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Wednesday, November 14, 2007
COCAINE
UGK feat. Rick Ross
Underground Kingz
Jive : 2007
[Buy It]
CRACK MUSIC
Kanye West feat. the Game
Late Registration
Roc-a-Fella : 2005
[Buy It]
EGHCK
Clipse
some damn mixtape
circa 2005 (?)
DREAMIN'
Young Jeezy
The Inspiration
Def Jam : 2006
[Buy It]
WHITE GIRLS
Cam'ron
Killa Season
Asylum : 2006
[Buy It]
Today I was torn as to whether I wanted to follow up on Ben's post about language or James's post about crack; both topics are of high interest to me. I sat at my desk with a copy of Borges's "Library of Babel" at my right hand, Young Jeezy's The Inspiration at my left. A cursory sweep through my iTunes revealed that I have more music directly pertaining to crack than music directly pertaining to linguistic metaphysics, and some MW readers have recently indicated that they prefer our posts that pertain directly to music over our more discursive efforts (if the latter have seemed scarcer lately, it's because I, the greatest offender when it comes to, er, "untraditional mp3 blogging," have been on vacation, opening up a space for Ben's bravura run). So I decided to take the rock (groan) from James instead.
But first, here's a picture of the terminally insane Pete Doherty making his cat smoke crack.
Crack's place in the popular culture is no less prominent now than it was in the scare-mongering '80s (even Kanye West, the surburban child of an academic, wanted a piece of the crack-trend action, troublingly asserting that "This is crack music nigga/ That real black music nigga"). But if crack seems less scary now than it did then, it's because a) crack became such a pervasive topic in mainstream rap and b) mainstream rap has become a pop phenomenon. Crack, in short, has been demystified, and at this point one might reasonably expect a white suburbanite who doesn't know a crack rock from a Fraggle Rock to know that "trap" means a place where one goes to buy or sell drugs and that "white girl" doesn't refer to Natalie Portman. Thanks to documentary-style trap-hop, we're all armchair experts in the terminology and tenets of moving weight (although the experience of *smoking* crack has received a lot less attention than the experience of selling it). This is a far cry from my '80s childhood, when all I knew of crack was that it was ambiguously yet urgently bad, like nuclear war, killer bees, and satanic heavy metal, and that black people were doing it. The implication of the news reports, as I recall them, was that the real danger wasn't to the poor black communities who were using crack, but to the white families they might rob, or entice into deviant sexual practices, who were just trying to go about their business of politely sniffing uncooked cocaine and dancing awkwardly amid banks of flashing lights.
Before crack, there was cocaine (I remember once telling a friend, who asked me what I meant by the term "post-capitalism," to think of crack as "post-cocaine"), on which Bun B provides many informative tidbits in the UGK song of the same name. It's often known as "yayo," and comes from Columbia and Peru. It's been around for hundreds of years, "exploited by the rich," and they used to put it in Coca-Cola. It's a global economy with a rigid chain of production: "Grown by the cartels, protected by guerillas/ Transported by the best, to the ghettos, to straight killers." The sale of cocaine is the most glamorous enterprise, while its use is reviled. "Everything was cool, I was ice cold," Pimp C says earlier in the song, "Until I let that bitch get up in my nose."
The idea that selling crack is glamourous while using crack is reviled is dominant in modern mainstream rap, as is the idea that venting toxins into one's community is justified by the genre's rapacious drive toward amassing wealth. Cocaine rap is so compelling because it embodies the American dream - of individual success at any cost, of being one of the few winners in a field crowded with losers - at its most ruthless logical conclusion. In "Eghck," Clipse turn out many clever puns about trapping - "I pedal (peddle) to the corner like a child on a bigwheel" and "So much shake in the streets they measure my weight in Richter" - but the song most poignantly demonstrates the capitalism-rap mindset when it turns personal. The part goes: "And I'm not proud, in fact, I hate this route / It's the same game got my brother strung out / So I count the ways that it fucked up his life..." And here we hold our breath for some expression of remorse, confliction, or even renunciation. "...so I don't have a problem with upping my price."
Young Jeezy, who according to the lore parlayed a successful crack dealing career into a successful career rapping about crack dealing, takes a similarly ambivalent stance to the consequences of his wealth on "Dreamin'." This is a standard up-from-squalor motivational rap song that only becomes exceptional when Jeezy is seized by a rare bout of introspection:
Mom's smoking rocks
Same shit I'm selling
So who's wrong, her or me?
She addicted to the high
I'm addicted to the cash
I almost put my hands on her
When I caught her in my stash
In both of these examples, crack dealers are personally and viscerally confronted with the destruction they're wreaking, feel troubled, and yet, looking at their fat wallets, decide, "yeah, it's worth it" - that is, they same way an environment-raping corporate CEO or corrupt politician might feel upon surveying the fallout from their various reavings and pillagings. In retrospect, one wonders if there was more than racial hysteria at play when mainstream America was so terrified during crack's '80s vogue: perhaps we caught a glimpse, however subliminal, of the true nature of our doctrines of competition and conspicuous consumption.Labels: brian, drugs, rap
posted by Brian
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