JEFF CHANG
The author on the healing power of hip-hop, facing Ice Cube, black-Asian relations, and the era of S
Jeff Chang's just-released book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, weaves a good slice of its narrative through the mean streets of Los Angeles, where he spent three years getting a master's degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA in the first half of the '90s while also working for URB magazine and contributing to Rap Pages and L.A. Weekly. His book tells the overlooked back-story of the culture, using the headlines of the '70s, '80s, and '90s as a reflecting pond for the waves of disenfranchised youth who would turn to rapping, break-dancing, and graffiti for salvation and self-realization. Like urban historian Mike Davis, who theorized that Southern California's "architecture of control" and Ecology of Fear shaped its being, Chang deftly places the hard concrete of the Bronx's "politics of abandonment," the racial evil of Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, and the ugly ethnic and underclass "uprisings" of Los Angeles in 1992 against the music that was clearly going with the flow. It took him about four years to write the book. Chang, a 37-year-old father of two, dug into more than a decade's worth of notes, re-interviewed subjects, and met up with people who were seminal in the history of hip-hop. He has contributed to The Village Voice, Vibe, Spin, The Nation, Mother Jones, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, and other publications. He also runs a longstanding indie hip-hop label, Quannum Projects, which helped launch the careers of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, and Lyrics Born. Raised in Hawaii, Chang now lives in the Bay Area.
CityBeat: How has mainstream media coverage of hip-hop changed over the years?
Jeff Chang: It's a lot more thorough. It has to do with folks like us getting up in there and being able to write about the stuff with almost a critical-insider perspective. A lot of the good stuff isn't necessarily in hip-hop magazines anymore. A lot of it's in the mainstream press. Maybe it says a lot about how hip-hop mags have moved. They're a lot less free-spirited.
Did you do a lot of research for the book, or did you jump into your old notebooks?
I did a lot of original research. I was primarily a West Coast journalist, so getting the interviews with the pioneers of New York was something I spent a lot of the last four years doing. As well, I did a lot of research on the history of New York City, and the Bronx in particular. A lot of other stuff I had to go back and relearn and re-research.
In the book you paint a rare picture of Koreans as having been vilified in the press and thus subsequently targeted in the Los Angeles riots. Was April 29, 1992, a race war against Koreans?
I don't think so. If it was a race war against Koreans, it would still be going on. What I've seen instead are a lot of multiracial organizations building on the grassroots level, and a lot of participation by Asian Americans in hip-hop. Certainly the younger Korean-American generation took great, great steps to put that together since 1992. The results are there. There's a lot more dialogue.
Has hip-hop helped?
Hip-hop has absolutely helped. It's basically an open template. It's an Afro-diasporatic culture that creates an open template for others to express themselves and add on. There are more Asian Americans in my generation that probably know more about the African-American struggle because of hip-hop, and that's a beautiful thing.
Did you try to cover the underreported angle of Asian Americans in the culture?
I didn't attempt to do the Asian-American history of hip-hop. Someone will. I wanted to stay focused on the big picture. Hip-hop was once a force for dividing Asian Americans and African Americans, but there were Asian Americans in radio in Los Angeles, and Ice Cube did find some sort of way to converge with Asian Americans as well. I wanted to sort of undo the damage that might have been done in a lot of ways by the mainstream media.
Is Ice Cube's evolution from gangsta to Are We There Yet? an allegory for the evolution of hip-hop?
In some ways it is. I'm a hip-hop dad myself. I've been dying to take my boys to go see that movie. I want to say, "That's a guy from daddy's generation; look what he's doing now." Maybe you can even read something into the Are We There Yet? title itself. The evolution of Ice Cube in many respects is a perfect story for how we've matured and aged. Charlie Rose was recently coming at him for N.W.A stuff, and he's like, "Hey, that was me at 19 years old."
Did Ice Cube's Death Certificate ("Pay respect to the black fist/or we'll burn your store right down to a crisp") help spark the riots, or simply reflect the tension of the time?
I think it just reflected the tension of the time. The book was originally going to be about my tortured relationship with that album. It ended up becoming the most difficult chapter for me to write. This is at a point at which the hip-hop generation is struggling to define itself not in terms of the '60s, but in brand-new terms and words, and in some ways it was masterful, and some ways it was way off, but an honest attempt. It was one of those things I had to engage. You always want art to really move you. You want it to shake you out of your comfort zone. Death Certificate did all that for me.
You mention the backlash against hip-hop and the culture war of the early and mid-'90s. How does today's culture war (Janet Jackson, the FCC, Air America vs. Fox) compare?
Maybe it hasn't manifested yet. The thing that scared me about the fallout of Hot 97 (a New York hip-hop station that aired a mock "Tsunami Song" using derogatory terms to describe Asians) is there might be a backlash against urban radio. That's coming from someone who has been very concerned about black-Asian tensions of the past. They could use this to initiate a rollback of all the gains the hip-hop generation has made in pushing folks of color in the mainstream. We don't have balance amongst those voices. One of the things that's clear is that the culture war of the mid-'90s, with people like C. Dolores Tucker, was a way to advance more punitive measures against youths of color. They don't need the culture to do that anymore; they have the larger war.
Indie hip-hop is being appropriated by Scion to sell cars.
"Scion hop" - it's a derogatory term, sort of like "backpackers." From the beginning, it's always been about style. Style is a currency you can use to redeem yourself, to become somebody who used to be a nobody. So it's not surprising to see the development of all these different types of companies that are beyond hip-hop getting specific about the kind of hip-hop audience they want. Scion is college-educated, upwardly mobile, first cars bought from the parents - that kind of crowd. The biggest names in hip-hop are brand names. Jay-Z and P. Diddy. It's a process almost built into hip-hop from the beginning.
What's the future of hip-hop?
The stuff I'm into is from overseas, where people have taken the template of hip-hop and flipped it to their own particular style. M.I.A. has a great ear from new stuff from the latest dancehall, bad-girl riddims. She's almost like a critic who can rap and do it really well. There are a lot of other folks who can bring their own stamp on it. There's stuff coming out of Dakar and São Paulo and Paris that's really interesting. It will be something from outside of North America that will set people off.Published: 02/24/2005
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