Hip Hop Hysteria

Serious social critics could once dismiss hip hop's purveyors as a bunch of crude vulgarians extolling ghetto-centric lifestyles. No longer. Hip hop has become one of the most influential U.S. cultural exports. In virtually every city on the planet, there are hip hop communities that not only have adopted the percussion-heavy music and spoken-word vocals, but have appropriated the sartorial and attitudinal style of the black and Latino youth who created the genre.

Perhaps the most exportable aspect of hip hop is its existential sensibility -- its celebration of place, despite limitations. With verbal dexterity, hip hop's creators transformed themselves from ghetto dwellers into esteemed characters involved in complex narratives. Hip hop infused their neighborhoods with cultural currency and mythical resonance. If not a Shangri-La, then at least a "Shaolin" -- the name the Wu-Tang Clan conferred on their poverty-ridden neighborhood on New York's Staten Island. Hip hop culture renamed and re-imagined.

Some 25 years after its birth, the genre has become a $5 billion industry but remains troubled at home. Beset by a growing chorus of critics who charge that its glorification of the "Thug Life" promotes misogyny, violence and crime, hip hop's advocates are on the defensive. This is not a new position; since its emergence from the ghettos of New York City in the late '70s, many mainstream critics have deemed hip hop a dysfunctional element of pop culture -- a soundtrack for sociopaths. The violent murders of some of hip hop's most popular artists give its detractors a powerful argument.

A dedication to authenticity, or "keeping it real," is an important value that requires hip hop artists to stay close to the fears and aspirations of the community that birthed them. But since murder remains the leading cause of death for young black men, hip hop may be keeping things a bit too real.

Commercial motives have warped and corrupted the genre. The record industry uses personal rivalries between rappers as marketing tools to ratchet up sales. Rap "beefs" may reap profits, but they also wreak havoc. Carlton "Chuck D" Ridenhour, frontman of the influential group Public Enemy, blames the East Coast-West Coast beef that virtually paralyzed the rap world in the mid-'90s on a "climate of violence" perpetrated by the record industry. "I think the culture has been mishandled by putting out violence," he told Newsday following the October murder of Jason "Jam Master Jay" Mizell of Run-DMC in his Queens studio.

Most famously, many attribute the unsolved 1996 murders of two of hip hop's most iconic rappers, Tupac Shakur and Christopher "the Notorious B.I.G." Wallace, to a feud between rival record labels. In a two-part September series in the Los Angeles Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chuck Philips provided ammunition for those who link the murderous scenarios of many rap lyrics to the lifestyles of its major players. He reported that Shakur's killer is a gang member whom the rapper had assaulted in Las Vegas earlier that night. More explosively, Philips claims that Wallace paid a bounty for the hit and supplied the murder weapon.

But Philips' conclusions are disputed in "Biggie and Tupac," a new documentary by Nick Broomfield. The film, based heavily on a book by Randall Sullivan called "LAbyrinth," points to Marion "Suge" Knight, CEO of Death Row Records (recently renamed Tha Row Records), as the guiding hand behind both murders. Broomfield and Sullivan speculate that Knight ordered the killings because Shakur was going to sue Death Row for unpaid royalties, and Wallace's death would make the first murder look like part of the bicoastal rap feud.

Like Sullivan's book, much of the film is based on the allegations of former L.A. police detective Russell Poole, who says he was discouraged from following solid leads on the case because they pointed to police involvement. One of the most provocative aspects of Broomfield's film is the allegation from Wallace's mother that the FBI had both rappers under surveillance at the time of their murders. "It surprised me that Biggie and Tupac had been under surveillance for so long -- for months, particularly in Biggie's case," Broomfield told the Village Voice in September. "He wasn't considered a political person, but he and Tupac and rappers in general were regarded by the FBI as focal points of potential political unrest."