Jason Tanz is a senior editor at Fortune Small Business. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Fortune, Spin, and Time Out New York, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Other People’s Property

By Jason Tanz

Bloomsbury USA

Copyright © 2007 Jason Tanz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59691-273-1

Chapter One

White Like Me: An Introduction

German klezmer may be evolving into the ground for a sort of proxy dialogue, a process through which Germans address not Jews, who largely avoid the concerts, but other Germans about their common past and their relationship to a Yiddish world that was destroyed. How far that dialogue progresses will probably depend on the willingness of the musicians and audiences to probe beyond the surface of the music, rather than merely contenting themselves with the feel-good “Jewish” flavor that the genre can provide … “The assumption that you can overcome history by using culture or music is just wrong,” [the German clarinettist Christian Dawid] said. –Jeremy Eichler, “Klezmer’s Final Frontier” New York Times, August 29, 2004

I have been called “nigga” at least once a week for the past fifteen years of my life. Black people have threatened me with murder and rape, and invited me to family barbecues. They’ve brought me along to witness church ceremonies, marriage proposals, weddings, births, and suicides. They have greeted me as a brother and shunned me as an intruder. But none of these interactions took place in the physical world. They all occurred in the fantasy realm of rap music.

Most paeans to hip-hop begin with an epiphany, the moment the author first hears rap’s booming beats, chaotic samples, and street poetry, and falls instantly in love. When I first heard rap music-blasting from the tinny speakers of a boom box that a scrawny black kid had smuggled on to my school bus-I was terrified. I don’t recall the song or the year, but I can remember the deep-throated machismo and apocalyptic drums that muscled their way down my hot-pink ear canal. Had I grown up in the swaggering alleys of New York or the blas cloverleafs of Los Angeles, perhaps I would have been better prepared for rap’s naked aggression and in-your-face racial provocation. Instead, I was raised in the piney suburbs of Tacoma, Washington, where rough-hewn musical depictions of ghetto struggles seemed as hypothetical and threatening as an extraterrestrial invasion.

From such inauspicious beginnings was a lifelong obsession born. I have now listened to rap music for half of my life; have purchased hundreds of tapes, CDs, and MP3s; have spent countless hours decoding lyrics, waiting in line for underwhelming concerts, and-yes-recording my own rap songs. Hip-hop has been an undeniable force in my life, influencing my personal relationships, my politics, my worldview, and my self-image. Picturing my life without rap music is like imagining who I’d be if my parents had never met. And, to paraphrase Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady,” there are millions of people just like me. In October 2003, rap and rhythm-and-blues artists held every spot on Billboard‘s Top 10 singles chart. Later that year, seven of the ten Grammy nominations for song and album of the year went to hip-hop or hip-hop-inflected R&B acts. In 2005, the two top entrants on Billboard‘s year-end Top 200 artists list were both rappers. An oft-repeated mantra is no less true for its ubiquity: rap is my generation’s rock and roll. We introduce our children to A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory or Nas’s Illmatic with the same reverence and wistfulness with which baby boomers view Blonde on Blonde.

The story of how suburbanites like me fell in love with hip-hop culture has all the makings of a blockbuster Hollywood romance in which two crazy kids from different sides of the tracks face down parental disapproval and fall desperately in love. Rap music was born in the cauldron of the South Bronx in the 1970s, a time when urban policies with such Orwellian names as “benign neglect” and “urban renewal” had turned the neighborhood into a haven for roving street gangs. I, on the other hand, grew up playing kickball in the street, setting up a lemonade stand with my next-door neighbor, and riding my bicycle to the candy store across town for Pop Rocks and jawbreakers. But despite our differences, today hip-hop and I have grown inseparable, together forever. Love conquers all.

It’s a great story, one I’ve told myself many times. But of course movie romances are not realistic, and the relationship between hip-hop and white America is not that seamless or uncomplicated. Instead, like all relationships, it is fraught with historical resonances and moments of mistrust and unease. As Tricia Rose, a professor of American Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, writes, “Young white listeners’ genuine pleasure and commitment to black music are necessarily affected by dominant racial discourses regarding African Americans, the politics of racial segregation, and cultural differences in the United States.” In other words, we don’t consume hip-hop in a vacuum. When we listen to black music, we are doing more than just listening to music. We are participating in a moment that is informed by centuries of racial history. Nor are we passive consumers; as with jazz, or rock, or soul, our listening becomes a part of the hip-hop phenomenon, changing its context and meaning. Call it the hip-hop Heisenberg uncertainty principle: every time we observe hip-hop, we change that which we are observing.

That’s why the loose amalgamation of listeners, artists, and producers known as the “hip-hop community” has zealously guarded hip-hop’s borders throughout its history, trying to preserve the music and culture’s power as a unique vehicle of black expression. That’s also why many fans are so quick to cluck their tongues at the current state of hip-hop-a commercialized, homogenized pop-music form-and declare it dead. And as the white audience for rap has grown over the decades, so has the anxiety in some circles over its corrupting influence. Today, some embittered hip-hop fans want to wrest the means of production from white-run corporations. “[H]istory repeats itself,” concludes an essay by Minister Paul Scott that appeared in the Final Call, the official newspaper of the Nation of Islam. “The slaves fight one another while the slave master laughs all the way to the bank.” In 2003, the Source, a magazine that has long been the bible of hip-hop journalism, declared war on Eminem. The publication had championed the rapper before, but now it argued that his success represented the front line in a battle between rap purists and interloping white co-opters. “We’ve got to remember where we came from,” David Mays, the Source‘s cofounder, summed up the argument. “We’ve got to remember the history and the struggle and the culture.” (The fact that Mays himself is a white Harvard graduate is emblematic of the kinds of racial complications that are common in the world of hip-hop.)

It is easy to see why the specter of white folks dabbling in hip-hop culture might raise some hackles: we tend to colonize whatever we touch. In 1923 the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes declared that jazz would never grow into a true art form until white musicians took it away from black artists. Twelve years later, America had crowned Benny Goodman the King of Swing. As Nelson George writes in his Death of Rhythm and Blues, white jazz stations refused to hire black on-air personalities, although they occasionally enlisted a few African Americans to help the white DJs craft more authentic patter. And then there is rock and roll, the epitome of cultural theft. Fifty years after Elvis brought his hip-swiveling to the American public, the music that Chuck Berry and Little Richard created is primarily the domain of white performers and audiences. Small wonder, then, that the prospect of white-bread rap fans is almost as offensive to many culture cops as cork-faced minstrelsy was to an earlier generation. Once you go white, you never go back.

And it is not only the hip-hop community that has qualms: plenty of white critics seem to think there’s something, well, improper about the enthusiasm of suburban white hip-hop fans. The video for the surf-punk band the Offspring’s 1998 song “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” shows a blond twerp in baggy clothes; the song’s lyrics describe the wannabe as clueless and mired in denial. Television viewers laugh at Ali G, a buffoonish character created by the white British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, for clinging to his hip-hop-inspired wardrobe and incomprehensible speech patterns as a way to mask his staggering cluelessness.

Still, not everyone thinks that white hip-hop fans should be discouraged. “White folks tend to worry about this in a way that seems curious,” says Bill Adler, the white man who served as the original director of publicity for Def Jam, the groundbreaking rap label, from 1984 to 1990. He has worked with the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and Run-DMC, among others, and produced and wrote a five-part documentary series on hip-hop history for VH1. “This whole idea that ‘I’m white, so I guess I can’t like something that’s black’ seems slightly retarded to me,” he says. He sees hip-hop as a way to break down such false distinctions. “I believe that the average white kid is going to be cooler about these questions of race. In effect, he is going to be less racist than his parents because of hip-hop.”

It may seem odd that, decades after Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, and Motown, the prospect of popular black music could still fill white Americans with such fear and promise. But there has never been a music quite like hip-hop. Despite its mainstream popularity, and despite its vast white fan base, hip-hop’s underlying theme has never shifted: the celebration and documentation of the lives of black Americans. How can a generation of kids raised on explicit musical tales of black people’s triumphs and misfortunes not feel differently about race than their parents do?

To judge by surveys, hip-hop’s rise has coincided with an unprecedented improvement in American race relations. A poll taken by the New York Times in 2000 found that 57 percent of all Americans described race relations as “generally good,” up 16 points from 1990; 63 percent of whites said they favored interracial marriage, up from 44 percent nine years earlier; 93 percent of whites said they would vote for a qualified black presidential candidate; and 85 percent of whites said they did not care whether their neighbors were white or black. (It is impossible to know how much of this attitudinal shift can be credited to hip-hop, and how much is the function of a healthy economy, low crime rates, the country’s changing demographics, and other factors.) But despite our seemingly universal desire to live in an integrated world, in fact we still do not. The New York Times poll found that 85 percent of white respondents-the same percentage who said they did not care what color their neighbors were-lived in areas with few or no black neighbors. According to the U.S. Census, the American population is 13 percent black and 67 percent white. But a study by Harvard’s Civil Rights Project found that the average white public school student attends schools that are 78 percent white and only 9 percent black; the average black student attends schools that are 30 percent white and 53 percent black. Between 1991 and 2003, the percentage of black public school students attending majority nonwhite schools rose from 66 percent to 73 percent. The Lewis Mumford Center at SUNY-Albany has reported that the average white American lives in a neighborhood in which 80 percent of residents are white and only 7 percent are black, while the average black person lives in a neighborhood that is 33 percent white and 51 percent black.

I want to use hip-hop as a lens to explore this distance between what our ideals tell us we are and what our lives show us that we are. “Yeah, hip-hop has brought people closer together, but so has McDonald’s,” a hip-hop journalist, Gabriel Alvarez, says. “It’s easy for everybody to say, ‘Hey, this is great music. Let’s enjoy it together.’ I don’t think hip-hop has made people sit down and have discussions.” The history of hip-hop’s spread through the suburbs is the story of what happens when one of our most deeply held fables-America as color-blind melting pot where we can all just get along-is contradicted by unrelenting reality.

Why do so many white kids love hip-hop so much? Does our appreciation foment understanding and communication, or reinforce stereotypes and substitute a cheap commercial transaction for significant cultural exchange? How has our consumption of rap influenced the music itself, and the communities from which it springs? These are all just polite ways of asking the Big Question, what we really are talking about when we talk about hip-hop: Can we live together? Or are the combined forces of history and our own weaknesses just too strong? Hip-hop’s trajectory through white America is really the continuing story of the complicated legacy of race in our country, of the forces that pull us together even as they pull us apart.

To write this book, I traveled across the country to talk to a wide array of hip-hop-loving white kids, trying to nail down where their fandom comes from and what it means. But here’s a tougher question to answer: Why has hip-hop been so attractive to me? Every journey starts at home, as they say. And before I headed out on the road, it seemed only fair to turn my microscope on myself, to try to examine my own life for its racial subtext, to try to understand my own obsession with hip-hop and black culture.

I can’t rule out simple genetics. As much as I love hip-hop, my grandfather loved jazz even more. I never met my mother’s father-he died when I was young-but from what I can piece together, he was not a very good guy. He was an alcoholic and abusive and a deadbeat and probably brilliant, in the way that guys whose minds are too cranked to hold down a job are often said to be brilliant. In 1956, he left my grandmother with three young children and no source of income (not that he had ever provided much of one anyway). It’s tempting to say that my grandfather didn’t love anything outside himself, but that’s not entirely true: he loved jazz. I don’t know whether he smoked reefer or played the bongos or wrote poetry like the era’s Beats, but I do know that he followed Duke Ellington the way future generations of hackey-sackers would trail the Grateful Dead. According to my grandmother’s (perhaps embellished) recollections, the admiration was mutual. Three weeks before graduating from the University of Chicago, the story goes, my grandfather dropped out of college to tour with Ellington as a paid hanger-on. In later years, Ellington and his musicians would stop in at my grandparents’ whenever they passed through Indianapolis. Billy Strayhorn once helped bathe my uncle Michael when he was a baby.

I don’t know if my grandfather was drawn to blackness for the same reasons as the narrator of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, who put his ear up to his black girlfriend’s belly and “listened to the rumbling underground.” But that’s a pretty fair description of the function that my grandfather played in my life, his legend providing a dull, growling counterpart to the bland safety of my childhood. My mother, seeking escape from the tumult that defined her youth, raised my sister and me with a deep aversion to conflict and a theory of interpersonal relationships that mirrored my surgeon-father’s Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. Despite spending the summer of 1968 in Berkeley, my parents made it through that decade with minimal drug experimentation, zero race rioting, and (as far as I know) a complete absence of free love. They suffered through a stint in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s until my father finished his medical residency in 1980. We fled to Tacoma, where my parents found a home at the end of a cul-de-sac and converted the downstairs bar into a shelving unit for our board games. On the rare occasions when my sister and I fought, my mother wouldn’t yell at us; she’d get teary-eyed, which was infinitely worse. To me-a walking-on-eggshells, consensus-seeking, eager-to-please kid-my scotch-swigging, Negro-loving, self-immolating grandfather became a mythic figure.

My parents’ lifestyle was echoed in their musical taste. I was not raised on the complex cacophony of bebop or the angry provocation of the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” or Jefferson Airplane’s countercultural experimentation or Jimi Hendrix’s whammy-barring or James Brown’s sweaty exhortations of racial pride, but on the acoustic strummings and canned righteousness of easy-listening folkies like Judy Collins and Joan Baez, soft-voiced chanteuses who to my mind seemed to believe that the world could be cured and racial divisions healed if we all behaved just a little more … gently.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Other People’s Propertyby Jason Tanz Copyright © 2007 by Jason Tanz . Excerpted by permission.
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