Street essays

Ladd blows the lid off media culture

by Matt Ashare

Snoop Doggy Dogg's got a job
Now he's Snap Doggy Do
They bronzed his dick on Wall Street to symbolize fucking you.

-- Mike Ladd

Mike Ladd isn't some gat-toting gangsta aiming to start a turf war with Snoop Doggy Dogg. And though he is from the Boston area, he's not trying to inflame East Coast/West Coast rivalries with his characterization of one of the other coast's biggest living gangsta stars. No, he's a 26-year-old English-lit grad student and teaching fellow at Boston University who grew up in Cambridge and is currently gearing up for the release of his debut CD, Easy Listening for the Armageddon (Scratchie/Mercury) next month.

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The hip-hop underground comes back
Spearhead's Michael Franti crosses over
Dr. Octagon shakes up hip-hop

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A stark collection of low-key, intellectually tinged raps that fall along the thin line that separates hip-hop from performance poetry, the disc is the product of an alert mind that's been watching, listening, and thinking about hip-hop for the last decade, observing problems and contradictions, looking for ways to articulate what he's seen on the front lines -- not of some urban war zone, but of the media machine.

The drama of gangsta rap is "all a big cartoon, just like O.J. was a big cartoon," says Ladd. "At some point the media decided they had to focus on black people, but they've done it in a way that makes it into a cartoon. There's no attempt to understand the complexities of humanity in the African-American communities. It's always reported as the African-American phenomenon. And that's been especially true of gangsta rap."

Not that Ladd's ready to let gangsta rap off the hook for being complicit in the deal to portray the African-American phenomenon as a drive-by culture of ho's, guns, and money. "They knew the game they had to play to get what they wanted. So people like Snoop did capitalism better than anyone could ever imagine doing capitalism. That's basically what crack dealing is, too. I'm not saying that crack dealing and gangsta rap are synonymous, but they're both coming out of the same impulse to say, `I'm going to outdo your capitalist ideals.'

"I have my own conspiracy theory about the gangsta rap thing. It's a suburban fantasy. It's what all the money was put into because a lot of white, out-of-college A&R kids were really thrilled and excited by how rugged it all sounded. They liked hanging out in the Jeeps hooking up these kids from the street. And the violence that came out of it was something that was very easy for people in the suburbs to buy into.

"I think that a lot of true stuff also came out of gangsta rap. But it got turned into a cartoon because as soon as something becomes a mass-market event, what's actually being said and what's being said for the sake of making a dollar become confused. My problem with that is, it only represents one aspect of life. It misses the struggle that goes on after someone is shot. Or the struggle that went on with love and life before someone was shot."

So why is Ladd, whose debut is set for a May 20 release, willing to offer his thoughts to the media machine, to people like myself, who are apt to take Easy Listening for Armageddon's most inflammatory statement and paste it at the top of an interview?

"Well, I've wanted to put out an album since I was 16 and playing bass and drums in little garage bands," he admits. "But there are other reasons. I don't want to come off like I'm trying to be a visionary or anything, but I think a lot of things are about to change. There are a whole lot of people in New York doing similar stuff to what I'm doing. Tony Medina is a great poet who's got a book out. Asha Bendele and Suhir Hamad are two other published poets who are coming out. Then you have Carl Rux, who's got an album like mine, except he can really sing. It's funny because everyone's so hyper-intellectual about what they're doing, that they each have a different term for it."

Ladd calls his thing "non-boxable," as in something that's not easily categorized. But if Easy Listening for Armageddon is any indication of the style and tone of the scene he sees emerging, it's going to counter the cartoon of gangsta rap not with the feel-good groove of Arrested Development but with a new kind of reality-based music that seeks to cut through the smokescreen of ghetto gunfire and reactionary mainstream politics.

"I'd like to see all the intellectual energy that I see coming from the street when I'm teaching become more visible," he points out. "I've seen more sophisticated analytical skills on the street than anywhere else. I made this record because I thought I had something to say about what's going on in this country. I think I say it better in a classroom than through any other channels of media that exist right now. But an essay never gets heard."