"When
you listen to Tupac Shakur, E-40, Too Short, Master P or any other
rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the
foundation and gave us the language to express black male urban
experience in a lyrical way."
--James G. Spady, Philadelphia New Observer
photo Gene Hazzard
Hip-hop’s television takeover
The ceremony for the 60th Grammy Awards is still two weeks away, but already music’s biggest TV night has made history.
For
the first time, hip-hop artists comprise the majority of nominees
chosen in the academy’s top categories, including record, album and song
of the year.
But that sound you’re hearing isn’t
champagne corks popping in celebration. It’s exasperated sighs that the
Recording Academy only just discovered what the rest of the
entertainment industry noticed back in the flip-phone era: Hip-hop, once
an outlier, is now the status quo.
From Broadway’s
“Hamilton” to Hollywood’s “Straight Outta Compton” to television’s
“Atlanta,” hip-hop’s domination of American pop culture has defied
countless predictions that a nervous white mainstream would never fully
embrace a trend born out of the urban, black experience.
Consider
hip-hop’s television takeover. Today, rappers are not only backing
films about the black experience, but they are creating, producing and
starring in top-rated cable and network series and breaking out of music
categories at film and television award shows.
“Atlanta”
creator and star Donald Glover — who under his rap name, Childish
Gambino, is up for five Grammys — made history when he won a directing
Emmy in September for his breakthrough FX comedy, a cable ratings
success, about the everyday trials and tribulations of an aspiring
hip-hop entrepreneur. No other black director had ever won an Emmy in
the comedy category, and Glover was the first director since Alan Alda
in 1977 to win for a comedy in which he also starred.
“I
wanted to show white people you don’t know everything about black
culture,” he told the awards ceremony audience, some of whom had already
watched him win two top Golden Globes for the show earlier in 2017.
Lin-Manuel
Miranda, who shattered records and expectations when his hip-hop
musical “Hamilton” swept the 2016 Tonys, is now executive producing a
forthcoming Showtime series, “The Kingkiller Chronicle,” based on
characters from the fantasy books by Patrick Rothfuss.
And
hitting Showtime this month was the already critically acclaimed “The
Chi” from “Master of None’s” Lena Waithe, the first black woman to win
an Emmy for comedy writing, and hip-hop star Common, the first rapper to
win an Emmy, Oscar, Grammy and Golden Globe. (Before Oprah and Meryl
Streep, he gave what had been the Golden Globes’ most inspirational
speech — “I am” — delivered with the poetic rhythm of a rap when he and
John Legend accepted the 2015 original song award for “Glory” in Ava
DuVernay’s civil rights drama “Selma.”)
“I was surprised by it all,” Common said about the accolades.
It
was one of many in a string of “crossover surprises”: Fox’s hip-hop
themed drama “Empire” became a surprise success with white audiences;
soccer moms across America were surprised they couldn’t stop humming
Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” in favor of something — anything — else; and a
biopic about once-feared gangsta rap pioneers N.W.A, “Straight Outta
Compton,” became a surprise hit at the box office.
The surprise, however, is that anyone was surprised.
The Age of Hip-Hop
From the streets to cultural dominanceThe 2018 Grammy nominations are overdue acknowledgment that hip-hop has shaped music and culture worldwide for decades. In this ongoing series, we track its rise and future.
“Hip-hop
is the soundtrack of at least one, probably two generations now,” says
Common (aka Lonny Rashid Lynn Jr.), who is an executive producer on the
Waithe-run series about everyday life on the South Side of Chicago.
“People used to be afraid of it or consider it the music of gangsters or
thugs, or whatever. But now, it’s part of everything … and everyone
under the age of 40.”
From the jaunty 1980s McDonald’s jingles
that still haunt Gen Xers today to raunchy rapper Method Man’s current
role as a congenial TV game show host for the millennial-skewing “Drop
the Mic,” hip-hop is now part of our cultural DNA. Tupac Shakur, Lauryn
Hill and Eminem are to a generation what the Beatles and Stones were to
boomers — the artists of their youth.
And in some cases, the actors of today were the rappers of their parents’ generation.
Ice-T,
the once-controversial “Cop Killer” rapper whose breakthrough film role
was in 1991’s “New Jack City,” has played a sex crimes detective on
NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” since 2000. “If you’re 17
now, that means I started when you were two,” he said in the past. “So
you don’t have a reference point for me as a rapper. Your mother does,
your father does….”
Rap,
after all, was the genre that gave us TV and film personalities like
Queen Latifah, Will Smith, LL Cool J, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Redman,
Method Man and Tupac — and we’re not even into the 2000s yet. Their
popularity would eventually give rise to more and more shows about or
starring hip-hop figures. When ABC recently canceled “The Mayor,” about
an aspiring rapper who becomes mayor of his hometown, there were no
outcries over the dearth of black leads on TV — people were too busy
looking forward to “The Chi” and the upcoming March premiere of
“Atlanta’s” second season.
“When I used to get my
Entertainment Weekly and I’d look at the fall TV previews,” said Method
Man (aka Clifford Smith), “there was so many years when there weren’t
any black shows premiered. I remember one year, there was only like one
new fall show premiering that featured people of color: ‘The Cleveland
Show’ — and that was animated, and the lead voice was done by a white
guy!”
Lee Daniels’ “Empire” was the clearest example of
hip-hop as a crossover bridge to break color barriers when it premiered
on Fox in 2015 and obliterated conventional wisdom that a “black” drama
was for black audiences. After all, why would an entire generation
raised on Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” consider a show about a hip-hop family
dynasty as anything but meant for them?
Instead
of waiting for Hollywood and television studios to let them in, many
hip-hop artists formed their own multimedia production companies or
began crowdsourcing funds to create their own content.
Ice
Cube (aka O’Shea Jackson) alone launched an entire genre of black
comedies for the post-Run DMC generation in the “Friday” and
“Barbershop” series. The stone-cold gangsta who had referred to himself
as the “[N-word] you love to hate” reinvented himself as everyone’s dad
in the “Are We There Yet?” films.
Taking cues from
pioneers like Ice Cube, Pharrell co-executive produced a love letter to
1990s hip-hop, the coming-of-age film “Dope.” Beyond his work with
Common, crooner John Legend, who came up in the hip-hop world,
co-produced a WGN America series about slavery, “Underground.” Rapper 50
Cent was behind the Starz series “Power.”
Ice Cube and
Dr. Dre avoided the curse of the corny rap biopic (e.g., “Notorious”)
by co-producing their own story in “Straight Outta Compton.” “NCIS: Los
Angeles” star and five-time Grammy host LL Cool J now co-produces his
own game show, “Lip Sync Battle.” Clearly his 1990s self was onto
something when he rapped about “Rockin’ [his] peers.”
Queen
Latifah (aka Dana Owens) and Will Smith also created their own
production companies after experiencing success on their respective hit
series, “Living Single” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” Netflix
recently teamed up with Smith for its biggest gamble to date, “Bright,” a
streaming version of a Hollywood blockbuster. Though critically panned,
the production was streamed an astonishing 11 million times over three
days when it was released last month and has been greenlit for a sequel.
Demand
is high for the cachet, the perspective and, of course, the money that a
rap celebrity and elder statesman like Jay-Z brings to a production.
“Selma” and “Wrinkle in Time” director Ava DuVernay recently worked with
Mr. Bey for his “Family Feud” music video, a short released exclusively
on his streaming service, Tidal.
It’s not just
recognizable star power from the music world that’s drawing viewers
toward shows and films that take their cues from the rap world. HBO’s
“Insecure” and the CW’s “Black Lightning” are heavily steeped in rap
references — such cultural shorthand would have been unthinkable 15
years ago beyond BET or MTV.
Reality TV on those
Viacom-owned networks has served as a major stepping stone for hip-hop
stars transitioning from music to TV — and beyond.
Let’s
face it, when “Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party” is renewed
for a second season (which kicked off last year), a barrier has not only
been broken, it’s been entirely erased. “I don’t know who’s going to be
more fried by the end of this show,” joked the perfect hostess with the
“Gin & Juice” rapper in the first season.
VH1’s
reality show “Love & Hip-Hop” gave us Cardi B. “Surreal Life” and
“Strange Love” made Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav a household name 20 years
after he was last a household name. “Run’s House” and, yes, even “The
Vanilla Ice Project,” a home improvement show, were canaries in a coal
mine for the acceptance of the brash likes of Nicki Minaj on Middle
America’s go-to show, “American Idol.”
Rappers who are
used to saying it all — unedited, with abandon and on the fly — make for
the best and most unpredictable reality stars. As for scripted
television and film, the tradition of storytelling at the base of rap as
far back as Kurtis Blow and the Sugarhill Gang is what makes hip-hop so
attractive to narrative-hungry mediums.
Says Common,
“rappers are storytellers, and that is a timeless tradition no matter
who is watching or listening.” And clearly, this year, the Grammys
finally are.
lorraine.ali@latimes.com@lorraineali
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