Damage Ya Whole Era: 1992
posted on Nov 01, 2005
The greater NYC metro area: Early 1990s (certainly grimy). Jeep beats stalk you in broad daylight. The streets are wild style, maybe not as rugged as the era of the ‘87 stick-up kid, but if you’re wise you remain visibly preoccupied with your radio. High-speed dubbing transforms perpetually broke ‘round the way kids into consummate collectors, endlessly conversant theorists. Tapes with stately names like Low End Theory and Mecca and the Soul Brother crackle with celestial, melancholic clatter. Their third-generation dubs, inelegantly labeled in newborn graf styles, manage to spark and thump even lovelier. Brooding, sinister basslines feel warm as a hearth in mid-winter.
These insistent vibrations lure us, in our Champion hooded, screw-faced anonymity, out from under the bustling, lethal avenues enslaved to commerce and politics. We drift uneasily into far-off, self-contained zones that are desolate and mystical, fiending for the arrival of drum fills. Airborne paragraphs are labyrinthine, vexing, and invigorating as the horn loops they glide over. Headz decked out in rainproof deep-pocket Carhartt, olive drab U.S. Army field jackets, or intricately stitched butter soft leathers set up camp at the vinyl spots, hungering for the new strain of dope to bubble up out of nowhere and blow the fuck up.
Honest historians recall that this so-called Golden Age was prone to recurring famine. Even “Uncle” Ralph McDaniels fucks up and devotes Tuesday editions of Video Music Box to your girlfriend’s most trifling friend’s “that’s my joint” candles n’ silk sheets Rappin’ Bullshit videos. Yo! is hit-or-miss at best, but you tolerate Ed Lover’s witless buffoonery to catch an EPMD video or parlay with Brand Nubian on the “J” line. Fab Five Freddy keeps the balance; he is dapper and refined but averse to the punk-smooth-shit that occasionally passes for steez these days. Between scrubs strutting in lavender Cross Colours pantaloons and overly defensive wiggers traipsing around in billowy overalls, something’s gotta give.
Propmaster Red Alert and the humble magnificent Chuck Chillout bring the enchantment on the airwaves after a week’s worth of dozed-through public school sewing classes. We’re grateful, but we wonder aloud who the hell allows Father MC’s “One Night Stand,” a cruel send-up of BDK’s fall-off purple paisley silk style, to creep ever so slickly into the megamix. Don’t even get me started on Too Short’s “In The Ghetto,” a track so laughably feeble that Chip-Fu is compelled to disparage it on wax. File sharing and multi-platinum Deep South rapper/actors are things of the future, but in 1992 this rap shit is the same as it ever was, an overflow of undifferentiated and unquestioned information, most of it toxic and foul. We weren’t sure at first whether Das Efx were nice with theirs or just plain fucking stupid, but how ill was it to watch Fashion, Juju, and Psycho Les lounge in the forest while relaying death threats to the siggidy-sewer dwellers?
The older gods teach us that the cream always rises. Just keep your ears pressed to the concrete long enough, and the rumble of an ill vibe starts to bleed through. Rap finally gets its own section in the music store. Every hack with a crooked hi-top fade and untarnished Reebok Pumps is given a Newport cigarettes/Puma sweatsuit record advance. Developing a sense of style and discernment is now a difficult but crucial rite of passage. You gotta be a trooper. The discovery of that ol’ next shit is arbitrary karmic reward, procured in mid-sleep during a vain school night attempt to dub the late, late mixshow. Things can go awry. Grand Puba’s solo outing is a certified classic but the too-cool-for-school trendsetter plumb forgets to go on tour while Ya Kid K! and Marky Mark sell millions.
The language and the politics, the signifiers and those signifying, are illusory and confounding. You vacillate between wanting to be the first kid on the block to notice that Brother J and Kris Parker are exchanging subtle salvos on record and trying to avoid being the last person on earth to dub the “Crossover”/ “Brothers From Brentwood, L.I.” cassingle. Pete Rock, Large Professor, the Beatnuts and others engage in wholly self-indulgent games of ill subliminal sample one-upmanship that keep everyone nodding along happily. His Most Mackadocious Bill Clinton saxes his way onto Arsenio Hall’s stage just as Redman resuscitates George Clinton’s spirit of reckless cosmic abandon. Stunts, blunts, and hip-hop rule the world. Reaganomic excess and its militant antitheses still do battle, but it’s an internal jihad best illustrated by Eric B. and Rakim’s effortless quantum leaps from a cautionary ‘hood saga to a rented mansion groupie escapade to a starkly solitary and poignant protest of the current international “police action.” And it was all dope as hell.
The “D.A.I.S.Y.” Age is deceased, drained of its relevance by brain-dead clones like the Stereo MCs. Although the garish and whimsical Leaders of the New School prefer to East Coast stomp and romp through quasi-psychedelic videos like “International Zone Coaster,” Nas’s ultra-cool pose in the lo-fi, low-down, “Halftime” video is the real future of rap. As if recently lectured by Large Pro on the finer points of funk-faking refusal, newcomer Nas relays his poetics while draped in his fly street garb, with his hat pulled down and practically covering his eyes like B-Real. Hatless shots reveal nearly perfect waves, controlled and tranquil even as he catches wreck.
Realness in ’92 can mean a crisp fade-and-half moon, a peasy-ass ‘fro, dred or bal-hed, so long as Gumbys and step-fades and other travesties can be avoided. After megablasts like Step In The Arena drop, headz just ain’t checking for paisley-patterned, Afrikan medallion, tribalistic nonsense. Trugoy cuts his dreadlock-fade-zigzag pattern down to the skull. Rolling Stone and The Village Voice are reluctant to leave well enough alone. Wide-eyed hipsters journalists traumatized by Public Enemy’s fall into obsolecence (best illustrated by Chuck D’s refusal to trade in his straight-leg pants for baggy Guess denim) hunt down what they perceive to be “left-of-center” acts. They tag such groups as “alternative rap,” which is meant to be somehow different than your garden variety, inherently flawed rap music. This mixed blessing of a label thrusts a handful of crews into a limelight typically hogged by Hammer’s genie pants or salient satires like 2LiveJews.
Down at street level however, hippie-go-lucky images die young. Tip and Phife, presumably motivated by groupie love and Jive-talkin’, trade their ugly-ass silk shirts for hoodies and timbo hooves. Even Kwame’s core polkadelic fanbase follows suit and settles into transitional streetwear marred by Karl Kani’s anemic signature. The nation wishes to gravitate towards enraged, visceral representations of tragicomic AmeriKKKan reality and pull honeydips at the same time. We pine for charismatic, adversarial, id-heavy spokesmen. Enter problematic prophet Ice Cube, who rightfully incinerates shuckin’ minstrels, again, on “True To The Game” and edutainer KRS-One, who bumrushes those born-again P.M. Dawn poo-putts at their own weak stage show. Some artists are lucky enough to become actual pariahs. Ice-T the cop killer, Chuck D the governor killer, and Sista Souljah the cracker killer sway in a chilly Southern breeze after their respective media lynchings. All of this show business shit is very real all of a sudden. Any critic oblivious enough to champion the less abrasive, dashiki-clad variants of the rap genre runs the risk of bearing close resemblance to the sheist-talkin’ A&Rs who are rumored to prop up squeaky suit-and-tie glam-rap.
As is the case with the other great rap controversies of ‘92, most notably the [fairly benign] scourge of bootlegging and the [hollow] threat of bootlegger leg-breaking, and the [embarrassingly alarmist and easily thwarted] near-extinction of vinyl, there is no organized attempt to direct hip hop ire against the major record labels and their parent corporations. Artists are easy enough targets for the self-righteous diatribes of the Right, the Left, the Civil Rights Generation, and the often single-minded yet unaligned youthful hip hop nationalists. In the nine-deuce a revoked ghetto pass can kill a career quicker than Tipper Gore and Bob Dole-approved censure. Such rejection is practically tantamount to forced retirement whether the brother in question is frontin’ in a zoot suit or channeling Shaka Zulu. Rap artists are forced to walk a burning tightrope between articulate urban guerilla and too fly for words rapper just to land a deal. Downfall, descent, denoument, and flat-out falling-the-fuck-off becomes increasingly entertaining and bizarre.
Around the same time that Kris Kross blew up/fell off, Arrested Development’s head simp Speech ruins everything for the unarmed “Afrocentric Bohemian” wing of rap. Like a dummy, he blindly signs his own death certificate and portends his group’s downfall on the obnoxiously feel-good hit single and Sly Stone pillage titled “People Everyday.” In a mumbly, half-hearted baritone, Speech’s duckish narrator laments his mistreatment at the hands of gun-toting, malt liquor-swiggin’ boogie men. In this riveting Birth Of A Nation-esque narrative, these ATL “niggers,” possibly inspired by Sir Mix-A-Lot to commit random acts of “wilding,” taunt Speech and his fatbooty Nubian princess. These thugs are no match for the bespectacled, dreadlocked, high-yellow “African” on a mid-day date, however.
Clearly gassed off himself, Speech reminds the listener that he ain’t Ice Cube even if he is forced by circumstance to rumble with these ign’ant ruffians, rainbow-dyed mudcloth blurring and Afrikan beads swangin’ in the Georgia heat. AD’s Grammy-bound album, whatever the hell it was called, soars up the Billboard Top 40 but the famously disloyal teeny-boppers quickly discard their token media darlings to new jack swing on the nuts of buppie knife-wielders Wreckx-N-Effect. To Arrested Development’s credit, the Showbiz produced remix of “Tennessee” is the heat, but nobody admits it in front of their boys. Ditto for the incredible DJ Premier remix of “Ease My Mind,” a track that only suggests the probable mediocrity of their sophomore effort, Zippitydoowahdittydittydumdittydoo.
The early 90s style wars are vicious and unforgiving. From the perspective of a self-assured and sellout-loathing b-boy, it is clear that not every casualty is innocent. The career of bohemian-for-the-sake-of-pretension “rapper” Me Phi Me is thankfully D.O.A. The grossly exploitative Us3 debacle, despite being the result of a growing “jazz-rap” fascination that goes on to spawn sub-genres such as hip-bop, acid jazz, and post-boombastic groovadelic jazzy house bop, goes biddy biddy bye bye in less than six months. Even Daddy-O has a laugh at the expense of the unapologetic Blue Note archives tomb-raiders. Rambling guitar-smashers like the Goats, New Kingdom, and inexplicably, Divine Styler, hold on to their day jobs even after the multiplatinum success of Check Your Head assures Rolling Stone’s anxious readership that live instrumentation can elevate rap from “more like crap music” to “totally rad.”
The nearly unlistenable grafted style known as “Hip-House” finally goes the way of electric boogie. “New Jack Swing” surrenders its industry stranglehold to a mixtape-spawned R&B and rap hybrid that uses ruffneck breaks as the backdrop. This is good because keytars disappear from rap videos forever, but bad because fly shorties begin to rock baggy Girbauds, baseball caps, and ice grilles. As with any war, however, there is unfortunate collateral damage. Originoo backpackaz K.M.D.’s fantastic debut LP Mr. Hood is pigeonholed as a 3 Feet High and Rising knock-off. The UMCs deliver the brilliant, pop savvy, Fruits of Nature LP to a mostly unreceptive hip-hop nation that is now content to loiter in back alleys, torch in hand. Innovative and highly original recordings with cumbersome titles like The Future Sound’s The Whole Shabang, Vol. 1 are cruelly slept on. Forever.
By the close of 1992, the former Native Tongue wannabees turned vicious baldies called Onyx tell us to throw our guns in the air for no particular reason while the NAACP publicly denounces them for their too-ignorant-for-TV comportment. The track is slammin’ and the gritty voices are full of youthful rage that is so misdirected indiscriminate that the new year promises to be even more fun and convoluted than the one in passing. On the Left Coast, a newly relevant Dr. Dre offers us a more elderly brand of amoral hedonism, complete with a smoothed out party and bullshit appeal and a tricked-out ‘64 Impala for the getaway. Some critics, both professional and barbershop, suggest that ’92 was not as dope as ’91. An even smaller number suggest that rap may never return to its ’91 greatness, though they don’t have too many convincing harbingers to offer as proof. Even so, Yo! MTV Raps chooses the somber and elegiac “T.R.O.Y.” as the soundtrack to their unsatisfying end-of-the-year montage.
Dancing disappears rather suddenly from legitimate rap videos and this is of course a step in the right direction. Everyone and their mother’s aunt is featured on Heavy D’s “Don’t Curse” so the horrifically happy techno-bop of “Now That We Found Love” can be shrugged off as an aberration. Chubb Rock drops a similarly schmaltzy song that warns us that we are “Lost In The Storm” but it is nearly impossible to have a serious, high minded discussion about the state of rap or the hip hop nation. There is too much to celebrate – the controversies boil over, simmer down, and fade away, while the embattled personalities, particularly that of a young and egomaniacal Tupac Shakur, begin attracting international attention and adoration. And we keep boppin’ our hooded heads along to the beat, in this case the evil, bassy “Punks Jump Up To Get Down” (Diamond D remix).
Comments for "Damage Ya Whole Era: 1992"
— Calculated Rik Nov 18, 07:38 AM
Ya’ll should pawn some of yo ’92 shit so the shorties can ride.
— b-illa Oct 23, 02:16 PM
I can freak, fly, flow…
— Liam Mar 16, 02:59 AM