Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money is one of the better bloggers out there when it comes to law and political economy, but maybe less so rap music. Lemieux posted a brief item the other day dismissing an American Enterprise Institute piece on “The 21 Greatest Conservative Rap Songs Of All Time” as a patently absurd exercise. The piece may be absurd, but if it is it’s not patently so.
Conservative attempts to discern the hidden right-wing messages in movies/televisions shows/popular music/certain nineteenth-century presidents are irritating when they’re not completely idiotic. But in this instance the premise, at least, may not be entirely off base. Lemieux and the LGM commenters seem to think that rap and conservative ideas are oil and water, which is pretty clearly not the case.
We’re not talking about kit-and-caboodle ideology here; we’re just talking about particular conservative ideas, several of which are not uncommon in the world of hip-hop. Probably most obvious is a strong commitment to gender hierarchy. Many, many hip-hop groups push an either implicit or explicit form of patriarchy in which women are objectified and treated largely as ornaments, and are expected to follow a man’s bidding.
Even more pervasive, though, and less criticized, is a generally pro-capitalist stance, or at least an embrace of material worth as a measure of success. You don’t have to search far for examples. There are more than a few raps called “Gotta Get Mine,” the most popular of which is by M.C. Breed and Tupac and includes the line “My mind on my money, my money on my mind,” a line that pops up in Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” as well. Puff Daddy and the Notorious B.I.G.’s “It’s All About The Benjamins” is in a similar vein – a not-too sophisticated song about getting and buying what you want.
Jay-Z’s “Dead Presidents” is a lot more nuanced, but still finally about having money. It samples the line “I’m out for dead presidents to represent me,” from Nas’s “The World Is Yours.” Nas was neither the first nor the last to refer to money as “dead presidents”; the phrase shows up again and again in songs that discuss money with sometimes more and sometimes less texture and substance. Too Short gives a practical seminar on the term in his “Money In The Ghetto”:
On the one-dollar bill if you look on the front/You find the face of George Washington/Make money baby, that’s all I do/That’s how I know Thomas Jefferson is on the two/Abraham Lincoln got shot and died/Freed the slaves so they put him on the five/And Hamilton my old time friend/They put his face on the front of the ten/These are the dead presidents/From the hood, and they represent/The American dream for the average minority/Make your money get some weed and a forty
Videos often make what’s suggested in the songs completely clear. In the 1980s, Sir Mix-A-Lot rolled around in a stretch Mercedes limousine singing “My Posse’s On Broadway,” sparking a decade or so of rap videos that took place in limousines or Hummers, on beaches, on yachts, or at the inevitable pool parties. Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” combined all of these.
The point is not to criticize rap; as I’ve discussed before, I’m a pretty big fan of the genre. “Money In The Ghetto” is actually one of my favorite songs. Nor is the point to claim that hip-hop is somehow inherently conservative. If anything, it’s to claim the opposite.
The problem with ignoring the conservative themes that at times reveal themselves in rap is first, that it treats a complicated and diverse cultural phenomenon in a simplified fashion, and second, that it treats that phenomenon in a static manner, denying some pretty important shifts that have occurred since hip-hop emerged.
Rap music in the 1980s and 1990s – and particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s – was not only politically charged but often very specific in its political philosophies. If you wanted to learn about the white power structure and cultural hegemony, you could play Public Enemy; if you were looking for a critique of patriarchy or macho attitudes, you could turn to Queen Latifah or De La Soul; if you wanted to hear about the Five Percent Nation, Islam, and the importance of education (in the non-institutional sense), you could choose between Gang Starr, Brand Nubian, and the often-overlooked Poor Righteous Teachers; while if you were more sympathetic to communism, you might prefer The Coup. For Afrocentric hip-hop, there was X Clan, which critiqued Western civilization as a whole. It’s pretty hard to imagine a performer today recording the line “Yo, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates…step off.”
“Golden era” rap also had a strong strain of social realism, which was often most present in the much-maligned subgenre “gangsta rap.” This sort of social realism stretched all the way back to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” but may have reached its greatest height in Ice Cube’s (I know, I know) “Bird in the Hand,” as sophisticated a discussion of social welfare and poverty as you’ll ever hear on the radio, even if you’re listening to NPR.
Hip-hop was a profoundly political style of music, which makes it all the more important to acknowledge how – with a few notable exceptions – it is relatively unpolitical and even apolitical today. And the particular kind of apoliticalness that many rappers embrace – denying politics by naturalizing the forces of the market – is a conservative tenet.
