I’ve finished a book that must just be hitting the bookstalls now, a powerful and painful study of poverty and hip-hop that is as sensitive to the nuances of the music as it is dismayed by the pit of intellectual and social despair from which it emanates. “Triksta” by Nik Cohn describes the author’s disillusioning relationship with New Orleans’ obscure but feisty rap scene, such as it was before the deluge that wiped out one of the book’s settings, the city’s long-troubled Ninth Ward.
Cohn, a sixty-ish rock writing veteran originally from Northern Ireland, doesn’t just fall in the thrall of New Orleans street music and go to JazzFest like so many pilgrims, he dives like a reporter/artist/entrepreneur into the deep end of the Crescent City’s “bounce” scene, its boisterous, competitive, sexualized and very regionalized take on hip-hop. He worms his way improbably into the inner city labyrinth of what in any other town would be called gansta rap. He tries to make records, scout talent on behalf of a major record label (he has connections) and, with a Quixotic purity, tries to improve the music. He meets and introduces us to strikingly square, responsible, earnest, sincere and socialized rappers, each as eager to make a mark. And he meets punks barely able to communicate with anybody outside their ghettoized peer group, including the very elders in their family, who think that a ubiquitous form of communicative jousting is the only ticket to the coveted life of bling.
Cohn demonstrates that in this one very special city at least, my own most dismal fears about hip-hop have come to pass. Not hip-hop the clarion spoken word or music genre, but hip-hop the fashion-industrial complex that has annexed the brains of so many who need so much. In his remarkable chapter 4 history of hip-hop from street renaissance to commodified hate, Cohn writes that when white consumers began adopting black style without knowing anything about its origins, “casually, as if by divine right, black reality had been kidnapped and turned into a video game.”
“Call it Niggaworld. A virtual ghetto, where killing and bitch-baiting scored bonus points, and when you were shot, you jumped up unharmed and kept on firing. Because they had so much spending power, the players dictated where rap went and how it was marketed. They neither knew nor cared about hip-hop’s past, the aspirations it had once had, or the strength and beauty it might still possess. All that mattered was maximum splatter. When a new rapper appeared on the scene, he was no longer judged by his flow or what he had to say, only by his police sheet, the number of bullets he’d taken, how many notches were on his Glock. Was he a real nigga, or fake? That was the one question that mattered.”
A few days after I finished the book, I saw stories about a dustup in Los Angeles where protests had led to the redesign of some billboards for 50 Cent’s new movie “Get Rich or Die Trying.” I don’t know what exactly was on the banned billboards, but one ad I saw in New York contained the most reprehensible image I’ve perhaps ever seen associated with pop music. The muscled and tattooed back of this blank-souled rapper was spread in a Christ pose with a microphone in one hand and a handgun in the other. That’s a kind of unholy I can do without.
Cohn’s description of the new hip-hop zombie army is so new that it cold very well have been written after 50 Cent emerged, but he offers subtle analysis of gansta casualties like Tupac. In any event, he says that by 2000, “the worship of brain-dead thuggery had hip-hop by the scrotum.” Somebody who loves this mucic as much as Cohn needed to say this. Because it’s Black America’s loss, a black hole (awful pun invaoidable) in the history of black American music, which has otherwise been such a poem, such a tribute, such a victory.
Read this book. There’s some kind of crazy roadmap back to soul music buried deep inside it.
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