Talib Kweli

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There's a splinter in hip-hop. An issue that forcibly imposes itself on every rap-based discussion, review, or article and it's neither black nor white. It takes shape in the muddled grey matter between gangsta braggadocio and social consciousness. Right there, lurking between N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton" and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" is rap's fault line. Is hip-hop capitalism's lackey, the expression of a socioeconomic condition to be accepted as is, or has the unrepentant materialism and brutal misogyny gone too far?

It was with me after a bitter split from my girlfriend as I curled up and draped myself in the darkness of my closet. Fiddling around with the dial until Mastermind's "Street Jam" blasted through the talk box, my finger hovering just above the record button as I waited to hear Eminem unleash a venomous attack to kill his ex ("97 Bonnie and Clyde"). Just like it was with me when the sales of bandana-clad former gang bangers outstripped more positive artists like Arrested Development and P.M. Dawn, forever searing dollar bills into the eyes of record label A&R's who saw in gangsta rap an easily exploitable musical genre. Part of me accepts that it always will be there like a permanent crease in your jeans, but by the time I reached university my patience had worn thin.

I was one year short of a decade old when gangsta rap flooded the burbs. I'm not entirely sure what we did before it, though a informal survey might reveal that we were bubble gum pop zombies listening to near-balding radio disc jockeys. My exposure to the ghetto, though rooted in my black heritage, came as it did for non-black people, through the culture of hip-hop. For me, the drug-riddled narratives told a distorted tale of America's disenfranchised through a funhouse mirror. One day there came a knock at the door of my predominatly white, working class neighborhood. Like an uninvited dinner guest, gangsta rap brought baggage and plenty of it. The days of backwards pants, coordinated dance steps, and party anthems were numbered, to be swapped for savage, yet stirring portraits of American tenements.

In the mid-to-late '80s, during those precious few moments before rap devoured pop culture, I was the token black kid in my school and I wasn't going ga-ga for gangstas. Don't get me wrong, my feet fit in an oversized pair of hi-top Adidas, I sported a hi-cut fade and Dwayne Wayne flip up shades, but 3rd Base, Kris Kross, and Kid N' Play tapes -- not Schooly D or Ice T -- were where my money went. The ghetto was as unfamiliar to me as it must have been to the droves of non-black kids now gorging themselves on this forbidden fantasy. But that didn't prevent us from buying in. Shooting, stabbing, stealing, and dealing -- the so-called hustler's trades -- they meant little to me and yet, like two opposites our attraction was instantaneous.

One morning you just woke up with hair between your legs, a deeper voice, and a testy attitude. From there, it was a short bout of awkward shuffling until you found yourself in one of two camps: gangsta rap or grunge. My skin tone dictated the former. Confusion about gangsta rap set in not long after a spat of racial intolerance. On the long walks home from school, my friends hounded me about rap's inability to qualify as an art form. They might have been attacking rap on its own merits, but they were also attacking a part of my culture, however disturbing, and as time crept along it became increasingly hard to defend.

Rap swallowed pop culture whole without chewing and almost overnight the sights and sounds of this burgeoning culture found themselves in an unfamiliar environment. Somehow the reality of our nuclear families, low crime rates, and education were no match for crippling poverty, the urine-soaked stench of apartment building stairwells, and the general melancholy of urban life. Hip-hop writer and author of Hip-hop America, Nelson George might argue that despite our contradictory lifestyles, the teenagers and young adults growing up in suburbs and ghettoes were shackled to the familiar chains of modern-day alienation, but he fails to address the real issue.

If you've ever driven down the road of hip-hop, then you've come to the fork in the road. The place where, if you look left, there's a path heavily populated by drug dealers turned emcees with little concern for anything other than the size of their rims, their fly ass chains, or their next trip to the strip club -- "Sket, Sket, Sket!" The stories may alter from artist to artist and take root in ghettoes you've never heard before. They can make you say "Ughh", "Hootie Hoo", or Westsiïiide", but they will always perpetuate a lifestyle that denigrates black women and advocates violence and self-destruction in pursuit of the almighty dollar bill. To the right is a more conscious path, one populated by rappers who eschew unrepentant materialism in order to make a positive difference in their communities.

I guess you could say that at the heart of this conflict, 50 Cent and Talib Kweli are warring in my psyche, each unraveling a long list of rationalizations with the same inevitable conclusion: you do what you do to get by. But for those of us who never grew up in that environment, those of us adopting that lifestyle without taking the time to question it, what does it mean that when given the opportunity we choose gangsta rap again and again? What does it offer us but an emergency hatch from the burbs, a world we can tune into and out of whenever we please? And what would it mean if we turned our back on gangsta rap, which is a reflection of an actual social inequality. These and other thoughts were stirring my mind when I arrived at the fork in the road and went straight.

The decision came swiftly. It had been dwelling for some time, but after scolding my roommate for equating hip-hop with all of black culture, I knew I couldn't continue to defend gangsta rap. My entire upbringing urged me to break free of its decadence and depravity, and I did but not entirely.