencies, as most
(33:01):
notably to crypts and bloods, and you know, a kind
of corresponding draconian level of policing. They would bulldoze the
whole front of someone's home off, you know, under the
name of like trying to stop a drug deal or
or some such and so I think that you know,
this is experienced even more intensely, like we were seeing
(33:23):
things happening in New York City that was certainly like
you know, we think back to it, it's like Michael Griffith,
you know, who's killed by the police, I don't know, Bumpers,
you know, a black woman who's killed by the housing
police and so on. We had those kinds of things.
I think that the L A. P. D was even
more egregious, you know, and the behavior that they were committing,
and you heard that in the music. You know, as
(33:47):
political as Chuck d was, who was like within a
certain set of real constraints of propriety, the so called
gangster rap that came out of La dispensed with all.
Speaker 6 (33:59):
That in the police get metaphor, you know, we're not
making like it's been kind of cloak this, you know,
like the poetry is mainly going to be in the
rhyme just but basically, in case you didn't understand the
sentiment we were trying to express, it is fuck the police.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Yeah, yeah, no, It's it's such a rich moment for
what becomes this contrast, and in some ways gangster rap
takes over the ethos of hip hop in the way
that both the media understand the evolition of the music,
the way the criticisms start to emerge about the music itself,
(34:40):
particularly criticisms about the said hyper celebration of black masculinity
and violence, the display of guns, and of course all
of that just furtheres like a vicious cycle, where then
Chief Darryl Gates, you know, who sort of uses the
Swat team to militarize policing. You get the ubiquitous presence
of helicopters, you know, covering every part of black Los
(35:03):
Angeles and its surrounding suburbs. And it's just a moment
when you can actually feel the ground of Black America
began to shift as the nineteen nineties take over from
the eighties of Reaganism to the nineteen nineties, and we
also get a change in the music.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Yeah, I think that one of the important things about
that that I was trying to bring out in the
piece that I wrote in The New Yorker was that
people critiqued the kind of hyper masculinity of hip hop
at that point, which I understand. I think there's a
fair critique, but I also think that most people missed
(35:42):
the fact that that hyper masculinity was clearly in response
to the astounding vulnerability of the people who were creating
the music. And what I say vulnerability. I mean, they
belonged to the demographic that was most likely to die
of homicide in the United States, young black men, and
(36:04):
they were almost kind of armoring themselves in kind of
cell breating the masculinity and vulnerability because the reality was
so much to the contrary.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
So we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back
and talk about how the music changed and the choices
it makes going forward. At least it's artists. We'll be
right back after the break. So Jilani, I mean, listen,
(36:49):
hip hop is a global phenomenon. I mean, you can't
go anywhere in the world and not either hear the
music or see the influence of the music. But one
thing that I know a lot of people are talking
about I've certainly considered it over the years, is like,
how does the music go from agitation where there's this
social commentary and even though thanks to rap, has all
(37:10):
of these problems, you know, hyper masculinity, misogyny, I mean it,
you know, all of this, but it goes to this
period where it's really glorifying money making and materialism and
getting paid and it's like I got mine, you get yours.
I mean, the music really does change to some degree
at least I would say, do you think that's true?
(37:30):
I mean, do you think the music change or those
elements were sort of always intention.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
You know, it's like genealogy, you know, like you have
kids that like don't look like the mother or father,
but it looked like the great uncle. Like those things
had always been present. They had always been part, you know,
of the music, you know, and so when you listen
(37:55):
to like early hip hop, there was like, you know,
I got a fly oj which is like you know,
a car back then, or like I got this many
girls of this.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
It just became the subject of the music. The subject
of the muse has always been the music too, Like
I'm great, I'm great at what I do. I mean
clearly telling my rappers delight and so. But but but
we're talking about something shifting, right, Let's.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Just s be clear. Like I'm thinking about Tupac and Biggie,
like their rise in the nineteen nineties, and and although
Tupac has a lot of music that is you know,
social commentary, he is also part of this broader shift
where you start to get this celebration of like your
own personal agency to be successful and Biggie Smalls. You know,
(38:43):
it leans into this I'm thinking about Get Money by
Junior Mafia featuring Little Kim and Biggie.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
And my My Howard classmate, you know, Sean Combs. So
Diddy was as responsible for that as anybody. You know,
money making.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Problems, right, more money, more problems, nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah, let's let's be real though, like this is still
music that was made in America. You know, the ethic
of acquisition had always been there, Like, I don't think
it's conspiratorial to say that very much. The capitalist acquisition
ethos replaced like the militant ethos that you saw on
the East or the West coast. You know, they just
(39:23):
became about luxury, you know, and brands and designer goods
like jay Z.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Jay Z that's first billionaire, right, right, I'm a business man, right.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
And so when you said when when you know jay
Z hit the line he said, you know, put me
anywhere on God's green Earth, I'll triple my worth. And
I was like, that's the ethos of venture capital. Put
me anywhere I can make money. Yeah, you know that
is there's no more clear distillation of the creed of
(39:58):
capitalism than that.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Well then then, I mean this raises the question we're
talking about how music reflects a moment. I mean, in Khalil,
I know that you do all this work about the
nineteen eighties and sort of this kind of individualist ethos
taking over, and to imagine that that hip hop is
is accurately depicting how much this has become mainstream, how
(40:22):
much of this has sort of imbued in all of
our cultures, that this being sort of this sense of
acquisition of sort of get mine.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Yeah, I mean, the best selling album of two thousand
and three is fifty cents Get paid, And you have
to like, I know, I'll put this back to you, like,
I know, we can never really suss out the chicken
and egg part of this, but I mean, what are
your what is your take on the role of the
music industry itself in glorifying a certain narrative of black hypercapitalism,
(40:54):
along with all the misogyny and madness that goes along
with it, to cater to white listeners sensibilities about like
some kind of authentically black culture.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Yeah, I mean I think that you know, the industry
was predominantly driven by what would sell like they had
the same ethos that the musicians had, but it also
sold with fewer headaches. You know, like the more militant
edge of things could be difficult, could be dangerous, could
create you know, turbulence for your for you as a company,
(41:26):
people talking about how much money they had and all
those other things. That wasn't going to be the same
sort of problem. But you know, also I think fundamentally, uh,
you know, what that reflected was the fact that so
many people in black life recognized, you know, we live
(41:46):
in proximity as a comparatively poor or a poorer class
of Americans in proximity to the wealthiest nation in the world.
Is it really that complicated for people to like make
songs about like I want, I want that, I want
to cut I want part of that. You know, it's
(42:07):
not that shocking.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
Yeah, it's not that yeahhleil.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
I actually have a question for you sort of similarly,
you know, sort of going from the seventies to the eighties,
the nineties to the two thousand, sort of the changing
sort of hyper capitalism. How do you think Phil collins
music changed over that time?
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Well, probably the sample of in there Tonight has has
kept his bills paid for for probably more than anything
else that he made. So that's that's how his life changed.
So Jelani, we we want to know.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
We got one last question.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Got one last question, right, So where is the music
now and where is it headed? That's a two parter.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
You know, it's really hard for me to say. Like
one is that I'm like not as closely connected to
it as I was. My kind of recreational time that
have been engaged and listening to music is now, uh,
watching Paw Patrol with my children.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
So yes has the three year old, twin boys and
a five year old daughter, right.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
Six year olds? Six? Yeah, yeah, yeah, big girl. And
so there's there's that part of it. The other part
is that I think that hip hop was smaller than
like now. It's such a huge, sprawling thing that it's
hard to even categorize what it is or where it's going,
(43:36):
and so it's going in five different directions simultaneously. But
I think that, you know, the one thing that we
can say definitively that we couldn't say the early parts
of its history is that it's permanent. You know, people
were always waiting for the moment when hip hop would
die or you know what it would go away. I
think at the half century mark we can say that
(43:57):
this is a genre that has, you know, fought for
its place in the cultural landscape, and that it's not
going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah so so, Delattie. This has been fabulous. Thanks so
much for joining us on Some of My Best Friends Are.
And as you know, on every episode we express our
love for each other and I love you, brother.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
Oh, I love you too, Love you brother. Thank you
for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
If you look you too.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of
Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me
Khalil Dbron Mohammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
It's produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our associate producer is Rachel Yang.
It's edited by Sarah Nix with help from Keishel Williams.
Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our managing producer
is Constanza Guyardo.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
At Pushkin thanks to Letal Molad, Julia Martin, Heather Fain,
Carly Migliori, John Schnarz, Retta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the
Brilliant Avery R. Young from his album Tubman definitely want
to check out his music at his website, Averyaryong dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dott them To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen. Even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it.
Speaker 4 (45:38):
Thank you, all right?
Speaker 2 (45:53):
And how do you think about the history of hip hop?
Like when you think about music back.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
In the day, what comes to mind?
Speaker 5 (46:01):
I feel like hip hop is as important to black
people as jazz is. It's sets the tone for a
lot of the youth black culture. And every generation has
their hip hop gods who set the tone for them.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
All right, all right, all right, all right, son, thank
you man. I appreciate that some of my best friends
are my son.
Speaker 5 (46:32):
I'm sorry these shows
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