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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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Monday, November 12, 2007
GET YOUR MOTHER OFF THE CRACK
Audio Two
I Don't Care (The Album)
Atlantic : 1990
[Buy It]
GIMME NO CRACK
Shinehead
Unity
Elektra : 1988
[Buy It]
BEEN THIS WAY BEFORE (RAP)
Roger
Unlimited!
Reprise : 1987
[Buy It]
CRACK ROCK
The Dogs
The Dogs
J.R. Records : 1991
[Buy It]
CRACKHEAD
Kenn Kweder
Kwederology, Vol. 1
2002
[Buy It]
CRACK
Big Black
Hammer Party
Touch & Go Records : 1986
[Buy It]
BASEHEAD
Corey Harris
Greens from the Garden
Alligator Records : 1999
[Buy It]
CRACK PIPES
Sage Francis
Personal Journals
Anticon : 2002
[Buy It]
CRACKSPOT
Ghostface Killah
Fishscale
Def Jam : 2006
[Buy It]
RAP GAME / CRACK GAME
Jay-Z
In My Lifetime, Vol. 1
Roc-a-Fella : 1997
[Buy It]
I AM CRACK
Juelz Santana
What the Game's Been Missing!
Def Jam : 2005
[Buy It]
SMOKE
Dimmer
I Believe You Are A Star
Flying Nun : 2001
[Buy It]
If you are of the certain age and the certain whiteness that I am, then you can't think of the 80s without thinking of crack. Crack was huge in the 80s. Juat like that, Styx was no longer the country's favorite white rock. It was pretty impressive - for this little upstart drug to become, in a few short years, a modern American plague. I like to imagine those first Shuttle astronauts looking down from space and seeing our nation's crack pipes ablaze, like a thousand points of light. Crack had a very candid resume: it was cheap, available, and promised instant returns. Even so, the boom it enjoyed was amazing. In a blink, the crack habit became an emblem for all habits, its mechanism the mechanism for all addictions. There was no wiggle room with crack, no recreational crack smoking, no loud, bohemian couple at your dinner party offering the crack pipe around, no lifestyle that included crack smoking except the crack smoker's lifestyle. The crack boom brought a parallel boom in new, sinister compound nouns: crackheads, crackmoms, and crackbabys - a whole new citizenry overnight.
Crack devastated America's black urban communities. But for white America, crack was a great phantom. For the white community, crack's grip was mostly on the imagination, but that didn't make it any less potent or twitchy. The way a white person thought about crack said much about the way they thought about race, and money and the city. It was something of a prism to be looked through, or maybe a more accurate, if equally lazy, metaphor would be a kaleidoscope, whose optics caught each tiny personal flaw and projected them into a uniquely, fantastically colorful spectacle of predjudice.
Crack became one of our great racial bogeymen. The history of race in America is stocked with racial bogeymen, but in the 80s, conditions seemed uniquely moist for the seeds of rapid fear.
The national tone was conservative and cocky. For the typical Reaganite, black America may as well have been a foreign country. The Establishment had never done or seen crack, or had any friends or friends-of-friends who had done or seen crack, or ever shown any previous interest in the welfare of America's inner cities. Yet the Establishment was obsessed with crack.
Politicians, economists, urban planners, the people in charge, were all exactly unqualified to handle the crisis. But they all took a furiously inexpert shot, like the crack epidemic was a Rubik's cube they had been handed for the fist time. I'm pretty sure at some point someone declared war on crack. Scientists gave crack to animals and announced importantly that the animals chose the crack over food. (I'm not sure what the benefit of these studies was --as we all know, one of the great evolutionary bonuses of being human is the ability to choose drugs AND food.)
Meantime, news from the crack front was being delivered to us by a new, accelerating media. A faster, noisier, sleazier, more voyeuristic, more entertaining media. A small-picture media obsessed with trend-spotting and tabloid magazine shows hosted by loud Australian men. This media loved crack. Do you remember, at the end of the 80s, when crack's ability to shock was on the wane, how the media didn't want to let it go? I remember a desperate spate of stories about new, more deadly drugs that were about to sweep into the suburbs and turn your Honor Roll daughter into a cheap hooker. Rolling Stone ran a big cover story on a drug called "Ice" that was supposedly going to make crack look like Flintstone's chewables. Ice was cheaper, more addictive, more deadly. I think some gangs in Hawaii were making it. Of course it was the Hawaiian gangs. That's an old Rolling Stone trick, because they know nobody fact checks the Hawaiian stuff.
The changing media reflected a change in media consumers. The audiences were younger. For white suburban kids, there was suddenly a new familiarity with black style and black music. White teens were dressing black, talking black, listening to black radio, admiring black athletes. They were even venturing into the city on weekends, where they mingled with black kids on the racial frontiers, swapping cultural chips, like the early stages of a game of Othello. Ahh, Othello, the 80s chess! But it was mingling, not mixing. We walked the same blocks, but passed each other on opposites sides of the street. For white kids, this new intimacy brought into relief very real divisions in a way we had never quite considered. Joseph Conrad, in a famous book he wrote about a crackhead called Mister Kurtz, described a phenomenon whereby the "glow brings out a haze." For kids like me growing up in DC, this bright new fog created a queasy kind of segregation anxiety. We laughed at our parents for being so ignorant, for getting it wrong when it came to all things black, but at the same time, we didn't know specifically in what ways they were getting it wrong. We couldn't debunk their myths with any evidence based on actual experience, we just did so on faith. The everyday invisibility of black people in our lives was embarrassing to us, and so we over-compensated, nurturing our own counter-fantasies about what real black people were all about, and we did foolish things like go to Kid 'n Play concerts.
I guess I don't really have anything in the way of a conclusion. What got me thinking about our old friend crack, was a link someone sent me a few days ago. It's a nasty link, nasty in so many ways, absolutely unsafe for work, and in fact, best left unclicked.
Here it is.
Instead of clicking that link, why not hop on the comments board, anonymously if you like, and give us some good personal crack stories. I know you got em. If I'm sure about one thing, it's that moistwork readers love to hit the pipe.
SOME CRACK LINKS:
CRACK IS WHACK
VINTAGE RACIST CRACK P.S.A.
VINTAGE CRACK P.S.A.
VINTAGE CRONKITE CRACK P.S.A.
PEE WEE HERMAN CRACK P.S.A.
CRACKHEADS GONE WILD
CRACK SMOKERS IN HELLS KITCHEN
THE IRON SHIEK SMOKES CRACK
I GOT COCAINE RUNNING AROUND MY BRAIN
THE MYTH OF THE CRACK BABYLabels: drugs, hip-hop, James, rap
posted by James
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