I the PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS
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i THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE SCHOOL OF BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES LISTENING TO REALITY: HOW ‘90S HIP-HOP ENGAGED WITH SOCIAL ISSUES JAMIRCA NUESI SPRING 2020 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in Criminal Justice and Sociology with honors in Criminology Reviewed and approved* by the following: Adam Gustafson Ph.D. Associate Teaching Professor of Music, School of Humanities Thesis Supervisor Jennifer Gibbs Ph.D. Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, School of Public Affairs Thesis Honor Advisor * Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College ii ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the world of Hip-Hop and major social issues during the 1990s. Using a variety of data sets, research, creative works, and primary sources, this study seeks to understand how Hip-Hop engaged with topics such as criminality, death, drug use, education, and poverty, and how that engagement helped to shape America’s perception of those issues. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ v Literature Review............................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 2: Crack and Hip-Hop ..................................................................................... 11 Chapter 3: Criminality and Hip-Hop ............................................................................ 18 Chapter 4: Death and Hip-Hop ..................................................................................... 27 Chapter 5: Education and Hip-Hop............................................................................... 34 Chapter 6: Poverty and Hip-Hop .................................................................................. 40 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 43 References ......................................................................................................................... 45 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Death Rates of Young Males............................................................................. 29 Figure 2: Dropout Rates (Ages 16-24).............................................................................. 35 Figure 3: Employment Rates for Recent High School Graduates vs. Dropouts ............... 36 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Adam Gustafson and Jennifer Gibbs for helping me throughout this journey! I would also like to thank Ralph Godbolt. Through his passion for academia and Hip-Hop, I was able to see the vision of putting this thesis together. Last but not least, I would like to thank David Witwer and Stephanie Ponnett for their dedication to the honor’s students. This is also dedicated to all the people who share the same opinion as Reverend Calvin Butts about Hip-Hop, I hope this paper changes your mind. If you are new to Hip-Hop and do not get the reference, listen to the intro of “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. 1 Literature Review As a central figure in rap during the 1990s, Tupac Shakur’s music was part of an artistic tradition that wanted to do more than entertain. Shakur represents a major shift in Hip-Hop that began in the late 1980s and 1990s. This new sound, which was developed by groups such as Public Enemy and N.W.A., was meant to educate and engage listeners with social issues that were plaguing the black community during the 1990s. For example, in 1991, Shakur released the song “Soulja Story.” They cuttin off welfare/ Think they crime is risin’ now/ You got whites killin blacks Cops killin blacks/ And blacks killin blacks/ Shit just gonna get worse/ They just gonna become souljas Straight souljas (Vaught, 2014) This song is one of many that show Shakur’s willingness to use his music to cover a range of issues, including police brutality, education disparities, poverty, and teen pregnancy. Shakur’s music blended seamlessly with his social activism. During the 1990s, Shakur’s music, and Hip-Hop in general, became a worldwide call for social action. More than just entertainment, Hip-Hop became a tool for education, community building, and social engagement with what many perceived to be an oppressive and inherently racist American mainstream culture. This paper focuses on how Hip-Hop engaged with issues of poverty, education, criminality, crack, and death during the 1990s. Hip-Hop has dominated American popular music for over 25 years, and this has led to a number of books dealing with the history of the genre, such as The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation by Reiland Rabaka. The book traces the lineage of Hip-Hop from Rhythm & Blues of the late 1940s through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It continues by 2 discussing the relationship of the soul movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the Black Power Movement, and it shows how these earlier eras led to the era of Hip-Hop, an era that began in the late 1970s and is now the dominant popular music in America. The book mentions the rise of commercial and “gangsta rap” as the start of the Hip-Hop movement. Rabaka asserts that the use of digital and telecommunications technology is what makes the Hip-Hop movement unique from the other musical moments. Notably, he defines the Hip-Hop movement as being both a political and artistic movement that sought to “capture the ear of those listening for aesthetic reasons” while also pleasing those who were looking for a deeper meaning (Rabaka, 2013). Rabaka states that Hip- Hop should not be reduced to just rap music which includes ghetto-gangsta-nigga-pimp- hoe-thug theme that does not align with Hip-Hop politics. However, because the book covers such a broad period of time, it is not able to go in depth about the social movements specific to the 1990s, which is one of the most important periods in Hip-Hop. Rabaka does mention Hip-Hop’s relationship with small-scale activist movements such as sexism, horrors of low-income housing, immigration, environmental racism, police brutality, prison industrial complex, and class struggles, but he fails to provide specific correlations between the music and these movements. The book continues with an in- depth analysis of how the Hip-Hop movement entered white suburbia. The author states Hip-Hop’s duality, having Hip-Hop culture and universal elements, is what allowed it to be accepted in “black ghetto youth” and “white suburban youth.” (Rabaka, 2013). Another book that covers the History of Hip-Hop is Break Beats in the Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop’s Early Years by Joseph C. Ewoodzie. The book starts with the infamous DJ Kool Herc party in which the author claims is the beginning of Hip-Hop. 3 Unlike other perspectives of DJ Kool Herc, the author does not believe Herc invented Hip-Hop. Instead, the author argues that it was inevitable due to the preexisting culture in New York. The paper begins with an in-depth analysis of the socioeconomics of the South Bronx during the 1970s. Ewoodzie’s in-depth review of the South Bronx is used to connect urban decay to the rise of social activism and rebellion, including graffiti and writing, as well as DJing and dancing. Ewoodzie argues that these four variables are what allowed Hip-Hop to form. But, the book only covers the beginning of Hip-Hop; it does not discuss how socioeconomic status, and other social issues, continued to influence Hip-Hop as it grew beyond New York City. Hip Hop in America: A Regional Guide by Mickey Hess is another book in tune with Hip-Hop history. The book covers Hip-Hop from 1970s-1990s. The author breaks down the history of Hip-Hop geographically, and he identifies the unique Hip-Hop identities in each region. The book begins with the Boogie Down Bronx, the birthplace of Hip-Hop, and he covers a number of notable rappers associated with the borough, such as DJ Kook Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and KRS-One. The author alludes to social activism by suggesting that KRS-One was one of the first MCs to have “first-person narratives expressing various views and experiences of young black ghetto dwellers.” (Hess, 2010). There are other notable moments when Hess ties Hip-Hop with social activism, such as his study of Fat Joe, another artist from the Bronx that rose in the 1990s. Hess links Fat Joe’s gangsta persona to the book, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Philippe Bourgois. The author lightly touches upon the influence of street life on Fat Joe’s music. Hess goes on to cover Harlem and Upper Manhattan and continues to allude to the relationship between Hip-Hop and social issues by lightly covering the crack 4 epidemic and Hip-Hop. However, instead of viewing how crack influenced Hip-Hop music, Hess focused on how the crack era influenced fashion and the popularization of the street hustler image. Another growing area of Hip-Hop inquiry seeks to understand the literary elements of the genre, such as Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language by H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook. The authors view Hip-Hop as a “living culture,