Free The Tanning of America by Steve Stoute Page A

growing up in the inner city. Reaganomics and the corporate free-for-all that were supposed to send some trickle-down into the streets only exacerbated unlivable conditions. The crack epidemic in the midst of hard times opened the floodgates for cheap drugs, guns, and other illegal businesses to set up stands at every corner. As crack cut a swathe across inner cities of America—turning neighborhoods into third-world countries, dealers into glamorous high rollers, and loved ones into crackheads—the reality was so negative and so full of despair it couldn’t help but alter the tenor of the poetry. In the process, the crack epidemic that created so much pain and destruction enriched the storytelling about how terrible it truly was—through the characters, villains, and even heroes it created. And so, to be a poet, to come out of that kind of poverty and violence and make it, was literally miraculous. Yet it was possible.
    Hip-hop, in marketing a new brand of hope, was simply doing what it always did well by borrowing from the classics and adding its own twist. Once an updated version of rags to riches was in the code, part of America’s DNA, the art form widened its audience exponentially. If you were generationally attuned, had an understanding or empathy toward impoverishment and/or dysfunction, and were aspirational, you were in. With no one even imagining the numbers that this marquee was going to attract, the cultural infrastructure had to quickly adapt to address the demand.
    And one of the ways that it did, as it became clear to me that night in Monte Carlo, was by inventing the outlines of a creed or belief system or, yes, a religion for itself. Music, interestingly enough, developed originally to connect tribal members to one another and allow religious adherents to commune with a higher power. This is to say that music, by its nature, breeds culture. On top of that, hip-hop is a kind of confession, at times a soul-baring about stuff you’re not even supposed to say in public, sometimes inappropriate, sometimes gut-wrenching— My mother’s on drugs, my father abandoned me, I’m broke, I’m f**ked up, what am I supposed to do?
    So, as the art form became a culture and began to fulfill the same functions that religious institutions have served throughout history, the most obvious thing it did was to provide governance. Religion has always been influential in governing people without hope and who are in despair, giving them a reason to believe, to go on. Incredibly, that’s what hip-hop did, stepping into the void of meaninglessness to provide governance for people without anything, riddled with crack, dope, and hopelessness. Rap music, using language that was old and new, literal and metaphoric, was like scriptures, full of vivid, accurate depictions of life that gave people who were poor and powerless a way to feel better. As the poets were telling the real stories, speaking over beats that you loved, the impact happened at a cellular level, elevating your emotional /spiritual metabolism. Sports heroes were still larger than life, but now another class of hero, by the laws of this system, could come from nothing and find purpose with just their words that would lead toward redemption, with all their sins and baggage included. The fact that they had no resources made their journey to fame and fortune even more epic. Rappers—the street poets—now became legends, not just locally but everywhere, and gave the culture a winning history, a bible.
    The impoverished-yet-unapologetic mind-set thus became the hip-hop religion’s unifying concept. Who knew that way of thinking could turn a profit?

The Business of Culture: An Intro
    One reason I believe hip-hop was able to grow from a small niche market (seen as a subgenre of black music at the record companies) to a full-blown dominant musical force and industry—a mainstay of popular culture capable of impacting the