Hip Hop Ain't Dead: It's Livin' in the White House

By PhD and Sanford Richmond

The book, Hip Hop Ain’t Dead: It’s Livin’ In the White House, is about a man, Barack Obama, who made history.  By first, becoming the first Black President in the history of the United States, and second, shattering the mold of conventional politics by making hip hop culture his political ally.  Obama’s public relationship with hip hop throughout his presidency caused just as much of an explosion of public dialogue as his place in history as the first Black American President.   The author Sanford Richmond details moments of his childhood as a hip hop fan, witnessing—and even personally experiencing—firsthand some of the historical moments that granted hip hop the control and influence over the American mainstream that the culture has maintained for the last two decades.Obama’s historical presence at the White House, influenced by the social and cultural power of hip hop, should guide and inspire conversations about race relations throughout the duration of the 21st century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781635050509

Book preview

Bibliography

INTRO: STRAIGHT OUTTA LA

When I was accepted into the Cultural Studies program in 2005 at Washington State University, it meant I would have to leave Los Angeles for the first time in my life. No matter what people say about LA, and people say a lot about the land of sunshine and celebrities, I found myself sentimental as I anticipated my departure from the city where I was born and raised. I’ve experienced so much from living in LA, that all the things I had witnessed, observed and—survived—was like a badge of honor. The good, the bad, and the ugly that embodied Los Angeles I had long ago accepted as my identity of who I am and will always be. I’ve definitely experienced my share of good living in Los Angeles, but that hasn’t prevented me from experiencing the bad and the ugly as well.

As a child of the 1980s, I saw the evolution of the Crips and Bloods cultivate the streets, piece by piece, neighborhood by neighborhood. Simultaneously with the emergence of gangs, the epidemic of crack cocaine started to take hold of the city. As gangs and the crack epidemic began to spread rapidly, I saw family members and childhood friends become affiliated with this new wave of crime and despair escalating across the city. I’ve witnessed gang fights, people getting robbed—I’ve been robbed. I’ve witnessed family members and friends selling crack right in front of me. On top of selling drugs, many of my family members became severe crack addicts. My uncle had a crack habit so bad that he stole my favorite childhood accessory—my brand new mountain bike—sold it, and then went on a crack binge.

As a result of this sobering new reality, childhood friends were getting killed and family members were getting incarcerated. The day after I graduated junior high school in 1990 my brother was sent to prison for multiple criminal charges related to drug dealing (and remains in prison to this day); that same year my cousin was sent to the federal penitentiary for interstate drug trafficking.

The year after my brother and cousin were sent to prison, however, would prove to be the year that truly changed my life. In March 1991, the city of LA and soon the world, became privy to grainy video footage of a motorist by the name of Rodney King, beaten by four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers after driving over the speed limit while under the influence of alcohol. The footage would spark nationwide outrage, leading to the four officers involved being tried for excessive force.

Two weeks later, while a freshman in high school, my English teacher made an announcement in class one morning that one of our classmates had been killed. Her name was Latasha Harlins—gunned down in a South Central LA liquor store by a Korean grocer after a violent dispute that involved a purchase of orange juice. At first, rumors were swirling that Harlins attempted to steal the orange juice and hide it in her backpack, but surveillance video would prove that Soon Ja Du, the Korean grocer, initiated the altercation by yanking Harlins’ sweater and accusing Harlins of stealing the orange juice before she could even attempt to pay for it. As documented by the video footage, Harlins, with money in her hand, responded by saying, Bitch, let me go! I’m trying to pay for it.¹ Hence, a scuffle ensues, ending with Harlins placing the orange juice back on the counter and walking away; while Harlins is walking away, Du takes her gun from behind the counter and shoots Harlins in the back of the head, instantly killing the young Black teen. Harlins was 15-years-old.

Roughly a year after that fateful month of March, on April 29, 1992, the four officers involved in the beating of Rodney King and tried for excessive force would be acquitted on all charges, immediately sparking the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Five months earlier, in November 1991, the Korean grocer who murdered Latasha Harlins was charged with manslaughter, but sentenced only to five years probation and a $500 fine. The Harlins verdict was the match, and the King verdict was the match head, that set fire to the streets of Los Angeles for four straight days.

As a 14-year-old kid, not understanding the towering and unjust reality of racism at the time, I was angry and confused—especially at the verdict in the Harlins case. It affected me deeply not only because she was a classmate, but because the video surveillance that vindicated Harlins of any wrongdoing didn’t prevent the judge from handing down a sentence that would alleviate Soon Ja Du of murder. I was traumatized on how the life of a Black person, more importantly, a young Black teenager, didn’t matter to that White female judge presiding over the trial.

The anger and confusion I experienced with the Harlins verdict continued five months later as I witnessed the result of another trial that demonstrated the lack of concern for Black lives as four LAPD officers were acquitted of excessive force against Rodney King. Once again, video evidence didn’t matter. What I felt seemed to be on par with what many people throughout the city were feeling as that same anger and confusion spilled out onto the streets.

During those tumultuous days of unrest, my mother and I stayed home, afraid to go outside, waiting for the riots to finally end. For four straight days, the smell of smoke coming from the flames of local businesses and buildings across South LA inhabited our household as if we had just burned a Thanksgiving turkey in the oven. The smell and stench of the smoke was so heavy and potent that fire alarms in our apartment kept sounding off, which led me to believe the riots were soon headed to my block, in which all the houses and apartment buildings, including our duplex apartment, would ultimately burn down. Thankfully that never happened. But the message was sent: the verdict handed down from the Rodney King trial and the probation given to Latasha’s killer—was unacceptable.

After the riots ended, I rode the Rapid Transit Bus (RTD) back to school—the same bus that Latasha Harlins and I used to ride together every morning. As the bus shuffled along, I can vividly remember the feeling of seeing a different city out the window, with seemingly the entire stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard, from Rodeo Road to Florence Avenue, reduced to rubble and most of its businesses burnt to ashes. It looked like the after-effects brought about from wartime missile strikes. In that moment, I didn’t know where the city of Los Angeles, or for that matter, the world, was headed.

Several years later as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, the classes that most sparked my interest were American Studies and African American Literature thanks to timeless tomes like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Native Son, and other texts central to African American identity and history. My college experience included having the pleasure of seeing Black icons of social change from the 1960s and 1970s, Geronimo Pratt and Angela Davis speak. Pratt discussed his time as a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party—in particular how, as a result of his activities as a high-ranking member of the organization, he was unlawfully imprisoned by the U.S. government, accused of a crime involving murder and kidnapping that was later proven in court that he didn’t commit. It took 27 years for Pratt’s conviction to be vacated and all 27 of those years were spent behind bars.

During his presentation, Pratt accused the LAPD and FBI for conspiring to put him in prison because of his top-level membership in the Black Panther Party. He also talked extensively about his relationship with his Godson, slain hip hop icon, Tupac Shakur. Tupac was the son of Pratt’s friend and fellow Black Panther Party member, Afeni Shakur.

Moreover, I saw Angela Davis speak at USC—twice. Davis talked about her days as a political activist in the 1960s, along with her close ties to the Black Panther Party. Because of her activism and ties to the Black Panther Party (she was never officially a member), she discussed being on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, and her time behind bars after the FBI captured her. Davis scoffed at people who romanticized the 1960s—above all she was relieved that the turbulent decade was long behind her. What also stayed with me is that she critiqued the emerging prison industrial complex that was gaining profit from the incarceration of Black and Latino men and women. Davis was laying the groundwork of what would soon become an enormous movement questioning the racial ethics and financial intentions of the American prison system.

During my college years I began to realize that the world I had experienced as a child was not merely just a sequence of unfortunate coincidences, but a systematic exclusion of an entire population.

I was fast becoming aware that everything I experienced growing up symbolized the conditions that hip hop music had been boldly and courageously describing all along. As a kid, I didn’t listen to hip hop to seek out political or social commentary, I listened to hip hop because I revered it. I reveled in the cleverness of the rhymes, the drama and fantasy that the most gifted rappers of all-time could employ with their storytelling and narration. The mastery and imagination of words that I had been listening to all my life was telling me things that were staring me right in the face—but I couldn’t put it together until I got older, as I began to recognize the complex notions of both race and race relations. The realization was increasingly setting in: hip hop verbalized the bad and ugly truths that were happening throughout my personal life, throughout LA, and throughout the country.

…

Hip hop music and culture is a genre that was created in the post-civil rights era of America; bred in the streets of New York and LA. As the music evolved, the genre grew more oppositional in nature, encompassing overt forms of expression that involved narratives of political resistance and economic mobility through ghetto conflict and struggle. These master storytellers would rap about circumstances they had either done, experienced, or witnessed—again, the ugly truth about Black life. This ugly truth that hip hop wasn’t afraid to speak was starting to garner a lot of criticism. The most politically significant and socially conscious group in hip hop history, Public Enemy, led by chief vocalist, Chuck D, and boisterous hype man, Flavor Flav, would garner tremendous controversy for their racially explosive lyrics throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Public Enemy, whose music focused on racial injustice, White supremacy, and police brutality, was constantly attacked by the national media with accusations of hatred toward White people, in particular the Jewish community. Their racially explosive lyrics coupled with their unrelenting support of Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, who was labeled at the time (and still today) a Black racist, Black separatist, and anti-Semitic, led many powerful elements within the music industry to threaten to inhibit the distribution of Public Enemy’s music.²

In 1989, the seminal group Niggaz Wit Attitudes, aka N.W.A, with members Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella, was attacked publicly for their groundbreaking debut album Straight Outta Compton. Their album was seen as a hybrid of gangster and political rage; additionally, it was laced with sexual and violent lyrics that outraged many social and political factions across the country.

One song in particular received special attention: Fuck tha Police. It sent shockwaves among law enforcement agencies nationwide, prompting a letter from the FBI which took exception to such action regarding the violence toward police the song outlined in graphic detail.³ Ice Cube, the lead rapper on Straight Outta Compton, would depart from the group due to contract disputes with N.W.A management and go on to a legendary solo career.

Ice Cube’s second solo release, Death Certificate, was another LP seen as a mixture of gangster and political angst. Death Certificate (arguably my favorite hip hop album of all-time), released on Halloween 1991, prophesized the 1992 LA Riots, with its documentary-type assessment of conditions affecting Los Angeles at the time: police brutality, racial profiling, growing unemployment, emerging gang violence, drug-dealing, and the pitfalls of living in a city besieged by the unofficial yet murderous dress code—the wearing of the colors blue and red under the tyranny of the Crips and Bloods. Unsurprisingly Ice Cube’s album was heavily criticized and condemned for its alleged racism toward Whites, its anti-Semitism, and its ardent support of Louis Farrakhan. In addition, the album includes a song titled, Black Korea, dedicated to Latasha Harlins and the years of tension escalating between Black consumers and Korean grocers.

In the song, Cube declares to all Korean grocers, Pay respect to the Black fist, or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp. This quote and overall song would prove an omen of what would occur five months later as many Korean stores went up in flames during the LA Riots because of the anger that boiled over with the Harlins killing. The lyrical content in Black Korea, alongside Cube simulating caricatures of Asian dialect and facial features, enflamed many Asian civil rights groups.⁴

In the early 1990s, a record label known as Death Row Records would claim the controversial spotlight. Dr. Dre, lead producer of N.W.A, would depart the group in a move similar to Ice Cube, due to contract disputes with management only months after the release of the group’s second LP, Niggaz4Life.⁵ Dr. Dre would go on to create a new record label, alongside former N.W.A bodyguard, Marion Suge Knight, ominously (and foreshadowingly) named Death Row Records. The roster of artists included Dr. Dre himself, along with future icons of the genre, Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur. Death Row Records, similar to N.W.A, was constantly attacked by outside forces due to the sexual and violent nature of its music—most notably by civil rights activist C. Delores Tucker, and Republican politicians William Bennett and Senator Bob Dole.⁶

Criticism of the genre intensified when the murders of hip hop superstars Tupac Shakur, and Brooklyn, New York-based hip hop artist, Notorious B.I.G (whose content of music was also considered gangsta rap), took place respectively in 1996 and 1997. This inevitably evoked a response from critics who believed that the culture of hip hop, which purportedly promotes criminal activity and violence, directly led to the murders of both artists.

Nevertheless, others contend that the controversies surrounding hip hop only contributed further to its musical, social, and cultural success. Hip hop pioneer and mogul Russell Simmons explains:

Attacks on hip-hop have always been great for the culture. In fact, I personally want to thank Bob Dole, William Bennett and the rest of those right-wingers for reminding kids that hip-hop is theirs. When adults say ‘Oh, fuck, don’t listen to rap!’ they just reinforce young people’s commitment to it.⁷

Simmons argues the more hip hop is criticized, the stronger hip hop becomes; that criticism against hip hop has always been great for the culture, and when political figures like Bob Dole and William Bennett create national campaigns against hip hop, it only reinforces why people became hip hop fans in the first place. Simmons must have been on to something, because the bad and the ugly truths that these hip hop artists were articulating was resulting in record-breaking album sales.

…

It’s the world before N.W.A and it’s the world after N.W.A.

-Ice Cube

Public Enemy’s success peaked in the early 1990s with Fear of a Black Planet, released in April 1990, and selling over one million copies in its first week.⁸ Subsequently, when they released Apocalypse 91…The Enemy Strikes Black the following year, this album sold a million copies within a month.⁹ Moreover, after N.W.A sold over two million copies with their controversial but trailblazing LP Straight Outta Compton,¹⁰ which as hip hop scholar and author Jeff Chang put it, overturned transnational pop culture like a police car,¹¹ they would make history again with their 1991 LP, EFIL4ZAGGIN, or Niggaz4Life (Niggers For Life) spelled backwards. With this album, N.W.A would flip the music industry upside down once again reaching No. 1 on the Billboard music charts only weeks after Billboard implemented its SoundScan ranking system.¹² What’s important about the SoundScan conversion was that historically, album sales were flagrantly unreliable. Previously the methodology of tracking album sales consisted of simply calling music outlets across the country and inquiring about sales numbers—a method perpetually vulnerable to error, misrepresentation, and fraud.¹³

The next groundbreaking LP was Ice Cube’s Death Certificate, released months after Niggaz4life in 1991, and reaching No. 2 on the Billboard charts, going platinum within two months despite the controversy surrounding the album.¹⁴

Death Row Records would also benefit from this new era of tracking record sales. Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur and the label itself would not only dominate controversial headlines throughout the early-to-mid 1990s, but would dominate album sales as well. From 1993 to 1996, every album released from Death Row Records topped the Billboard charts at No. 1. When all was said and done, it was reported that Death Row Records sold up to 150 million albums worldwide.¹⁵ Even when Tupac was killed in September 1996, his album The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, would be posthumously released by Death Row Records and grab the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts.¹⁶

When Notorious B.I.G. was killed in March 1997, his double album, Life After Death, posthumously released as well, would also debut at No. 1.¹⁷ By 2000, Life After Death was certified Diamond, reaching a selling point of 10 million copies.¹⁸

By 1998, hip hop was officially the No. 1 selling music genre.¹⁹ And in late 1999, Russell Simmons decided to put this reality to the test. He wanted to mark the end of the 20th century and subsequently, the beginning of the 21st century, with the release of two hip hop albums from his iconic record label, Def Jam Records. In Simmons’ vision, the 20th century would conclude with a hip hop LP at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and the 21st century would begin with a hip hop LP at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. This feat would ultimately be accomplished, thanks to two artists on the Def Jam label who happened to be the two hottest hip hop artists at the time, and who were also given the cultural tag of gangsta rappers, DMX and Jay-Z.²⁰

DMX’s album, And Then There Was X, released on December 21, debuted at No. 1, and was indeed the last album to hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts at the end of the 20th century, while Jay-Z’s album, Vol. 3…Life and Times of S. Carter, would be released one week later on December 28th, and would go down as the first album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard charts in the 21st century. Add to that, Jay-Z’s earning power would coincide with arguably the biggest 21st century moment to date a year later with The Blueprint, released September 11, 2001—the same day that a series of four coordinated terrorists attacks launched in New York and Washington D.C.; completely destroying the World Trade Center in New York and demolishing sizeable fragments of property of the Pentagon in D.C, changing the reality of national security forever. The 9/11 attacks would end up killing nearly 3,000 people. Even through the fog of fear and terror that sat on the conscious of the American people, The Blueprint managed to enter the Billboard charts at No. 1.²¹

Consequently, these record sales provided a window into a huge portion of the hip hop buying public—White people. In the summer of 1990, I went to a Public Enemy concert with my cousin and his lady friend. Held at the famous Greek Theater in LA, it was the first hip hop concert I ever attended. Looking back now, I believe I witnessed history that night regarding the sea change in popular culture.

Again, I didn’t listen to hip hop music to seek out political commentary, I listened because I enjoyed lyrics coalesced over heavy pulsating beats—the trademark of most hip hop songs. My cousin had an extra ticket and I was excited. The concert was part of a nationwide tour and the strong supporting cast included Oakland, California-based group, Digital Underground. I can remember seeing Digital Underground perform one of the greatest hip hop dance songs of all-time, The Humpty Dance, with lead rapper, Shock G, performing in his alter ego, Humpty Hump, dressed up in Groucho glasses and a nose disguise, making for a colorful outfit and an outlandish persona. Even more notably, it was the first time I laid eyes on a young Tupac Shakur, kickstarting his career as a backup dancer and rapper, doing the Humpty Dance alongside Shock G, and fellow Digital Underground dancer and rapper, Money B.

I also anticipated seeing another of the hottest hip hop acts at the time, Heavy D and the Boyz. Unfortunately, they cancelled their appearance on this tour due to one of their dancers, Troy Trouble T Roy Dixon, being killed by accident after falling off a two-story exit ramp outside an Indianapolis arena a few weeks before the tour would come to LA. But all in all, the main event was Public Enemy.

What stuck out to me the most was looking around at the sold-out audience in this renowned outdoor venue and realizing the crowd was mostly White. I was shocked. Up to that point, every person I knew who listened to hip hop was Black. I didn’t even think White people liked hip hop. The Music Television Network (MTV) wouldn’t even consider playing hip hop on their network for years on end.

Even when Yo! MTV Raps premiered on the air in 1988, it would come on for only 30 minutes a day, and the rest of the daily lineup, besides Michael Jackson and Prince, would feature White artists performing some rock n’ roll music video or another. Similarly, I can remember feeling frustrated as a child after picking up magazines and newspapers