National trends '99

Two words: hip and hop

by Matt Ashare

A national trend in music? For the past year or so nobody's really been too puzzled about that. It's not like a couple of years ago when people were scratching their heads over electronica, wondering whether name-changing, faceless, pasty, knob-twiddling white boys on overseas ecstasy were really going to take over the American charts, and trying to figure out the difference between jungle and drum 'n' bass. And it's not even like a couple of years before that, when arguments about what happens when the underground becomes overexposed were so common, and we were all faced with the paradox of alternative music rapidly evolving into the dominant pop sound. No, the musical trend of the late '90s is easy to put your finger on and, at least on the surface, there's nothing terribly confusing about it. I'll give it to you in two words: hip and hop.

Yeah, hip-hop. And I'm not just saying that because the Beastie Boys were the top doggy dogs in this year's Best Music Poll, edging out Fugee Lauryn Hill for Best National Act, a category in which rock acts such as the third- and fourth-place R.E.M. and Pearl Jam really didn't have a prayer. Or because hip-hop's Hill dominated the Grammys, the charts, and just about every critics' poll I saw at the end of '98. Or because born-again glam rocker Marilyn Manson couldn't fill the Centrum after being on just about every magazine cover in the country, but Jay-Z and R. Kelly both got inside Boston city limits and sold out the FleetCenter. Or even because by Robert Christgau's count in his essay for this year's Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, New Orleans hoop-dreamer Master P landed 27 albums on Billboard's R&B chart, and almost as many in the top 200. Or because suddenly there are almost as many hip-hop magazines on the stands every month as women's magazines. Or because . . . well, I suppose I've made my point.

So yeah, hip-hop exploded commercially in '98, and things haven't slowed down in '99. Why that's happening is open to speculation, but my hunch is that it's got something to do with the rock industry's shooting itself in the foot. The great flood of so-called alternative rock from huge major labels in the mid-'90s had the same effect that you always get when goods are indiscriminately dumped into a market -- it devalued the product. Only, in this case, it wasn't the price of CDs that went down, because the record industry can and does keep CD prices as artificially high as they want. Instead, it was the metaphoric value of the music itself -- its artistic, rather than commercial, power -- that was adversely affected. Pop music, no matter how fleeting or ephemeral, relies on consumers who believe in that power. Take that away, and all you've got is a round piece of plastic with a hole in the middle.

Hip-hop, on the other hand, developed a different economic infrastructure in the '90s, one that's helped rationalize the sort of indiscriminate product-dumping that alternative fell prey to. For starters, it's always been commercial music. So whereas rock had a small, vaguely anti-capitalist indie underground that was largely swallowed up by giant major labels who cracked the alternative code, hip-hop emerged as a money-making wing of the mainstream record industry. Yeah, there are indie hip-hop labels, but that's not where the hits are coming from. Lauryn Hill? The Columbia-affiliated Ruffhouse. Outkast? The Arista-tied LaFace. Jay-Z? He's on Def Jam, which is part of the merged Universal-PolyGram label group. So the new rise of hip-hop hasn't required any fundamental structural shift in the industry, and the people who have always marketed hip-hop product -- specialists who know the quirks of the market -- are still in charge.

More important, hip-hop has a built-in mechanism for introducing new artists, and for setting up the release of a debut album, that's hard to beat. Long before Ma$e put his own album out, he was a protégé guesting on his mentor Puff Daddy's multi-platinum disc, which itself had already been artfully positioned by Puffy's involvement with the Notorious B.I.G.'s multi-platinum swan song, and so on. There isn't a rapper among the 27 who scored hits on the Billboard R&B chart from Master P's No Limit crew who hadn't already had at least a couple of cameos on an earlier No Limit blockbuster. So new artists are rarely simply dumped indiscriminately into the expanding hip-hop market. They're introduced gradually. The closest thing you'll find in rock is the artist vanity imprint. (How many of you really remember the name of the band that put out a CD on Tori Amos's Atlantic imprint? E-mail me the answer and you'll get a gold star.) Or maybe the opening slot on a big tour, which, looking on the bright side, usually means playing to a half-full hall of people who'd rather be seeing the headliner.

But, hey, that's all just a hunch. And it's beside the point in a poll where the Beastie Boys, the most rockist multi-platinum rappers there ever were, still dominate the hip-hop category. Not that there's anything wrong with the Beasties, or that they didn't deserve to win. Fact is, Hello Nasty (Grand Royal/Capitol) was easily one of the best rap albums of '98, and the Beasties are more hip-hop in the three-MCs-and-one-DJ sense of the word than Lauryn Hill will ever be. Hill's got some hip-hop pedigree, but her Miseducation put on such a convincing soul-sista act that she owned this year's R&B/Soul category. The Beasties, though, because they're white upper-middle-class punks with undergraduate degrees and style for miles, because they've played funk and punk and hip-hop, and because they've got David Bowie's old talent of zeroing in on a trend just before it breaks (they are the ultimate cool-hunters of the '90s), are where the zeit meets the geist. Hip-hop artists can sell as many albums as they want to hip-hop people (and I don't mean that as a racial distinction), but unless hip-hop people are the only people (and they're not), the story is the same as it's always been. The real measure of hip-hop's dominance, or of the trend toward it -- the plot thickener, so to speak -- lies between the hip and the hop, among the fans (and now skin color is starting to matter) who like DMX but love the Beasties, in BMP categories like Best New Act and Best Loud Act.

So let's take a close look at the list. For New Act we've got someone old enough to have had his first heart attack. But, dammit, if Hill can be considered a new artist in Grammy parlance after going multi-platinum with the Fugees and releasing a solo album that would have been money in the bank one way or another, then nearly-forgotten former House of Pain dude Everlast shouldn't be considered out-of-place at the top of our New Act list. And how did he do it? By reinventing himself as, I dunno, Johnny Cash with a boom box, Elliott Smith with biceps and beats, Mike Ness with a DJ. Something like that. And then there's Best Male Vocalist Beck, who left his beatbox at home and mutated into a '60s pop dude for a change in '98. But where would Beck be without two turntables and a microphone? And the loudest of the Loud Acts -- a category we might as well change back to "Metal" now that alternative has blown over -- is, of course, those Rodney Dangerfielding suburban California dudes in hip-hop duds who were kind enough to give props to Ice Cube by inviting the irrelevant rapper along on their Family Values field trip. Yeah, Korn, who get no respect from us critics because they're sexist or homophobic or something (even though DMX, for example, ain't no angel when it comes to gals or gay-baiting), but probably just because they're metal and that's just not the kind of music that's ever gotten most critics off. As for the category that just refuses to go away -- Electronica/DJ -- it finally had a breakthrough year in the guise of our old pal from the Housemartins, Norman Cook. Yeah, Norman cooked up a couple of hits by reinventing himself as Fatboy Slim and reinventing electronica (what an awful word) as Big Beat, a sampling subgenre that sounds suspiciously like what the Clash were doing back when they discovered Grand Master Flash and made "Radio Clash" -- in other words, rockist hip-hop. Hell, even this year's folk winner, Ani DiFranco (sorry Wilco, sorry Billy, sorry Lucinda), hasn't been immune to the appeal of the beat sciences.

And therein lies the real story. Hip-hop is now everywhere -- in folk, in rock, in metal, in pop. Of course, there are aberrations: Lilith Fair won Best National Tour (though I do remember seeing Paula Cole do her rap shtick on the Lilith stage); Garbage made an undeniably great pop album that's more '80s New Wave than anything else; and Tori Amos is, well, Tori Amos, a singular artist in a multiple-choice world. And it isn't like alternative, which had so much to do with that elusive thing we call attitude and so little relation to any identifiable sound. It's a musical style that can be broken down into its various elements and pieced back together in countless ways, adopted, adapted, and appropriated. Sure, there are hip-hop subcultures in which attitude is every bit as important as or inseparable from sound, but hip-hop exists musically apart from subcultures in a way that alternative never could. Of course, I'm not trying to suggest that we're all going to be listening to hip-hop a month, a year, or even a decade from now, only that the different new musics we're all listening to have more of a hip-hop flavor than they used to. Maybe that will help heal the great racial divide in our country, which would be cool. Or maybe the white kids growing up today with their Wu Wear and DMX albums will just develop a different set of racial stereotypes. I'll leave that to the sociologists to explore. In music, the tone and tempo may change from time to time, but the beat, as always, goes on.