DEAD PREZ: REVOLUTIONARY BUT GANGSTA
(from Revolutionary But Gangsta; Sony Urban/Columbia)
Because I am white with blue eyes and Dead Prez is black, idolizes Marcus Garvey, and on their new album, RBG, even has a hit song about sticking a white delivery-boy for his money (a job I've always wanted to apply for), let me tell you what I think about hip-hop:
Z-e-r-o. People who don't like it are either a) prejudicial, or b) already have an alternative for what they're piping is the "truth of today." Frankly, I think most of it's plain dumb. Yet, Dead Prez remains one of the single-most played groups in my collection, and easily the hardest hip-hop in the past five years to grab me since their Afro-revolutionary Let's Get Free, and the only group to repeatedly curse George Bush while saying 9/11 wuzn't aimin' at us/not in my house in the agitating Turn Off The Radio. As to the hip-hop nation itself?
Bugger that. I'm also willing to bet rap music has screwed, softened and essentially been misrepresented by every white kid I meet who listens to the snuff. Find one catchy dance in a TV ad for urban-outfitter sneakers which mean anything besides a commodity and I'll listen to Glen Campbell for the rest of my life. Perhaps what originated as a euphonious street-beat in hip-hop (old skool, etc.) has in fact chewed down to a bunch of middle-class kids in Tarheel jerseys watching the BET channel, influenced by no further conception (as the folk-revival had with blues) other than the latest mod and MTV estrogen. Does anybody care? (Plus, today's generation-- "Generation Y" if you will-- seems to extremely commercial, and thus under no principle to enhance pop-culture as a form of social commentary, but ironically buying 90 dollar shoes at the mall or listening to rap music which, essentially, is about hunting "you" down for the lifestyle "you've" oppressed others with, is deemed as cool.) I just returned from a party where the majority of people were dressed in the Rap "big-khakis-BIG-sweatshirt" fashiondom, while the only actual black kid there left within minutes because one white "dude" kept overtly calling himself a "dumb nigger."
You hear a lot of that today. Racial animosity. Everyone wants to be cool and nobody at this particular scene dared to interfere with the situation. There's hip-hop: the money, the drugs, the whodunits, the zillion ghetto-action Hollywood films, and the AM news reporting inner-city violence to usher Fear through central suburbia (yr no. 1 hip-hop consumer). It's hated as a demagogue, among evidently killing Soul (which I thought Donna Summer got rich doing, no?), laying down the law that "they" should be back in Motown cranking out hit after hit like a 24-hour dry cleaner with all the harmony to make sugar sing-- and besides, they say, Bob Dylan invented rap back in '65.
Yeah, and Norman Rockwell's our President. Open for business? Everyone wants Otis Redding over a bunch of obese misogyny-- Bubba Sparxx doesn't actually wanna be the fat blub Bubba Sparxx he's known as, he'd rather be singing with The Delfonics, for if real hip-hop had the privilege of choosing an aesthetic it wouldn't be hip-hop, now would it? It doesn't wanna be it. Isn't that the point?
But nobody likes rap (the 5% that's good) and capitalism together...it sucks, just ask 2Pac. M-1 and Stic.man of Dead Prez have consistently avoided that rut, taking the torch from predecessors like Public Enemy or Fela Kuti and aiming their exodus to a seminal and strict (hehe: Get the white man's dick out of your mouth) Black Power.Turn Off the Radio lyrically revolutionized pop-songs as its mix--You're only scared of Malcolm X 'cuz he died for ya-- with a crucial strike of neo-Black Pantherism, sighted by their five-step "Code of the Warrior" fundamentals-- the essence of Prezology: No Snitching/Protect Self, Family & Community at all Times/Each One, Teach One/Be Organized/Be Productive (and if you really wanna put the pedal to the metal: Steal their Albums). M-1 is smart, and in "B.I.G. Respect" off Radio rapped his entire life under one minute (something Rock has a hard time finishing in five decades without overdosing and marrying its cousin). In a New York zine called Ugly Planet he told Ojo Rojo in 2003:
"Our need to form a record label is a reaction to being involved with big, commercial corporate record labels like Loud, Sony, Columbia, and coming to the understanding that they can't really provide the services that we need to make the records that we want to make."
Did I mention RBG: Revolutionary But Gangsta is on Columbia? (who dropped them a year ago after a dispute but seem to have, hmm, reunited). I guess this either means M-1 isn't happy with his new album, or feels he's enhanced Prez's street cred. and exploited the system by feeding it back into the hip-hop community as both an entertainment and an enlightenment. Naturally, though, I'm suspicious of anything purporting revolution on a major label (historically it's only amounted to basic avengerism and not much change in society). It doesn't even sound right, and I'd be a liar if I said RBG didn't appear compromised, either: 12 songs, 45 minutes, one an intro another an outro, "Hell Yeah (Pimp the System)," the key maelstrom, is repeated as a Jay-Z remix (the tighter version) and yet again in a later hidden track, while "Radio Freq" is the same song as "Turn Off The Radio" in 2002. When you get past all the multi-voice soul choruses you really only got nine songs, none of whom lyrically steer close to their prior riots in persecuting the government & prison wards, standing more as a "get-up soldier" ammo party: I used to drink cognac/Now I train for combat...
Training their warriors. "50 In The Clip" is a whole cut about "revolutionary gangstas" doing push-ups on the street corner, and then there's the Bone Thugs-esque "I Have a Dream, Too" about shooting cops with a brigade of pistols cocking in the background (okay, that's pretty cool). And how about those censored bits-- like "W-4":...run up into the White House with the gauge out/Click-Clack...Suddenly the voice is stripped and there's this odd gap of space, then abruptly: Give me my shit back, followed by the typical, Beotch! A different Prez; more weed, more overcoming alcoholism ("F***ed Up," same person in there as Gil Scott's "Pieces of a Man"), less Marcus Garvey "back to Africa," with more tips on how to botch the system and saw apart the police-state ("Hell Yeah," Get a friend and do it again, which The Coup also sang in "5 Million Ways To Kill A CEO"; and so you know: call up a delivery boy, have him drive to a rundown alley, stick him up and rob his money. Among other tips. Like obtaining a fake ID-- as George Bush's daughters did?).
Whatever. The album's okay, I just wish they hadn't gone near that prefab rap. Point: Underground hip-hop is the only hip-hop. Some accuse Prez of being racist for calling "me" (me/we) a "cracker." They seem to be segregational (simply because they fail to see whites also live in ghettos: what the hell do you call Wal-Mart?), which doesn't help matters, but even still, a lot of whites are arrogant "crackers," just like Prez defies "niggers" in the Uncle Tom sense, too. Ultimately, if anything RBG has to offer, white people will be attracted to the group, for they'll be intrigued by an aspect of militant liberation that they're habitually unable to control per se (if they're even listening, my theory's they only dig rap 'cuz it sounds cool on their car stereo).
Compared to rock music, which is only about catering an ethic, politically RBG blows everybody away, including that album you're thinking of right now. Critically, Dead Prez, no matter how universal they spread the word, will never earn 5-stars in Rolling Stone (RBG got three). A "good album" today is justified & rated upon how radically "it" reinterprets itself, which of course is already a continuum based on critics who've supported it on behalf of their own nostalgia and cohorts...Still, even though it assassinates indulgence and rids the point, the cultural attitude towards "hip-hop" is balked with every immorality today. Prez is in a rough place. Relatively, they are modern Panthers, yet they try to instigate this in rap music-- a divisive biz-- which whites also see as a stylistic fantasy-- making it their overall nemesis. Fine. They're heroes who I'm willing to bet are the only thing erupting an impact for the minority. Even if RBG's got a muzzle over its mouth I still believe it'll snap: We're about to turn drive-bys revolutionary...Oh? Are you going to do it? And what's a "cracker" like me to do in all this?
--Carson Arnold - May 5th, 2004
copyright 2004 Carson Arnold
H(ear) is an online music column consisting of interviews, articles, and investigations written by Carson Arnold. As a freelance writer for various magazines and liner notes, living in the woods of Vermont with his family, Carson widely encourages one to submit their art, writing or any interesting piece of material that you would like to share. H(ear) is accepting both promos and demos for review or any other valuable music-related subjects. If you wish to make a comment or would like to receive H(ear) weekly by email please contact Carson at [email protected]
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