The Rap Battles
The double standards of Canadian media don’t add up to 50 Cent. Probing the language of our panicked press, there’s “Just A Lil Bit” of bias
BY Dave Morris
Illustration by Zela Lobb
Like many in the Canadian media, Rex Murphy doesn’t get hip hop, but he certainly seems to know a thing or two about finger-pointing.
Gangsta rap has been around in its present form for almost two decades. Society has yet to implode. These two facts haven’t stopped the Canadian media from arguing that though Curtis Jackson (a.k.a. 50 Cent) might be deserving of the same protections afforded explicit creators like David Cronenberg or Chuck Palahniuk, make no mistake: 50 Cent is nothing but a thug.
“If rap music is socially toxic, and it is hard to see that it is not,” Murphy, the eternally scowling pundit, wrote in his November 26 column for the Globe and Mail, “then the circle of responsibility for it goes from industry to performer and all those eager people who buy the product. The rap audience can’t claim moral superiority over its thuggish heroes.” Murphy could easily have added the national media to his list of responsible parties. Despite their largely uncritical coverage of rapper 50 Cent’s every move, coverage of Liberal MP Dan McTeague’s call to prevent the convicted drug dealer and hip-hop superstar from performing in Canada has been marked by journalists bending over backwards to condemn the G-Unit rapper while still labelling McTeague’s comments opportunistic.
When McTeague asserted at a press conference last November that due to a sizeable increase in gun violence, “people in Toronto or any urban centre [don’t] need or want to hear Mr. Jackson’s message right now,” he was merely reading from a playbook as old as politics itself.
His attempts to stop 50 Cent at the border ultimately proved fruitless. Though members of 50’s G-Unit entourage—including solo rappers Tony Yayo and Young Buck as well as old-school groups Mobb Deep and MOP—were not granted temporary resident permits due to various legal problems, the rest were allowed into Canada, where their scheduled concerts in seven Canadian cities were performed without incident. But that’s not the point. Take a look at a page from hip hop’s history…. The debate over whether to ban gangsta rap picked up in the early ’90s where heavy metal fearmongering left off, with both sides having long since fortified their entrenched positions. In one corner, politicians and parents vent their moral outrage over the violence and misogyny that is slickly marketed to their teenaged children; in the other, free speech advocates warn against stripping artists of their freedom of expression.
In the legendary 1966 obscenity trial over William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, the concept of obscenity in American law was changed to exclude works with “artistic merit.” Even though “artistic merit” is not an absolute defence in Canadian obscenity law, we frequently refer to it as a concept in censorship debates. When it comes to defending 50 Cent, himself the protégé of past censorship martyrs Dr. Dre and Eminem, the question of artistic merit is quietly pushed under the table.
Some commentators shied away from discussing whether 50 Cent’s multi-platinum albums Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and The Massacre can be defended as art, while others attacked his music even as they defended his right to perform it. Ottawa Sun writer Allan Wigney compared so-called “urban” music to examples drawn from rock and country, including the Rolling Stones’ legendarily misogynist “Under My Thumb” and Neil Young’s “Down By The River,” where he deadpans, “I shot my baby / Down by the river / Dead, oh, shot her dead.” The Toronto Star music critic, Ben Rayner, avoided praising Fiddy’s lyrical skills but asked that all hip hop not be tarred with the same brush. He pointed to socially conscious rappers like Lauryn Hill as an alternative to the gangsta school, arguing that “hip hop is about much more than guns, ‘bitches’ and money.” Now Magazine columnist Alan Young was one of the few to address the music directly. He called 50 Cent a “clown,” but conceded, “there is some rudimentary artistry within [his] songs.”
Perhaps the most comically inept assessment of 50 Cent’s catalogue came from the Globe and Mail. “Rodgers and Hart, it ain’t,” they crowed in a November 25, 2005, editorial, “How Canada Deals With 50 Cent,” perhaps forgetting that only Hart was a lyricist. The editorial asserted the rapper’s alleged co-optation by the “capitalist ethic he purports to despise” (what ex-drug dealer despises capitalism?); and in one particularly damning assessment, described his music as “one gun-fixated rapper’s percussion-heavy, monotonic grunting about drugs and sex.”
As anyone with a working knowledge of musical terminology can attest, 50 Cent is far from monotonic. In fact, he is arguably the most melodic rapper on the charts, varying his flow in both pitch and cadence, even singing the choruses on recent hits including “Candy Shop” and “Just A Lil Bit.” Reading the reports in the Canadian press, however, would lead you to believe that, despite being one of the most popular musicians alive, 50 Cent is a hack. The media have anointed him as a symbol of all that is sick and debauched in popular culture, a vision of pure nihilism, untainted by artistic virtue.
Is 50 Cent’s music really as artless as the Canadian media would have us believe? And if not, why has he become the scapegoat for the decline of western civilization?
Since Niggaz With Attitude (NWA) first exploded out of the Los Angeles ghettos in the late ’80s, gangsta rap’s defenders have always stopped short of endorsing the violence, misogyny and drug use that the music describes, while somehow still making a case for listening to it. Even when the message arrives unencumbered by humour, irony or critical distance, music critics have assured listeners that they don’t necessarily have to feel guilty for singing along.
In 1989, NWA had become so vilified, their record label was warned by the FBI that the organization took exception to the group’s notorious call to arms, “Fuck Tha Police.” Three years later, NWA co-founder Dr. Dre released The Chronic, a slick ode to California gang life that ushered in the G-Funk era with infamously foul tracks including “Let Me Ride” (“Bodies being found on Greenleaf / with their fuckin’ heads cut off / Motherfucker I’m Dre”) and “Bitches Ain’t Shit.” Gangsta rap was still controversial in some corners, but by 1992 the Supreme Court had already quashed attempts by law enforcement to ban 2 Live Crew albums. Compared to the censorship battles of the late 1980s, The Chronic was received with relatively little outrage and by the end of the decade it was being widely acknowledged as one of the best albums of its kind. In 2004, Entertainment Weekly called it the sixth Best Hip-Hop Album of All Time; Rolling Stone recently ranked it at number 137 on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It has been near-universally praised for its innovation, as well as quietly chastised for its harrowing content. In the 2003 anthology Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide (ECW Press), hip-hop critic Oliver Wang notes the album’s violence and “inexcusable misogyny,” yet goes on to describe it as “a romanticized ideal of what living (and dying) in LA is all about, seeped in a decadent, fabulous fantasy…. It seems perverse to use a word like ‘idyllic’ to describe the portrait that Dre paints on the album—a world where death and violence is a built-in part of living—but The Chronic is undeniably celebratory.”
Even after 14 years, the sinuous brand of bass-heavy funk topped with smatterings of gun- and girl-talk that Dre pioneered on The Chronic still largely forms the blueprint for an album like 50 Cent’s The Massacre. There are menacing, violent songs including the Dr. Dre-co-produced “Gunz Come Out” (“Hard niggas tend to soften up when that lead touch ’em / You cut ’em up once, they keep fightin’ / Fuck it, just keep cuttin’ ’em”), as well as the requisite misogyny in songs like “Get In My Car” (“I got no pick up lines / I stay on da grind / I tell da hoes all da time / Bitch, get in my car”). Not every song on The Massacre parallels the Chronic template—“Disco Inferno” and the Scott Storch-produced “Candy Shop” are pure club tracks, designed to appeal to a mainstream yet gangsta-friendly audience that didn’t exist in 1992. (It took another year for Dr. Dre and protégé Snoop Dogg to crack open that particular market, with “Gin And Juice” and “Who Am I? (What’s My Name)?” from the latter’s breakthrough album Doggystyle, forever bridging the gap between teenyboppers and tough guys.) For the most part, The Chronic remains the standard by which gangsta rap is judged, and although hardly anyone examining the two would argue that The Massacre is a superior album, the two are definitely in the same ballpark—where the pennants of critical validation still proudly fly.
It’s probably not a coincidence that before the name 50 Cent became every politician and pundit’s shorthand for devil music, the previous holder of the title was yet another Dr. Dre protégé, Eminem. Unlike 50 Cent, Eminem had a number of defenders in the media who argued that the sophistication of his lyrics placed him above the pack. When then-Attorney General of Ontario Jim Flaherty tried to ban him from performing at the SkyDome in 2000, both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail were quick to leap to his defence. Writing in the Star, pop music critic Vit Wagner observed Eminem’s tendency to “refer to women pejoratively,” but ultimately concluded that the album’s status as “art” excused it to some degree.
“Listen closely to the [Marshall Mathers LP] half a dozen times,” wrote Wagner, “and there is but one irrefutable conclusion: The Marshall Mathers LP is art—or, at the very least, is imbued with many of art’s attributes. It is challenging, confrontational, purposeful, fascinating and, yes, intentionally profane. It also happens to have a great beat. And that’s a lot more than can be said for most of the bland, generic pap cresting the charts these days.”
Because Eminem manipulates his identity and offers a meta-narrative on the relative profanity of his content, Wagner argued, his work is more defensible than an artist who simply presents violence and misogyny without comment. And, as with The Chronic, it’s hard to argue with beats this dope.
An editorial in the Globe and Mail was less forgiving, but conceded that Eminem’s music was worth arguing about. “The issue is free speech, and it goes to the heart of our democratic process. Mr. Mathers’s lyrics are sick-making; they express an odious hatred of women. But if free speech means anything, he has the right to sing them—just as the rest of us have the right to listen to them, vigorously debate them and talk about them with our children.”
Compare this with the same point, made in the Globe and Mail’s 2005 editorial about 50 Cent: “We may properly disdain the values and subculture that is celebrated in what passes for 50 Cent’s music. We may lament his deleterious influence on the young. There is excellent cause for people to boycott his show and his products, and to urge others to do so. But whatever the degree of toxicity in his act, a free and democratic society must, with the exception of direct incitement to violence, tolerate the expression of ideas it finds objectionable. To bar entry to Curtis Jackson would be an unfortunate step.”
In the former, Eminem’s music can be listened to and enjoyed, provided that the audience is made aware of its problematic content. In the latter, 50 Cent’s music is a social evil that must be tolerated, but never enjoyed.
This disparity is not new, nor is it unique to hip hop. Since the minstrel era, black artists have often faced an initial period of demonization, and later, posthumous canonization by a member of a privileged white elite, a figure that Norman Mailer once famously dubbed the “White Negro.” The anthology Everything But The Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture contains an essay by Carl Hancock Rux whose title, “Eminem: The New White Negro,” recalls Mailer’s original term and explains how white artists from Dada and Surrealism onwards have embraced black culture’s alleged savagery as a way of distinguishing themselves from their own society, while using certain intellectual conceits to re-emphasize their whiteness.
Rux calls hip hop “a means of expressing the social realities of African-American urbanity,” but observes that social realities such as gang violence are not what Eminem is primarily trying to express. “The classic hip-hop realism he was initially influenced by when he first studied the style of Naughty By Nature and Nas has been replaced by his own brand of contemporary Surrealism that abstracts and exaggerates hip-hop lore more so than any of his authentic heroes or contemporaries dare try…. Niggaz [sic] may talk bad about bitches and they baby’s mama—Eminem brutally murders his.” Eminem takes gangsta rap’s violent power fantasies and stretches them beyond the limits of realism, justifying his departure from realism by manipulating his identity. Rux compares Eminem to the Surrealist movement, describing both as having “achieved narcissism born to overwhelm self-loathing and inherent existentialism,” and notes that Eminem “uses the vernacular of black hip-hop culture, as well as the psychoanalytical vernacular of the white intellectual.” The foremost example of this is “Stan,” a song from The Marshall Mathers LP. “Stan” sees Eminem narrating the story of one of his own deranged fans, who kills his girlfriend in exactly the same way that Eminem himself described killing his girlfriend in “97’ Bonnie & Clyde,” a track from his previous album. Both songs have been frequently cited by critics such as Wagner as examples of Eminem’s sophistication, a trait rarely attributed to black artists whose lyrics are similarly violent and sexually graphic.
50 Cent has demonstrated little interest in manipulating his identity or in departing from gangsta rap’s realist clichés, but is he less sophisticated than Eminem? If Eminem’s highbrow calling card is “Stan,” then 50’s corresponding stab at literary credibility is The Massacre’s “A Baltimore Love Thing,” a harrowing tale of drug addiction told in the first person. Fiddy casts the addict’s relationship to the drug as an abusive one, narrating with himself playing the role of heroin itself. He clearly relishes the evil of his role, sweet-talking his paramour when she tries to quit him (“Girl, I’m missing you, come and see me soon”), and shouting, “You fat bitch, don’t ever try that again!” when she relapses. The extended metaphor works hard, bringing a touch of humanity to the alien landscape of the addicted mind, and poignantly shedding some light on the powerful forces that can keep someone in an abusive relationship. The New York Times’ pop critic, Kelefa Sanneh, calls the song “clever and unexpected,” pointing out how subversive it is for someone like 50—who plays the seductive Don Juan in the vast majority of his radio hits—to take on an abusive role and to perform it so convincingly.
Critical reaction to The Massacre was mixed, but even critics dismissing 50’s flow as “plodding” and “pedestrian” observed the complexity of “Baltimore Love Thing.” Some even grudgingly acknowleded that 50’s popularity may be due to more than simply his ability to survive getting shot.
The Canadian media evidently believes that whatever nuances 50 Cent’s music may have, his fans are incapable of perceiving them. And as the bodies continue to mount, the press has begun to drop their half-hearted attempts at defending him.
On December 29, three days after the Boxing Day shootout on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto that left several innocent bystanders injured and one dead, the Globe and Mail returned to the subject of 50 Cent and his supposed influence on the meteoric rise in Toronto’s gun violence.
“Go to Toronto’s Yonge Street shopping area on any given day, and you will find groups of tough-looking young men,” began the Globe and Mail editorial. “Their dress is the dress of the urban ghetto culture: puffy down jackets, baseball caps or tuques, baggy pants, expensive running shoes. The tunes on their music players glorify violence and demean women. They speak in the same slang you might find on the streets of inner-city Chicago or Detroit. Their role models are ‘gangsta’ rappers like 50 Cent.”
The editorial went on to address whether violence in pop culture influences real-life violence, but it did not elaborate on what Yonge Street’s young men in baggy pants have to do with the vicious murders that occurred under their watch. No one is asking whether the gunmen in question were 50 Cent fans, least of all the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star (whose initial report on the shooting mentioned the McTeague-50 Cent controversy below the fold). If the media are to be believed, anyone who listens to 50 Cent, who dresses a certain way and who conforms to the hip-hop strawman that the media are more than happy to propagate, must be as much of a thug as the rapper himself. They are incapable of distinguishing the subtleties that non-hip-hoppers and Eminem fans are capable of perceiving. We can tell the difference between reality and fantasy; they can’t.
Of course the killers were 50 Cent fans. They had to be—just look at their pants.
