Thug life fails

Tupac, Snoop, Chuck D, and Ghostface

by Franklin Soults

Music videos are usually incidental to good music, but they can at least cover the emptiness of weak songs with a veneer of meaning. That's certainly what has happened with Dr. Dre's clunky new single, "Been There, Done That." The clip shows him sitting in his plush office, riding around in his limo, and going to a ballroom dance in a secluded mansion, all while ghetto scenes explode in mayhem around him. This super-conscious identification with the upper crust is Dre's attempt to proclaim his emancipation from dumb macho fantasies as he starts up a brand new label, Aftermath Records. But the cold ostentation seems isolated, empty ("lonely" would connote too much feeling). It all comes painfully close to saying something real about the trap into which most successful hardcore rappers have fallen.

"Been There, Done That" was supposed to herald the release of Dre's perpetually postponed second album, but that seems to have got postponed again. Instead, November has been dominated by a slew of other big-name releases that, together, delineate the dimensions of that rap trap. Four in particular have received special commercial and/or critical attention. Two of these have just come out on Dre's former label, Death Row Records: Tha Doggfather is the second album by Dre's protégé, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and The Don Kiluminati: The 7 Day Theory is a posthumous release by "Makaveli," a new tag for the recently murdered Tupac Shakur. Elsewhere on the charts, Wu-Tang Clan member Ghostface Killah debuted at #2 on Billboard's album chart with Ironman (Epic/Razor Sharp), and Chuck D, former leader of Public Enemy, has just released his first solo album, Autobiography of Mistachuck (Mercury).

The only thing these four albums appear to have in common is that they're by established names. But if the discs range all over the map in terms of style, skill, and imagination, they're alike in trying to deal with the contradiction of making a career -- maybe even "maturing" -- in relation to a style built around dead-end violence. At one level this is just an extreme version of the problem faced by aging members of rebellious youth subcultures from rockabilly to punk, but the dilemma is compounded to the nth degree by the stigmatization of race. At a time when whites are expressing an open hostility toward blacks that rivals the days of enforced segregation, these successful public representations of poor black youth are caught in a crushing bind. How can they move upward and onward from gangbanging and bitch bashing when the streets are more alienated, angry, and desperate than ever? No wonder Dre rolls up his tinted window as his limo drives through the 'hood.

Both Tupac's "Makaveli" album and Snoop's Doggfather are caught in that bind, and it's a big reason they both flop. Yet the one by the dead guy is the healthier of the two. Tupac's intentions are an indecipherable muddle, but Snoop's first major artistic statement apart from Dr. Dre just finds him barking witlessly in the garage.

Snoop Doggy Dogg was Dre's greatest discovery; it's no exaggeration to say that Snoop's soft but nasty raps and Dre's laid-back, pimp-style production combined to change the course of hip-hop. Doggfather, though, is just the latest reminder that talent always has its contingencies. Without Dre, Snoop relies on obvious samples of old funk hits and straight-out covers of classic raps, as well as the generic production work of lesser lights like Tha Dogg Pound's Dat Nigga Daz and DJ Pooh. Instead of imitating Dre's plush grooves, they mostly keep the tone spare and quiet -- a sound that merely reflects Snoop's rap style, thereby undermining it.

Part of the problem may be that Snoop has simply lost interest. "I don't give a fuck about no beat," he says in one song intro, and I bet he doesn't really give a fuck about no gangbanging, either. Although he shot his way happily through Dre's multi-platinum The Chronic, he started pulling away from his guise of cold-blooded murderer on his follow-up solo debut, Doggystyle (both on Death Row). Now he's positively torn about his role, and it shows. "I want to be the first rapper in the Rock 'n' Roll hall of fame," he says in a recent press release, but then he adds, "I'm not afraid of being a role model, but I'm staying real and entertaining from the hardcore perspective." From cut to cut, he preaches peace one minute, then celebrates his gangbanging exploits the next; the contradictions end up making him sound as hypocritical and confused as the next sucka MC.

As Makaveli, Tupac Shakur escapes this fate only because he sounds so completely taken by both extremes. Even if it was intended as a throwaway quickie, the Makaveli album sounds unfinished: the mix is slightly muffled, and the backing tracks range from the kind of full-fledged crossover productions for which Tupac was famous to perfunctory, squiggly synth beats. This one had the potential to return to the searching, doubt-ridden style of Tupac's next-to-last album, the pre-Death Row Me Against the World (Interscope). For all the self-serving self-pity, it's amazing how often the style there worked. Tupac wasn't an especially gifted rapper, as Snoop can be, but Snoop's stylistic innovations have been imitated and absorbed, whereas Tupac's impassioned cadences and burred delivery remain unique -- as arresting a feature of his persona as his killer looks. Although the new album is marred by gangbanging trifles at both ends, the middle section is a warm testimony to what Tupac could have become with a little more luck and a lot more self-knowledge. "White Man'z World," especially, points a way out of the hardcore bind: the exchange of hard attitude for hard politics.

Of course, the hip-hop community has already gone through that phase once, back in the late '80s. Ultimately, ghetto kids found the immediate symbolic rebellion of gangstas like Ice Cube and Dre far more appealing than the long-haul fight promised by political rappers like KRS-One and Chuck D. And these artists weren't up to the long-haul fight either, at least not with music to match their message -- just consider Public Enemy's last album, Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (Def Jam). On Autobiography of Mistachuck, however, Chuck D comes halfway back to life -- which is to say he packs all his punches into the first five or six cuts. Instead of taking aim at the big, systemic evils of the day, he focuses these numbers at a clearer, closer target: black music.

"Entertaining is today's way of picking cotton," raps Chuck, condemning everybody from immoral, materialistic rappers to amoral, materialistic crossover acts: "NO mainstream dreams . . . NO negroes with ego. NO mo' shows callin' women bitches and hoes . . . NO bodyguards' gold teeth. NO east coast west coast beef." The sermon ebbs and flows, building its intensity from cut to cut with slow R&B vamps and jazzy sax breaks, James Brown beats and old-school scratching. The music may be markedly out of date, but it's as much a relief as Chuck's hard, common-sense raps.

Then comes the second half. In truth, Chuck found a way out of the hardcore bind years ago, but that only turned him into a raging crank venting his spleen as the world passed him by. I wish he'd just continue to vent away, but on the rest of the album he tries to prove his relevance by trading raps with tired wanna-bes, experimenting with darker backing tracks, and trying to pretend he loves his "Underdog" status (as one new song would have it). Chuck D was never a gangbanger, but he's as caught by the gangsta bind as anybody.

In the end, the only act who's learned to have his gangbanging and leave it too is Ghostface Killah (a/k/a Tony Starks). Ghostface is the fifth member of Staten Island's 10-man Wu-Tang Clan to release a heavily assisted "solo" album since the crew's one and only national release, 1993's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (Loud/RCA). Like the martial-arts societies on which they model themselves, the Wu-Tang owe their strength to their impenetrable, secretive cohesion. For any outsider, cracking their code language and relationships with one another is like undertaking an anthropological field project, with all the attendant cultural discomfort. Likewise, their music is a buzzing mix of old kung fu-movie dialogue, short looped samples, doomy, throbbing bass, trippy raps, discordant jazz textures -- you name it. It throws a net much wider than most hardcore -- I spotted a reference to Keanu Reeves and Grey Poupon, an ironic reading of a Sam Cooke soul classic, a sample from an old Al Green horn chart turned inside out -- but what it pulls in always feels cramped, diseased. It's the kind of music Tricky might make if he lived in New York, or Beck if he lived in Hell (same thing?).

Yet it provides Ghostface, like all the Wu-Tang members, with an escape clause from hardcore. At first inspection, the raps are as violent as the hardest West Coast fare, but they're so difficult to unravel, it's often hard to know who gets shot or kicked or raped, or even to know whether these abuses "really" happen. The only nagging problem is, somewhere out there, they do. The Wu-Tang Clan are contortionists who can escape the hardcore trap untouched and grinning. The rest of us should be so lucky.