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