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Interview with Jeff Chang, Activist, DJ, Label Owner And Journalist
Author Of 'Cant Stop Wont Stop' And Winner Of The American Book Award
Jeff Chang’s hip-hop prose is a key to demythologizing
a sonic movement who’s commercial existence swirls in
a white supremacist media miasma. The veteran music
journalist’s first book, “Cant Stop Wont Stop,” pulls a
fine intellectual rake through hip-hop’s history from
the standpoint of an activist, DJ, label owner and
journalist.
The origins of the MC battle, West Coast
hip-hop’s gang interaction and misogyny are a few of
the subjects within the culture that Chang explicates
in his modest but sharp writing style. Corporate
narratives that recast hip-hop’s significance as
temporal purchases co-signed by the machine and the
current tastemaker dissolve under the weight of
Chang’s pen. Hip-hop’s eternal drives are uncloaked
and the raw verve of the earliest dance/graffiti/dj/
collages appear on the pages from the viewpoint of an
invisible insider.
For starters, readers learn that
Kool Herc’s cross-pollination of his Jamaican roots
with his Bronx relocation cleared a path for the
hip-hop producer, the genre’s party atmosphere and
twisted the soundsystem raps into the fantastic
microphone check. These archives are unstuffed to
reveal a people’s history of hip-hop.
Chang’s passion to maintain hip-hop’s first ethos of
giving a voice to those not heard also lead him to
found Solesides Records, home to hip-hop specialists
Blackalicious, DJ Shadow and Lyrics Born. He has
written for numerous publications including URB, The
Village Voice and Vibe among others. Hip-hop ambushed his senses as a little boy and he has
been articulating his feelings about it for years.
The appeal of “Cant Stop Wont Stop” is educating diverse
groups of people about hip-hop’s history and its power
earned Chang an American Book Award. On his visit to
Ann Arbor’s University of Michigan to give a lecture
he took time to speak with me about his work, American
radio and the state of hip-hop journalism.
[Tamara Harris] Why another book about hip-hop?
Jeff Chang I’ve been writing about hip-hop since ’91 at the same
time I was a DJ and an activist, so all of those three
kind of came together. You know, over time I kind of
wanted this weird sort of tangential career path. At
different points I had run record labels. I’ve been a
community and labor organizer, and I had been a writer
as well like a journalist and an editor
and stuff, so with the book it all kind of came
together.
The idea was to kind of create a way to talk
about what had happened and the differences between
the civil rights generation and the hip-hop
generation. I had had a lot of sort of painful
debates and arguments with older folks about politics,
and I think “Cant Stop Wont Stop” was a way to say ‘look,
there’s a reason why our generation is the way it is. You down us all the time, but we in fact have a pretty
amazing and heroic type of history as well.’
[Tamara Harris] What have been the strengths and weaknesses of hip-hop
journalism?
Jeff Chang Hip-hop journalism didn’t come out of this sort of mutual objective ideal of journalism - it came out of
this idea of “we’re not being represented at all so we
need to go out and do it ourselves.” And so I think
that hip-hop journalism came from that same impulse
that drove a lot of the folks during the ‘80s to
create these great works of art, like Spike Lee or
Julie Dash or Public Enemy. All these different types
of folks didn’t see their stories being told, and so
they wanted to get out in the media and tell them.
I think that that’s one of the strengths of hip-hop
journalism.
I think what has been a weakness is
because we never had a lot of detachment. There’s not a
lot of self-critique about the fact that hip-hop
journalism has increasingly become celebrity
journalism and [is] falling into the same traps that
celebrity journalism falls into. This isn’t to say
that celebrity journalism can’t be enlightening about
questions of aesthetics and politics or any of that.
Obviously, folks have proven time and again that
celebrity journalism can ask larger questions. But
the sort of downfall of celebrity journalism is at its
worst it basically fetishizes the person, and I think
that that’s a part of what’s going on in popular
culture: the dumbing down of pop culture. We’re not
critical enough of that.
[Tamara Harris] How did it feel to win the American Book Award?
Jeff Chang It was really humbling. It was a big thing because the
American Book Award has actually been good about
hip-hop authors. They’ve given awards to Tricia Rose,
Nelson George and to be included on a list of those
kinds of folks, to meet Ishmael Reed, all these kinds of
things are like unbelievably humbling. The other thing
about it is I have to say my names’ on the jacket, but
hundreds of people wrote the book. I honestly felt
like this is a validation of all of their stories as
well which I was just a vehicle. The award was just
really. really cool in that sense. Kool Herc and Cindy
came out to receive the award with me and it was
definitely one of the highlights of the short life so
far.
[Tamara Harris] In the book you chronicle the end of dancing in hip-hop with the arrival of NWA. Has hip-hop danced at
all since then?
Jeff Chang Oh yeah, it’s all about dancing now. The last five
years, it’s been all about the dances. Jamaican
dancehall brought that back, but that was a welcome
thing. In the mid and late ‘90s there wasn’t a lot of
dancing in the music, and I think you start to see that
coming back like in recent years. There are people
that say people are dancing because they don’t want
rap talking about the war or about politics or that
kind of thing. But honestly, it’s something that I
never want to see leave hip-hop.
I was just talking in there about how often what happens in hip-hop history [and]
pop music history, generally you have these periods
where it’s all about dance crazes. Then they give way
to quote unquote serious music about messages and
about more the brain - this sort of mind body split, the
way that pop culture swings.
I was talking about the
Juvenile video and that whole kind of swing, and
[Hurricane] Katrina and what that’s done. I think it’ll be
interesting to see what happens in hip-hop out of
Katrina because the records will start getting
probably later this year. Juvenile’s record is
probably the first to capture that anger and rage that
is coming out of what we saw happen in New Orleans, so
I’m interested in seeing how that goes.
I wouldn’t
like to see people not dancing anymore, and I think
writing that particular part in the NWA section was
meant to be ominous, to show that, hey, for a lot of
folks it wasn’t fun anymore. You couldn’t go and
gather, you couldn’t go and celebrate, it was all about
the anger of it, the angst of it.
[Tamara Harris] Your book pays a lot of attention to context. Why the
focus on soci-political history than say the making of
particular albums or other aspects of hip-hop?
Jeff Chang That’s just who I am. Like I said, I’ve been an
activist, and DJ. My politics have always informed my aesthetics and my
aesthetics have always informed my politics. That’s
just the way I look at the world. I very much wanted a
book that just wasn’t going to be about rap music or
just about the four elements of hip-hop, but that was
gonna go into the context that the culture emerged
from as well as the content that came out of that
culture. There’s a lot of shifting back and forth from
content to context.
I think that in the end, I was more
interested in painting a portrait of a generation
than I was instead of doing a great man history, which
is what I think a lot of things end up being. It’s just
one way of looking at it, so many more stories that
haven’ t been told yet. In that sense, I’m really
humble about the fact that I was lucky enough to get
this opportunity
[Tamara Harris] As far as the merging of hip-hop and commerce, do you think that African-American culture has something
already built-in that makes it prone to branding?
Jeff Chang No, not necessarily, but I think what has happened is
hip-hop. I do take that back. This is what hip-hop
culture does; pop culture used to be about this
top-down thing where you would have folks at the top,
say, this year everybody is going to buy this it use to
be a real top-down thing. Then we had a couple of
seasons where hula hoops didn’t sell and people said
we want the Rubiks Cube, and these kind of phenomenons
grew out of nowhere and took over the entire country.
Hip-hop is that; hip-hop generates those phenomenons
that then takes over the country on a yearly basis.
Every year some kid somewhere is saying ‘I’m not going
to wear that anymore, I’m going to wear that.” Somebody
sits looking at him and says, “Wow that’s interesting.”
[Tamara Harris] What do you say to the people who say hip-hop is dead
because it only speaks to itself?
Jeff Chang Well, there are a lot of people who want to listen. And,
I think that it’s always been that way. I think in
order to go pop, hip-hop had to stop speaking to itself
to a certain extent. I write about “Rapper’s Delight”
and how it was a pop record that none of the pioneers
probably could have made. It had to be this no-name
group from New Jersey that came out with “Rapper’s
Delight” and blew through the roof with it because
most rappers at that time were thinking about their
club gigs on the weekend. And their routines were
geared toward the patrons that would be going to those
club gigs every weekend.
A lot of the early rap
records are just that these routines that are put onto
wax, and “Rapper’s Delight” did the neat trick of
having these stories that have a universal pitch to
them. These days, with hip-hop being such a rich global
style generator, it’s almost important for artists to
be obscure again, to speak to their own audiences
because there’s that element of voyeurism, quite
frankly, that pop culture allows.
A Young Jeezy is
popular. That’s not necessarily an experience people in
the suburbs have access to on a daily basis. They can
be voyeuristic. When you get somebody like E-40, that
has all this lingo that’s particular to the Bay Area,
people are intrigued they don’t know what it means. It
adds to the appeal of it.
I think that’s a lot of what
drives the fascination with hip-hop, why hip-hop is
such a powerful force. Because every once in a while
you get someone like a Ghostface Killah, that you have
to write down his rhymes line by line to figure out
what the hell he is talking abou,t and even then you
can’t.
[Tamara Harris] You wrote a piece last year on the death of the alt.
press. Between the selling of a paper like the Voice
and the mostly glossy magazines on the American
newsstand, how do you think those things affect and
will affect hip-hop journalism?
Jeff Chang Because alternative weeklies and hip-hop magazines in
general have shortened their word counts, what that
does is it doesn’t allow us sometimes to get the big
issues. You need the long form to really be able to
get deep into certain kinds of things. The longest
story in Vibe magazine now is not going to be more
than 2,300 words. That’s about 50 percent or less of
what the long form used to be.
Hip-Hop is an idea
generator. I’s something that’s like Tricia Rose put
it: it’s discursive, it’s the kind of thing where
people call and then there’s a response and out of
that, a really interesting dialogue can come about. So
I think that the demise of the long form in journalism
really has some serious effects on the way that folks
do it.
There is a preponderance of journalism that is
going to be about trying to sell stuff, whether that
be a new CD or a movie or a this or that. It’s not as
if we haven’t fallen into that trap already ... it’s been,
like, since the dawn of hip-hop journalism. It’s always
about the new record that’s coming out. The difference
is that it’s now going to be about the hundred words
that summarizes what the record sounds like or the
eight-hundred words that summarizes what the artist
wants to tell you about that. And what gets cut is
that dialogue, that interesting stuff all of those
ideas generated by these records, by these pieces of
theater, by these works of art. That’s a serious loss.
[Tamara Harris] How have the past few years and key events like 9/11,
Iraq, Katrina and oil affected hip-hop?
Jeff Chang There’s always a time-lag effect of the time it takes
to produce a record, but like with Katrina, we’re going
to start seeing this year the effects of that. Quite
frankly, I think the music is going to get a lot more
topical. I think it’s going to be lot more angry. I
think there’s going to be a very, very overt direct
reaction to it. It’s the same thing that happened with
the war immediately after 9/11. You would hear Wu-Tang
talking about Osama come in my neighborhood. Ghost
basically issue a challenge, this sort of idea of you
come in my neighborhood then we’ll take it to you.
As
time has gone on I think we’ve seen a shift to where a
lot more people are openly critical of the war. Jay-Z
had those lines about marching against Iraq in the
record by Punjabi MC. “Mosh” by Eminem and “Why” by
Jadakiss, and all of these other types of records came
from this changing sense of what the world was really
about where Bush was going with it.
The thing that I
think happens after these crises is a rush by the
media to kind of be like “9/11 happened, so why isn’t
any rapper making any records about the war?” or “Why
are they making reactionary records about the war?” My
answer is people just don’t understand the rhythms of
hip-hop. People don’t understand it takes a while for a
record to come out, for a rhyme to be made, for ideas to
crystallize.
But at the same time a lot of folks were
organizing benefits in the south that nobody wrote
about, that hip-hop journalists didn’t write about.
Thousands of people in the south organized at the drop
of a hat. People like David Banner and MTV [are] there, but
the hip-hop journalists weren’t. Thousands of folks
going down, just brigades of folks going down to the
gulf coast to help out, that’s what they’re not reading
about. We’re all focused on the next record that’s
coming out, on who’s going to be hot.
There is also a
way we have to take responsibility and lead sometimes.
So I give Elliot Wilson a lot of dapt for this because
Elliot put Juvenile on the cover. He wrote, I think, in
the next issue after that ‘We put Juvy on the cover
because it was the right thing to do but bottom line
is, it’s one of the worst-selling copies we’ve had.”
It’s a really interesting dilemma. I remember when
they put Juvy on the cover 4-5 years ago and the same
thing, which shows XXl, sells with East Coast rappers
on the cover. I understand that that’s part of what’s
going on here.
As a writer though, I’ve been frustrated
because there are fewer outlets for me nowadays to be
able to talk about the stuff I’m interested in talking
about then there were after 9/11. For two years I was
getting a lot assignments. People were kind of
interested in going there. And then after a while, it’s
like that sign in the Juvenile video “You Already
Forgot.” It’s like the media cycle turns and people
are not there to sustain it.
But that’s not to say
there’s not a demand for it. It’s just that most
people haven’t had any kind of faith to make that
work. For instance, there are a lot of now hip-hop talk
radio shows across the country that are extremely
popular. You got this cat Antwon Gun in North
Carolina, you got Davey D that does breakdown FM, you
got like Fidel Rodriguez in LA who does Divine Forces
Radio. You got Hard Knock Radio in Berkley. In New
York City you have WBAI. You have a lot of folks out
there who are using the airwaves to kind of put stuff
out, do what some folks consider to be
counter-programming the mass media portrayal of
hip-hop. But nobody wants to pick them up.
All of the
talk shows have are baby-boomer folks, older folks. And
respect to all of them, Tavis, Ed Gordon, respect to
all of them, but there are a lot my age who are not
being heard. That’s because people don’t want to take
a chance on people of color over 25. If you turn 30 in
America and you’re a person of color, you’re going to
feel like you’re going to be in a void for about 10-15
years unless you’re a baby-boomer. From the time
you’re 30 till you’re 45, there are not going to be any
radio shows for you. There may a couple of TV shows to
watch, The Wire. There’s no magazines directed at you.
It’s something people in media talk about all the time
nobody has anted up and said we’re going to take care
of these folks, and I guarantee if someone does it they
will make a lot of money. The oldies stations they
play like the Mary Jane Girls, Maze, they play ‘70s
stuff. That’s what happens with Black music in this
country. There are stations that will play alternative
rock these are oldies stations for the 30 to 45 age
group of folks who are white they’ll play Soundgarden,
Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana they’ll play all these
acts but they won’t do that for hip-hop.
I want a
station where I don’t have to listen to the latest act
they’re breaking all of the time. I think when Power
106 launched, they were doing some interesting stuff.
This is Power 106 in New York. They were mixing in old
school stuff in with new stuff, and they were testing
it out, try to go for a bit more of a demographic. But
they’ve since gone back because there’s no incentive
for them to maintain it. It was like we’re going to
bring you guys in and once we got our numbers up,
that’s where we’re gonna stay.
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