“When I was a teenager in the Bronx, you know, hip hop was not this international global phenomenon… I was so fascinated by [hip-hop’s] movement from everyday sort of expressive culture, like a vernacular working class culture, to the radio… And that started helping me think about what it means to be a cultural producer for communities to have expressive culture and how do they participate with the market and the technology, but also control what happens? Can they control what happens?... There's a deep kind of narrative manipulation that happens in the commercial arena, and that has to do with sales over creativity and full range of expression.” - Tricia Rose

White House Chronicle, Show #8016
April 15, 2016

Guest Hosts: Jim Ludes, Salve Regina University’s Pell Center and G. Wayne Miller, The Providence Journal

Guest: Tricia Rose, Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University

Transcript has been edited for clarity

JL: We've been looking forward to this, in part because hip hop is such an important part of storytelling. Your beginnings with hip hop really began as a child growing up in Harlem and in the Bronx. Tell us a little bit about that.

TR: Now this sounds like I'm old, but I am. Hip hop and I were, kind of, teenagers at the same time. When I was a teenager in the Bronx, you know, hip hop was not this international global phenomenon. It was, you know, remember double cassette decks, you know, with the B side and recording over it with rhymes and re-record them again after, you know, a basketball game, they would do it again and check it out and see what would happen.

So it was completely a local grassroots phenomenon. And that's one of the things that really interested me about it, that it was so accessible. That the technology and the art form meant that kids of varying degrees of talent and interest could participate pretty immediately and tell whatever stories they wanted to tell about their lived experience. Now, that said, you know, we're teenagers, so not all of those stories were for public consumption. But the vast majority really were about lived experience in ways that you wouldn't normally hear in mainstream society from a group of people who you almost never heard from: teenage people of color, from a working class background.

JL: And this was organic and it was the lived experience that you saw every day.

TR: Pretty much. I mean, it was, you know, kids talking about parties, talking about friends, talking about parents, talking about someone else's dinner, whether their grandmother cooked you know, friendships, relationships. Now, over time, what happens is the music as it becomes more commercially viable, as the industry picks it up, you still have those wide range of everyday lived experience stories but now you begin to have stories that emphasize a particular set of assumptions and values about black and brown people. So the stories that talk about drugs and guns and violence actually get more attention. They sell more. They don't necessarily suggest more sophisticated rhymes, or better beats, or better music. But they tell the story that people already actually expect to hear. And those stories begin to predominate.

And so it's not that that range of stories shouldn't have been there, but they begin to take over and they become what hip hop in the commercial arena turns out to be.

GWM: And does that influence then the image, the opinions and the beliefs that a lot of people who might not have been back there on the basketball courts in the 1970s come to hold as quote unquote “truth” when in fact not.

TR: That's right. Yeah. Well, in fact, this has always been a struggling point for hip hop because it's very much about personal identity. People craft a persona and then rap from that persona. You know, that doesn't happen so much in, say, pop music or R&B. You can sing any good song, right? Doesn't reflect on you. Hip hop, you're supposed to really speak from a set of experiences. So the fact that people expect that authenticity means that when they get a hard core gangsta rap rhyme with the authenticity factor, now you must be the person you are portraying. And so it feeds that belief that this is actually both who they are and this is who black and brown people are in general. So there's no question it feeds that expectation.

GWM: So it creates and underlies a stereotype.

TR: No question. But, you know, one one thing you know, to add is that it is true that black and brown urban communities were so devastated by the so-called war on drugs, which was really a war on the community, that the increase in incarceration and the increase in the the policing of those communities meant that there were more drugs and more crime going on. Right. So the stories you hear are truthful in the sense that they are expressing a reality, but the desire to hear from these criminalized people really drove the sales of hip hop in its commercial form, particularly after the late 1980s and throughout the nineties.

JL: So you’re living this experience as a teenager growing up in New York. At what point does your does your just this lived experience translate into the focus of your scholarship?

TR: Yeah, I know. Well, I had no interest at all in this as an academic subject when I was a teenager. I was going to be a lawyer. I was going to change the world through, you know, being the next depressed defense attorney was what I was going to do. And I went to college and majored in sociology, and then near the end of my college career I wrote a paper on hip hop and rap in New York, mainly because I was so fascinated by its movement from everyday sort of expressive culture, like a vernacular working class culture, to the radio. I'll never forget that moment when I actually heard it on the radio, and that just changed everything. And that was about 1980 when I went to college. But the second thing was when Rapper's Delight, the 1982 song, “The Message” was given a special award as the most significant social pop song by The New York Times. And then it really started playing on the radio. And I thought, How did this get into this place? Right? How did it go from here to this other place that we don't really have any control over? Right. It's the radio. You remember, it was magical. Like, we don't know how songs get on the radio. And that really fascinated me. And that started helping me think about what it means to be a cultural producer for communities to have expressive culture and how do they participate with the market and the technology, but also control what happens? Can they control what happens?

JL: One of the things that struck me about your scholarship is you draw a distinction between (and correct me if I'm overstating this) sort of what would be authentic hip hop and the corporate hip hop. Just stretch that out for us.

TR: So I don't quite mean authentic because that implies that there is an absolute truth to be found about the music. And I think it's an art form. It's not a statement of fact. It's not a deposition. It's an art form. But I am saying something that you're quite right to point out, which is that there's a deep kind of narrative manipulation that happens in the commercial arena, and that has to do with sales over creativity and full range of expression.

So here's the biggest ironic thing about hip hop as it becomes exceptional, popular, particularly through the early to mid 1990s and then into the 21st century, the higher its sales, the greater its success, the more money it makes, the narrower the stories become. So you would think there are more records, more artists, more people listening. They'd be interested in a wider range of stories because they'd get tired of hearing about the same thing. Well, actually quite the opposite. The record industry literally often requests that artists change the content to mirror what I call in Hip Hop Wars, a very narrow set of images which is basically gangsters, pimps and the classic sort of “ho” story. And my argument is that this street culture that's driven by a sort of fantasy about black criminality becomes the only way that most consumers want to hear hip hop stories.

GWM: Why do you think that is, though? I mean, there's a pressure on that narrowing, but that stuff sells. What does that say about us?

TR: As usual, when you go right to the hard part? Yeah, thanks for that. It's a couple of things. One is that, you know, poor communities have more street crime by definition, all racial backgrounds. It doesn't have white collar crime, it’s called street collar crime. So there is that kind of association. But the most important thing is that we despite all the tremendous growth and change we've had in this nation, there is still a fundamental belief that black people as a group have this kind of disposition, that they're either criminal, they're hypersexual, they're dangerous, they're other, they're exotic. And that has not really changed pretty much since emancipation. During slavery, we had a different set of stereotypes to justify slavery. But immediately upon emancipation, we begin with this fear of black freedom, one would argue, or a black autonomy and it translates into an ongoing both fixation and weird kind of criminal fear that we see all the time in the culture. So hip hop is a terrific embodiment of that.