Deadbeat road a hop-skip away
IN THE past, the “spirits” of hip hop have been most closely identified with brother- and sisterhood, defiance in the face of an aggressive hierarchy and, most importantly, defeating social ills through creativity namely music (turntablism), spoken word (rap), dance (breakdance) and visual arts (graffiti).
Other spirits associated with hip hop were marijuana (weed) and, in the 1980s and 1990s, crack. Hip hop was legendarily born in the south Bronx of New York during the late ’70s.
As America’s cocaine epidemic stretched its arms through all the major cities, shrewd dealers looking to expand their marketplace, started cooking down the pricey coke into rocks known as crack, which were then easily sold at a cheaper price to lower-income neighbourhoods.
Due to crack’s highly addictive components, street hustling entrepreneurs found a relatively easy way to get rich quickly, and it’s somewhat a mythic rap fact that this was the way many of today’s superstar MCS (Jay Z) got their first mixtape financed or how they went on to form their own independent record labels (Suge Knight and Dr Dre).
But crack soon became whack and with the influx of America’s new legal prescription drug high sold through the mouths of contemporary rappers like Eminem’s obsession with Vicodin or Lil Wayne’s addiction to sizzurp (codeine syrup), younger, more modern day rappers have taken the pill parallel verse to the extreme, so much so that a new genre in the hip hop world has risen in the past few years, namely Emo or more facetiously, mumble rap.
New artists such as Lil
Uzi Vert, Trippie Red, XXX,
Lil Tracy and sadly Lil Peep, who recently made headlines worldwide by overdosing on Xanax last week, have taken the imagery of depression, self-hatred and nihilistic pill popping to the next level.
These youngsters, though mostly unsigned and popular due to their presence on social media and streaming sites, have issued in a new, scarier version of rap and remorse than their predecessors moaning about their hardships.
Every major newspaper and music publication has given these youngsters all the attention they’ve craved, so that it feels like a popular cultural assimilation of the ’90s grunge rock all over again; instead this time it’s the clinical hell of prescription heroin causing the fuss, not Layne Staley or Kurt Cobain with a bloody needle hanging out of their arms.
It’s an alarming trend and one which I hope doesn’t permeate the South African hip hop, kwaito and rap scenes. Already the poor man’s smack, Kat and nyaope are ravaging township and suburban youth.
Schedule 6 and 7 prescription drugs are more difficult to come by in this country, compared to the happy-go-wealthy doctors of the US, but we do tend to take our entertainment cues from the mighty American entertainment wheel, so it’s feasible that we’ll soon take a seat on this merry-go-round.
South African musicians’ drug of choice still seems to be the upwardly mobile drug of choice, cocaine, with two major deaths of female artists attributed to its overdose, TK Mhinga and Brenda Fassie.
Our one big hope is that South African hip hop artists are essentially socially conscious, more likely to wax lyrical about the problems affecting the youth daily than rap about escapism through chemicals as most have seen first-hand the damage done to communities through gangsterism and drugs.
If they can keep these struggles in perspective, and as artists shoulder the responsibility to keep youngsters looking forward and upward, not inward and backward, maybe we’ll weather this dark trend and become world leaders in making a positive change in people’s lives rather than the poster children for ending them.