Washington Post Book Reviews
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Saturday January 22, 2011
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THE BIG PAYBACK: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop
THE BIG PAYBACK: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop Dan Charnas
New American Library
ISBN 978-0451229298
660 pages
$24.95
THE ANTHOLOGY OF RAPAdam Bradley and Andrew DuBois
Yale Univ
ISBN 978-0300141900
867 pages
$35
Reviewed by Aaron Leitko
Whether you're talking jazz, disco or rock 'n' roll, in American music rags-to-riches is the ruling narrative. But if the record industry has one truly Horatio Alger-worthy tale to tell, it's the ascent of hip-hop.
Over the last 30 years rap music has risen from the street corners of New York City to become a global million-dollar culture machine. The visionary art was only part of it. Hip-hop also needed a few good salesmen. In "The Big Payback," Dan Charnas, a former talent scout man for Profile Records and a writer for the rap music and culture magazine "The Source," chronicles the history of hip-hop as told by the record company executives, radio programmers and magazine moguls who helped guide the genre from urban subculture to mass-market behemoth.
Hip-hop should not have needed so much promotion. Its commercial appeal was evident from the get-go. Sales of the Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 single "Rapper's Delight," rap's first breakthrough hit, tallied in the millions. But the mainstream was slow to catch on. Even as late as 1991, major radio stations, even black-owned ones, were openly hostile to the genre. "The slogans were great," writes Charnas. "'No rap and no hard rock' (B104 in Baltimore). 'No kids, no rap, no crap' (KHMX in Houston). WBMX in Boston aired a TV spot that featured gold chains being pulled out of a radio while the announcer said, 'No rap!'" Charnas digs up true believers who helped break the embargo. Some were regional personalities -- radio executives like Greggory Macmillan of Los Angeles' KDAY and Keith Naftaly, program director of San Francisco's KMEL, who made a point of making their stations hip-hop friendly. Others, like Ted Demme, who produced the groundbreaking hour-long music video block "Yo! MTV Raps," will be familiar to anybody who spent the late '80s with a remote control in her hand.
But hip-hop had the potential to sell more than just records. Rappers, unlike rock stars, could pick up endorsement deals without being cast as total sellouts. The Fat Boys inked a deal with a Swiss watch company and helped make Swatch synonymous with the '80s. Run-DMC wrote "My Adidas." During the '90s, New York City-based rap crew the Wu Tang Clan took things a step further -- founding a Wu-Wear clothing line that was marketed directly to fans via catalogs included with the album art. "Wu Tang became the first group in hip-hop," Charnas writes, "perhaps in all of pop music, to not only launch themselves as a successful American brand outside of the entertainment industry, but to own that brand."
At 600-plus pages, "The Big Payback" is a doorstop. Charnas opens with Alexander Hamilton and closes with rapper-cum-label-president-cum-clothing-impresario Jay-Z inducting hip-hop originators Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five 2007 into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Charnas catches the business in its infancy -- when future moguls struggled to deal with the day-to-day busywork of running a record label. Some of them had a long way to climb. Charnas recalls Bill Stephney, an early employee of Def Jam records, who called the label "the combined work experience of ten days at an Orange Julius." The juice-pumping gig had been label-founder Russell Simmons' only pre-Def Jam employment. Co-founder Rick Rubin couldn't even claim that on his resume.
In maturity, rap music achieved the power to annoy major corporations -- the scandal surrounding "Cop Killer," a song by rapper Ice-T's heavy metal band, Body Count, spurred a national boycott of Time Warner, the label's parent company. "I got my 12 gauge sawed off, I got headlights turned off, I'm about to bust some shots off, I'm about to dust some cops off," shouted Ice-T over screeching guitars.
"Cop Killer" is a rock song, though, and Ice-T sings the lyrics instead of rapping them. That distinction is enough to keep the song out of "The Anthology of Rap," though the volume does include some of the MC's more traditional rhymes. The book compiles important verses drawn from throughout hip-hop's history. It's strange to see the lyrics printed on Bible-grade paper and placed in an academic context, but leafing through the book, one can get a sense of how rapidly the genre evolved. "Now if your name is Annie get up off your fannie/ if your name is Clyde get off your back side," rhymed Kurtis Blow in the 1980 song "Rappin Blow (Part 2)." Thirty years later, hip-hop language is a little more po-mo. "I walk right in hip-hop like, 'where my dinner be at?' I ate that and was like, 'Where my dinner be at?'" raps Lil Wayne on "Live from the 504," from a 2007 mixtape.
There's plenty of room for serious study.
"The Big Payback" may be a book that favors desk-jockeys over disc jockeys, but Charnas doesn't shortchange the passion that both parties poured into hip-hop. The music united as often as it divided -- inspiring artists and entrepreneurs to set aside class and race differences. While studying at Harvard, Jon Shecter, founder of "The Source," brought rapper KRS-One to campus to speak in a panel discussion. When the floor opened for questions, some black students tried to take Shecter down a peg.
From their perspective, a white guy had no business running a hip-hop magazine. "KRS-One had the power, in that moment, to make or break the reputation of the magazine," writes Charnas. The rapper backed Shecter up: "If you think you can do better, outdo them."
Aaron Leitko is a writer in Washington, D.C., whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Pitchfork, Washington City Paper and in "Best Music Writing 2010." He can be reached at leitkoa(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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CHINABERRY SIDEWALKS
Rodney Crowell
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307594204
259 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Rodney Crowell's memoir of his boyhood in southeast Texas is a wonder: wistful and profane, heartbreaking and hilarious, loving and angry, proud and self-lacerating. Best known as a composer and performer of country and folk music, that can be characterized AS in any number of ways, most of which can be traced to country and folk, Crowell emerges here as a prose stylist of energy and distinctiveness, a gifted storyteller who has, as it happens, an uncommonly interesting and deeply American story to tell.
There's a coincidence here that can't go unmentioned. Between 1979 and 1992 Crowell was married to Rosanne Cash, herself a composer and singer of talent and accomplishment who is, of course, the daughter of Johnny Cash. The marriage ended in what he calls "our selfishly amicable and thoroughly modern divorce." "Ultimately," she says, "we both had to grow up, and we recognized that we couldn't do it together." But they've remained friendly, perform together from time to time, and now are authors of two of the loveliest memoirs to come my way in recent years. Her "Composed" was published last year, and now we have his "Chinaberry Sidewalks."
The chinaberry is a warm-weather shade tree that was brought to the United States a couple of centuries ago and has flourished in the South. It doesn't appear to have any particular aesthetic or botanical distinction, but in the spring of 1958, when Crowell was 8 years old, his mother, Cauzette Crowell, planted three chinaberries along the sidewalk in front of their house in Jacinto City, a "white-trash garden spot" a few miles due east of Houston. "Lacking imagination to match our industriousness,"
Crowell writes, "my mother and I named the trees J.W., Cauzette, and Rodney. Perhaps it was the intoxication of accomplishment that prompted us to christen the trees with our own names, or maybe the trees symbolized for the two of us a new chapter in our family history, in which case we wanted our names displayed front and center. Either way, our buoyancy was short-lived."
That was scarcely surprising, given that buoyancy -- or any other form of happiness -- was an infrequent visitor to the house on Norvic Street or any of the other shacks the Crowells lived in during Rodney's youth. J.R. and Cauzette waged an "ongoing war of hard words and physical abuse," struggled against a "crippling sense of disentitlement," and "his tendency toward unsubstantiated cockiness and her pinprick precision in delivering the right words at the wrong time (made) them doubly vulnerable to the bubble-bursting rifts that distinguish their marriage."
Married in Indiana in 1942, J.W. and Cauzette made their way to Texas and somehow managed "to go from a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor to the threshold of some spiffy new cracker-box palace in twelve short years," in a housing development of "cookie-cutter bungalows whose poor workmanship, lack of imagination, and cheap material destined them for an early demise."
All the more so in the Crowells' case:
"Among the more crippling side effects of my parents' disentitlement was a dirt-poor sense of themselves that made them far better suited for the maintenance of property not their own -- particularly my father, whose mathematical wizardry and carpentry skills emerged only when he was employed by a third party, preferably at below minimum wage."
The $6,000 house, "essentially a tarpaper shack," steadily became a wreck, especially when Hurricane Carla thundered through in 1961. Holes appeared in the roof, but J.W. declined to fix them, "holding the opinion that a cooking pan and a wash pot -- or three cooking pans and a bucket -- were a better solution to a leaking roof than needless repair." In the kitchen, "sheetrock hung from the ... ceiling like papier-mache stalactites." All of which just made it easier for southeast Texas' mosquitoes and cockroaches to gain entry, which they did in hordes.
J.W. Crowell was a singular character. He drank as least as much as he worked, and when he was drunk he could be anything from sentimental to abusive.
He "craved attention and preened after every ooh and aah he ever got." There was a "thin line between his heartless insensitivity and harmless self-absorption." And: "His Don Quixote commitment to harebrained notions was one of the things I loved most about him."
As for Cauzette, her "switches from Pentecostal purist to beer-guzzling shrew" were a source of astonishment to her son, as were the endless afflictions life visited upon her, among them -- during her early years -- "polio, acute dyslexia, epilepsy, the sudden death of an infant son, and a subsequent case of whacked-out nerves." She dragged Rodney to church every Sunday:
"Hating these holy-rolling, speaking-in-unknown-tongues free-for-alls she loves so well, I do my best to make the trip more miserable than it already is. It's a testament to her faith in an angry and kind and vengeful and loving God that she sees this two-mile slog with her son kicking and screaming as a small price to pay for salvation."
It's a measure of the subtlety that Crowell brings to his portrait of his parents that he simultaneously is appalled by them and deeply loves them. After setting forth chapter and verse about his father's failings and failures, he stops to say: "By now I hope it's clear that apart from his manhandling my mother, I idolized my father and had learned at an early age to view his fragile self-imaginings with bemused detachment." Coming to terms with his mother took longer, in large part because of his distaste for her fevered religiosity, but after his father's death at age 65 -- "Call it maudlin, manipulative, or simpleminded, but as I see it he died of a broken heart" -- she became close to him and was adored by his daughters. The book's last two chapters, in which he describes each of his parent's last days, are deeply moving and filled with love.
Love, in the end, is what "Chinaberry Sidewalks" is really about. "As a boy my favorite place in the world was my grandmother's apron-covered lap," Crowell writes. "Rocking on her lap and listening (on the radio) to a live Carter Family performance, I remember knowing for the first time that I was loved. In time I came to understand the nature of her love as being part of an even greater love, one that loved my grandmother for loving me." Later, there was a shoe-shine man known as Spit-Shine Charlie, who befriended the boy and showed him another kind of love. His grandmother and Charlie died "within a year and a half of each other." Crowell continues:
"Their deaths triggered a prolonged period of muted loneliness that lasted until the birth of my children. And with the arrival of each of my daughters, the ability to love without expectation came bubbling slowly from the forgotten depths of who I was when I first crawled up in my grandmother's lap. Thanks to the abused wife of a sharecrop farmer, a crippled shoeshine man, and four little girls, I was able to emerge from the dark forest of an angry heart into the light of love that will forever exist between my parents and me."
This is the emotional and thematic core of "Chinaberry Sidewalks," but there is much more to it, much of it uproarious or moving in different ways: boisterous small-town boys making mischief, Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns with cuss words added; seeing and hearing Hank Williams two weeks before his death; a spectacular show by Jerry Lee Lewis ("Raw sexual energy and death-defying audacity"), followed immediately by an unforgettable one by Johnny Cash, who "spoke the language of common people with uncommon eloquence." That, of course, is exactly what Rodney Crowell has done in this splendid book.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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