Alternate Histories of Hip Hop
...and rethinking Genre.
Hi Everyone,
Hope you’re staying cool out there…
Our most recent episode features an interview with scholar Amy Coddington about her fascinating book “How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop.” While the title might suggest an account focusing on the genre’s rise to chart glory during the mid-to-late ‘90s, the book is actually aimed earlier, examining the complex commercial dynamics that structured rap’s initial pop breakthrough. It’s music (and a process) that’s all too often dismissed as being fundamentally inauthentic—and frequently just written out of hip-hop history all together.
In essence, the story we explore is one of genre—less an aesthetic distinction than a mixture of business mechanisms, marketing signals, audience self-identification, and musical practice. The key was radio —the dominant means for new music to break through to a mass market back then. While rap was increasingly popular in Black communities, it was still viewed as unpalatable by the major Black stations. Pressured by an increasingly financialized industry demanding better returns (same as it ever was), these long-standing institutions had begun to move away from serving the Black community (a role that we discussed in an earlier episode featuring Brian Ward) and towards the market-category of “people who listen to Black music”—an intentionally more amorphous and (potentially) wealthier group to sell advertisements to.
In the face of this, rappers found their way into the mainstream through dance music—specifically freestyle, a much-beloved, post-electro style that combined clave, Afrika Bambaataa, and teenage angst to devastating effect. (The freestyle story is honestly too interesting to really get into here—we’ll probably devote a stand-along episode to it one of these days….)
Part of a new category of “Hot” Top-40 that explicitly reached past Black and white binaries to court a growing Latinx audience in cities like New York and LA, crossover rappers able to engage with dance music (think Salt’n’Pepa) opened up a new space for hip hop culture—one that would eventually serve as the gateway for the more traditional sounds of artists like LL Cool J or Run DMC.
Beyond filling in a vital piece of American musical history, this kind of work opens up a crucial set of questions about genre—how it organizes our understanding of musical history, how it was constructed over time, and how (and for whom) it operates. In these post-poptomistic days, the whole concept has something of a bad rep. There’s certainly no denying the ways in which it has been mobilized to disenfranchise entire musical traditions. While our playlist-addled, shoegaze-happy present makes the entire concept seem less useful than ever.
So sure—genres are absolutely capitalist constructs. But like…everything else is too, no? Maybe the more interesting approach is to dig into the history of these constructs—interrogating the power dynamics, and inequalities and stakes of what gets left in and what gets put out. Because while I’m now fully convinced that MC Hammer (or even Vanilla Ice) certainly functioned as rap music in the expansive vision of the genre that was crucial to its commercial flourishing in the early 90’s, that inclusion (or exclusion) reflects the complexities of conditions on the ground, both then and now. And what we’re left with from such work is both an expanded understanding of what Rap has been, and a new perspective on the discursive processes that have made it what it is today.
You can hear our interview with Amy Coddington on Itunes, Spotify, or Podbean and anywhere else you get your pods.
ALSO: Check out Saxon’s fascinating article on one of the originators of New Age music for SFGate.
Department of Actual Music:
Sam: Not to enter the brat-course, but this one totally got me—it’s not just that like…they finally decided to make hyper-pop with hooks, but the ripped-from-the-headlines, “this-song-is-definitely-about-you” lyrics of the remix is Instagram-core of the highest order. Also—the hiccuping pitched up vocals? Freestyle baby. Freestyle.
Saxon: Every year my top streamed artist seems to be Dean Blunt. I dunno how this happens but it seems like every spring Blunt and Co. drop new singles and/or an album that take me through the hot summer months in a gauzy, melancholic mood. Welp. They’re back. You listen to Brat and party. I’ll fall asleep on the beach day-drinking and wake up with sunburn with this on repeat.
Saxon and Sam