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Copyright by Amanda Maria Morrison 2010 The Dissertation (or Treatise) Committee for Amanda Maria Morrison Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation (or treatise): FREAKS OF THE INDUSTRY: PECULIARITIES OF PLACE AND RACE IN BAY AREA HIP-HOP Committee: John Hartigan, Jr., Supervisor Kathleen Stewart Richard R. Flores Domino Perez S. Craig Watkins FREAKS OF THE INDUSTRY: PECULIARITIES OF PLACE AND RACE IN BAY AREA HIP-HOP by Amanda Maria Morrison, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2010 Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Alan Stewart Morrison and Martha Dolores Morrison, who always encouraged me and never told me pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology was “impractical.” Acknowledgements Completing a dissertation is a long and arduous journey, particularly when it involves extensive field research of the kind required in anthropology. There are numerous people who have supported me along the way, without whose contributions this project would not have been possible. I first want to thank Olis Simmons, Executive Director of Youth UpRising (YU), as well as the entire crew at YU, the youth leadership development organization in Oakland that provided me with a much-needed social anchor in an otherwise expansive fieldwork setting that felt daunting at first. The YU team is truly fighting the good fight in its efforts to reach out to young people in danger of “falling through the cracks” of our frayed social fabric. I feel immensely fortunate to have been included in that amazing team of “street soldiers.” I also want to thank the dozens of consultants who set aside time to allow me to interview them and sometimes just tag along to get a glimpse of their lives. Every person I encountered is a truly singular character who offered great insight. I particularly want to shout out to the young folks who befriended this aging hip-hop “head”: B-Janky, Alexander the Grate, and the rest of the Trunk Boiz, as well as Darnell “Bizzy” Smith, Nicole “Ace” Brown, and the Fly Yung Focuzed crew, for choppin’ it up with me on a regular basis and “making me hip.” Another key ally in this whole process, my advisor and committee chair John Hartigan, Jr. has been an unwavering champion of my research and guardian of my overall wellbeing. Throughout my eight years of graduate studies, he has deepened my thinking, engaged my work, and, on many occasions, provided emotional support and v boosted morale—often in the form of much-needed levity. I could not have asked for a better mentor. Finally, I want to thank my closest friends and family who sustained me through this entire process, putting up with me as I regaled them with details from “the field” and vented anxieties and frustrations. To Pele Aveau, my Oakland housemate during all three years of my dissertation research and writing phase, thanks for all the late-night conversations and accompanying me to more than a few hip-hop shows. To Mary and Dave Day, the support and respite you provided me on many a weekend escaping up to Sonoma County was truly sustaining. Finally, much love to my twin brother, Jordan Morrison, who always has my back, and my other brother, Brian Morrison, who would have loved coming back to Austin to see me get “hooded,” and no doubt would have expressed pride in his sister as he made fun of the formality of the puffy hat and tassels. vi Freaks of the Industry: Peculiarities of Place and Race in Bay Area Hip-Hop Publication No._____________ Amanda Maria Morrison, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: John Hartigan, Jr. Through ethnography, I examine how hip-hop’s expressive forms are being used as the raw materials of everyday life by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, home to what many regard as one of the most stylistically prolific, politically charged, and racially diverse hip-hop “scenes” in the world. This focus on regional specificity provides a greater understanding of the impact hip-hop is having on the ground, as an aspect of localized lived practice. Throughout, I make the case for the importance of ethnographically grounded localized research on U.S. hip-hop, which is surprisingly still relatively rare. Most scholars simply stress its continuity within a set of deterritorialized Diasporic African and African-American verbal-art traditions. My aim is not to contest this assertion, but to add to the body of knowledge about one of the most significant cultural inventions of the twentieth century by exploring hip-hop’s racial heterogeneity and its regional specificity. Acknowledging this kind of diversity allows us to reconceive what hip-hop is and how it matters in U.S. society beyond the ways it is usually framed: as either an vii oppositional form of black-vernacular culture or a co-opted and corrupted commodity form that reinscribes hegemonic values more than it actually contests them. Examining hip-hop within a specific, regionally delineated community reveals how hip-hop’s role in American life is more nuanced and complex. It is neither a pure vernacular expression of an oppressed class nor merely a cultural commodity imposed upon consumers and alienated from producers. In the Bay Area, hip-hop “heads” simultaneously consume mass-produced rap while producing homespun forms of music, dance, slang, fashion, and folklore. Through these forms, they construct individual and group identities that register primarily in expressive, affective terms. These novel cultural identities complicate rigid social markers of race, gender, and class; more specifically, they challenge the widely held perception that hip-hop is solely the terrain of inner-city young African-American men. More fundamentally, a sense of belonging is engendered through localized modes of expression and embodied style that manifest through shared practices, discourses, texts, symbols, locales, and imaginaries. viii Table of Contents Introduction..............................................................................................................1 Notes on Method .....................................................................42 Chapter One: Setting the Music Scene ..........................................................46 Chapter Two: What the Streets Are Saying: Hardcore Realities and ‘Hoodspace Imaginaries.....................89 Chapter Three: Clownin’ on Capitalism: The Hyphy Movement and the Carnivalesque ......................133 Chapter Four: Backpacker Bohemia: The Cultural Economy of “Conscious” Hip-Hop .................178 Chapter Five: Black and Tan Realities: Latinos in the Borderlands of the Hip-Hop Nation ...............209 Chapter Six: Where Brown Buffalos Roam: Latino “Bridge Consciousness” in Conscious Rap ...............243 Chapter Seven: Reaching the “Crack Baby Generation” ................................270 Concluding Remarks............................................................................................303 Works Cited .........................................................................................................312 Vita ....................................................................................................................339 ix Introduction From about 2004 to 2006, Bay Area hip-hop was all about celebration. With the popularization of the “hyphy movement”—an exuberant regional style of urban music, dance, and dress that garnered national attention from everyone from MTV to USA Today1—it looked like the Bay was finally going to earn its place on the rap music’s geographic “mattering map” (Grossberg 1992:82). Home to one of the U.S.’s most musically avant-garde, linguistically innovative, politically charged, and commercially independent hip-hop scenes, the San Francisco Bay Area had long been an extremely active and influential node of rap music production. It had just never received much recognition within the corporate media for all of its contributions. But by the winter of 2007 everyone seemed to be in mourning. The colorful graphic hoodies favored by hyphy kids gave way to black pea coats, sweatshirts and knit caps—outfits that had all the flair and flamboyance of a longshoreman clocking in at the Oakland shipyards for a 4am shift. You could still spot teenage girls wearing rainbow- striped leggings and neon-pink braids—a uniquely feminine manifestation of hyphy’s cheeky, irrepressible style; likewise, young guys continued to sport thick, flowing dreadlocks and ridiculously oversized white t-shirts—the basic hyphy uniform for men. But those plain white tees now appeared more commonly emblazoned with customized “R.I.P.” decals memorializing fallen homies. 1 MTV produced two segments on the hyphy movement. In 2004, MTV News ran the feature “Hyphy: Crunk, Northern California Style” (http://www.mtv.com/bands/h/hypy/news_feature_110804/). In 2006, MTV News produced an episode of its “My Block” series on “The Bay” 1 This was no time for celebration. The murder rate in the blue-collar city of Oakland, where the hyphy movement emerged, had soared to its highest level in ten years. San Francisco saw a similar increase in homicides, though this fact was largely lost on the tech-industry elites who had colonized the city, pushing poorer residents into segregated outlying enclaves where crime was concentrated. Even working-class Bay Area suburbs like Vallejo, Richmond, Hayward,