March 11, 2005
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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Guns and Poses
By DAVID HAJDU
OWN at the crossroads of Hudson and West Houston Streets, where the radio station WQHT, Hot 97, broadcasts hip-hop programming, music and violence seem inextricable. Last week there was a sidewalk gun battle between the entourages of the rising rap star known as the Game and his former mentor, 50 Cent, while the latter was in the studios doing an interview to promote his new CD. Meanwhile, in a Manhattan federal court, testimony continues in the trial of rap artist Lil’ Kim, who has been charged with perjury and conspiracy for her responses to questioning on the matter of a 2001 pistol fight outside the WQHT offices between her followers and those of a rival, Capone (born Kiam Holley).
In its bloodlust, hip-hop is more old school than many of its fans and critics may realize; in fact, the music is carrying on a tradition as old as the blues. Created by and for indigent African-American sharecroppers in the South a century ago, the blues gave voice to the discontent and anxiety of a subjugated, marginalized people. It was an outlet for rage – as well for joy, sometimes, to palliate that fury – coded in language about domestic matters, to throw off any eavesdropping whites.
Robert Johnson, the iconic early master of country blues, whose legend tells how he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his enigmatic guitar style, laid the bedrock for hip-hop lyrics when he sung freely of gunfire in songs such as “32-20 Blues” (Johnson’s rewrite of a tune by a contemporary, Skip James), which he recorded in 1936:
She got a .38 special but I believe it’s most too light
I got a 32-20, got to make the caps right…
I’m gonna shoot my pistol, gonna shoot my Gatling gun
You made me love you, now your man have come
Wrath and weaponry of various kinds infused virtually every style of blues in the music’s formative years. Bessie Smith, the fearsome sexual provocateur, bellowed (in “Black Mountain Blues”), “I’m bound for Black Mountain, me and my razor and my gun/Gonna shoot him if he stands still and cut him if he run.” Lonnie Johnson, the virtuoso of delicate, chamber-style guitar blues, crooned (in “Got the Blues for Murder Only”), “I’m going to old Mexico, where there’s long, long reaching guns/When they want real excitement, they kill each other one by one.” Leadbelly, the pardoned convict who composed lyrical and earthy folk-blues, entertained nightclub audiences with his tribute to a bartender who shot a policeman, “Duncan and Brady”: “Brady, Brady carried a .45, said it would shoot half a mile/Duncan had a .44, that what laid Mr. Brady so low.”
Gunpowder helped ignite the blues, which spread and transformed over a century to give us innumerable musical styles from jazz to rock, and nearly every style has an element of the outlaw ethos at its core. Country music has always celebrated renegades, bandits and gunslingers – its founding father, Jimmie Rodgers, yodeled about being “free from the chain gang now” and Johnny Cash came to epitomize outlaw cool – despite having served only a single day of his life in jail. Even swing had an aura of roguishness before Benny Goodman, with one early big band called the Racketeers of Rhythm.
How does hip-hop fit into this legacy? Awkwardly. While it too has at its heart the fury of profoundly frustrated, often desperate, souls, gunfire-for-show like the Lil’ Kim incident and the recent altercation over 50 Cent demean that history through pettiness, self-consciousness and off-handedness.
In blues, the reasons (or rationales) for the violence were ostensibly amatory or otherwise personal, though societal by extension: a broken heart, wounded pride, maltreatment by the boss (standing in for white society). But what was the shooting on Hudson Street about?
Six years ago, Mr. Holley and his group, Capone-N-Noreaga, made a recording with the rapper Foxy Brown in which she referred to Lil’ Kim as “lame.” A year later, Mr. Holley bumped into Lil’ Kim’s former manager and one of her friends outside the radio station; two dozen rounds later, one of Mr. Holley’s associates ended up wounded.
In the 50 Cent case, it seems that the Game had recently hinted that he might record with one of 50 Cent’s rivals. This prompted 50 Cent to announce on the radio that he was ousting the Game from his inner circle. Outside, each man’s loyalists pulled out their guns, and after untold rounds, one man had been shot in the leg.
On one level, the combatants’ absorption with artistry is striking. A critical comment in a song and talk of a creative collaboration were adequate cause for gunfire. (How many of Lorenz Hart’s admirers began shooting Oscar Hammerstein’s fans when word hit the street that Hammerstein was writing “Oklahoma” with Richard Rodgers?)
Yet while both Hudson Street shootings point to the importance of the music in hip-hop culture, they also point to the glibness of that violence. After all, when dozens of pistol shots at relatively close range lead to one minor wound, it would seem that the gunmen really don’t have their heart in it. Besides, how bad can the blood be when 50 Cent and the Game are kissing each other on the cheek at a charity event a week later?
Shootings like these seem conducted mainly for image-making, for reinforcing the street cred that rap stars’ rapidly acquired wealth inevitably threatens. Unlike their ancestors in blues, hip-hop stars are scarcely marginalized; they are senior members of the pop-culture elite, and they revel in lives of extraordinary privilege and conspicuous opulence. We end up with millionaires and their friends inciting gunfights with one another because the act of shooting confers the illusion of their authenticity as desperate outlaws. 50 Cent, though bred on rough streets in Queens and wounded repeatedly in his youth by less cynical gunfire, is a celebrity today, the opposite of an outcast. He seems desperate only to retain his credibility.
“He ain’t got shot no more, so he don’t got nothing else to talk about,” chided a competitor, Jadakiss, in his own Hot 97 interview the day after the shootout.
In a sense, the shootouts on Hudson Street were business ventures – investments without much risk, since arrest, conviction, imprisonment and even death all confer status in hip-hop society. As such, at least some of the most gratuitous public acts of violence in hip-hop suggest a variation on Joan Didion’s famous observation about Hollywood: Violence is not the art form; it is just part of the deal.
David Hajdu, the author of “Lush Life” and “Positively Fourth Street,” is the music critic for The New Republic.
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