Two Turntables and a Social Movement: Writing Hip-Hop at Century's End

Hip Hop America By Nelson George Viking, 1998

The VIBE History of Hip Hop Edited by Alan Light Three Rivers Press, 1999

The Dying Ground: A Hip-Hop Noir Novel By Nichelle D. Tramble Villard, 2001

Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema By S. Craig Watkins University of Chicago Press, 1998

In the eighties, when I was growing up in Los Angeles, Cal Worthington was the most famous car salesman in all of Southern California. His television commercials for his Long Beach car lot always presented him in the same way: dressed in a two-piece suit, cowboy hat on his head, and twanging—in a dusty drawl that sounded imported direct from Dallas—"This is Cal Worthington and my dog Spot" while he wrestled with tigers on the hoods of Mustangs and promised slashed prices and bad credit sympathies. White, Southern, country, and goofy, Worthington was local TV's reigning pop icon of working-class white suburbia.

After disappearing from the airwaves for most of the nineties, Worthington has finally returned. Now, though, his spots are running on radio, on The Beat, one of LA's leading hip-hop and R&B stations. In between Nelly and Snoop is Worthington 2001 style. It's the same voice, the same country accent, the same banjo plucking away behind him, the same white car dealer in the same white cowboy hat on the same lot off the 405 freeway, but now Worthington calls Long Beach "The LBC" and talks about car prices that are "the bomb." We all have our ways of registering just how significant hip-hop's impact on mainstream US culture has been and for me this was it: something is definitely up when even Cal Worthington of Worthington Ford has gone hip-hop.

The hip-hopification of Worthington is, of course, about little more than chasing market trends and profit margins (if polka was dominating the Billboard charts, Worthington would be playing an accordion on top of a beer barrel). Nevertheless, that it is hip-hop that has been internationally recognized as a dominant commercial force, the commercial idiom with which one must become fluent in order to sell products, is the point here. It could be anything else, but it's not: at the turn of the twentieth century, US popular culture has become nearly synonymous with hip-hop culture, or at least a commercialized and commodity-ready version of what was laid out as hip-hop culture in the late seventies and early eighties.

Hip-hop has changed the way radio-ready pop sounds (listen to the rhythm tracks that hold up *NSYNC and Britney Spears), changed the way TV advertising works (witness Sprite's glossy campaign featuring rap artists like Busta Rhymes and its more underground campaign, which features unknown freestyling rap MCs culled from the street corner), and further confused the racialist logics of Billboard sales charts by consistently landing hip-hop albums on the Top Ten charts above rock and pop releases. The impact has of course become increasingly global as well: it has left its mark on local music scenes from Tokyo to Johannesburg to Mexico City, impacted fashion trends across the world, and is guaranteed to occupy a prime spot on the new release shelf of any major chain store. When I recently was in Hong Kong—where Jay-Z's new album was being hyped alongside the new solo album from Wong Kar-Wai acting phenom Tony Leung—a cab driver complained to me that the English his daughter was learning was not the Queen's English that he had learned. "What English does she speak?" I asked. "Ice Cube," he answered. ¹

The great change is that hip-hop has gone from being a cumulative inter-American, Afro-Caribbean product of Reaganomic violence on US inner cities, the booming crack trade, and massive deindustrialization...