Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello. Welcome to the call like I see it podcast.
I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call like I see it, we're going to discuss the 50th anniversary of hip hop, both generally and in the context of a recent documentary that's airing on Hulu right now that featured artists and contributors to the culture and, you know, with people from Lola Brook to e 40, you know, to the locks to Mc light, you know, so all, you know, generations and, you know, just all types of people. So it was pretty interesting documentary. And later on, we're going to react to the effort. You know, in another hip hop related, you know, we're going to react to an effort that prosecutors are using the. The lyrics of young thug on a rapper to as far as prosecuting his case. And, you know, fat Joe had a pretty interesting reaction to that and just kind of real. We'll react to that.
Joining me today is a man who knows how to make people feel something. Tunde ogun lana tunde. Are you ready to make him say, uh.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Uh.
That's about as much as you'll get out of me?
[00:01:22] Speaker A: I said, you supposed to make him say that?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Okay. You ain't supposed to say it.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Let's have a show.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Now, we're recording this on December 19, 2023. And this year, we've seen much written and recorded about hip hop's 50th anniversary. You know, the creation, so to speak, from 50 years ago being spoken of was back in 1973. And people point to a back to school jam, which was held on August 11, 1973, and it was by DJ Kool Herc. And, you know, this is in the Bronx in New York, and this school, back to school jam had, at minimum, you know, DJ Kool Herc spinning records. And yet, you know, people, you know, dancing b boys, b girls, you know, so to speak, or they're forebears, you know, all in ways that we may find familiar, but along these lines, just, you know, for the. For full context, you know, the culture of hip hop is. Is actually considered to have four elements in addition to, you know, you know, mc'ing or rapping, which we're all accustomed to, and djing as well. There's also breaking, you know, b boys, b girls, breakdancing and graffiti. So, you know, like that. That is pure sense. And. But the, you know, much of the attention, though, you know, goes to the djing and the Mcing. You know, those are the most prominent things from a commercial standpoint. So, you know, I want to just kind of get us started. We'll get to the documentary in a second, but I wanted to get your big picture kind of thoughts, you know, just what kind of stands out to you? Tunde, as we're looking at 50 years of hip hop.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: I'll say it with a smile that I must be getting older.
So. And I say that with a smile and as a joke, because, you know, being 45 years old, hip hop has been part of my whole life. So that's. So I joke and say, oh, it's fifties. That means I'm getting older. So, no, and I guess, as I think about it, yeah, it's interesting. You and I actually literally don't know what the world looks like without hip hop. So I think one of the biggest things that stands out, which I know will be part of our discussion today, is really the global influence that hip hop has had and that we have watched from a young age kind of blossom and mushroom out from exactly, like you said, from certain parts of american culture, primarily those that were seen as maybe forgotten and overlooked, you know, inner cities and starting, like you said, in the Bronx and New York at a time in the 1970s when the Bronx had been neglected. And if people go look at videos of the Bronx in the 1970s, there was a lot of it looked like a war zone. The buildings were on fire, there was a lot of dilapidation, and the housing projects were starting to fall apart after having been built, you know, maybe a generation prior. And there was a lot of that kind of, what do we do with these parts of town, especially coming out of the 1960s, and a lot of the tensions that the country had over civil rights. So I think that, to me, is what is interesting about hip hop 50 years later, is that not only its cultural impact on the world, which we'll discuss, but also the fact that it's matured kind of like, kind of like you and I over that period of time. So hip hop's a little grayer than maybe it was back when we were kids.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, it wasn't gray at all, you know, then, you know, and that's it now, you know, there, there's a mix of some gray and there's a mix of some. Some youth, you know, so. And obviously, it's, it's still an art form. This primarily seems to be driven by the youth, but, yeah, it's much more diverse, you know, from a maturity standpoint, to me, I would say, actually what stood out the most, what has stood out to the most to me, is how much it's evolved, you know, but part of that is, we're seeing an art form start from scratch. You know, like, if you compare it to another art, you compare it to, you know, like painting or something like that or other even, you know, if you're talking about postmodern, you know, like any, any particular form of an art, you know, like, just it does it. We haven't seen a lot of other art forms change that much over the last 50 years, you know, versus where it. Where it was to where it is and then all the things in between. And so, I mean, that is being able to see something start from scratch and then become something so big is remarkable in itself. And, you know, I think that one of the things that really, if you, when you think about it, stands out about that is how technology plays a role in this. If hip hop started now, for example, where information is communicated over large distances so easily, you wouldn't probably, you probably wouldn't have distinct styles evolve the way that you did. You know, where you had, you know, if you go back in the eighties and the nineties, you had, you know, East coast hip hop had a sound. West coast hip hop had a sound. South comes in with its own sound, like. And then there's within the south, there's, you know, there's the Houston sound, there's the Memphis sound, like, there's the Atlanta sound, you know, different things like that. And so on the West coast, there's the Bay Area, there's la. These are all distinct sounds, you know. And then, of course, in New York, you know, you could, the discerning eye, you know, could hear differences between Brooklyn and the Bronx, you know. So to me, like it that it happened when it did allowed for it to kind of evolve separately for a while. I'm kind of in a true evolution sense, you know, like animals that are on different continents, that, you know, that are separated, can evolve away from each other a little bit and create their own distinctions. And then, you know, like, when it came back together, so to speak, on a more national scale, it wasn't very, you know, it wasn't all the same thing. There were a lot of different unique styles. And then what that allowed for is for things to get blended, you know, and things to even allow for even more creativity. So, you know, it, it's actually, it's fortuitous in the sense, you know, technology allowed for the creation of the art, you know, in terms of, you know, the records being available, you know, on a large scale and so forth. But they gave it enough space to kind of incubate in various places and. And be developed in different ways in various places, which I think creates a more full art form today.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it's an interesting.
Bringing in some darwinism into.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Platypus, you know, like, on one side, I know elephants.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: That's why I get nerdy with it. It's the finches on the Galapagos Islands versus the mainland.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: But so can we have a debate of, is, was hip hop created by intelligent design?
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah, intelligent design.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Hold on. Yeah, let's not go on a tangent.
But that's. No, but it's a great point because, look, there's a lot of interesting things to pull out of that, right? I mean, number one, and it is one of the, we hear so many people complain about our country in general, right. Americans that are so down on our own nation. But one of the beautiful things about our nation is our huge geographic and cultural diversity within the country. So you speak well to that, that hip hop is an art form, and especially the fact that there was enough technology to create the music, which I know we'll get into in terms of the electronics and where microchips and processing was going and how it affected music and as well as things like radio and eight track tapes and cassettes and records. But there wasn't so much, like now, where this stuff got out and could be, you know, it's kind of almost like the sapiens unification theory, that everybody would have figured this out together en masse and the sounds wouldn't have been as distinct, because to your point, just doing the reading, we saw DJ Kool Herc, who's credited with being the initial guy who started hip hop at the party in the Bronx in August of 1973, so on and so forth.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: But the first, as far as creation myths go, that is. I mean, I say myth, not to say that it's not true, but I.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Want to get on what it is.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: But that's a really cool one, I would think.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think we should definitely revisit that. But for the sake of just my comments here, just. It wasn't till 1979 that you had the first rap album or hip hop album played on the radio. Yeah. And actually, like. Yeah, like a chart and actually an album produced. So for six years, this art form was allowed to just incubate in that culture in the Bronx. And then I'm sure it probably spread a little bit, maybe in the northeast and all that, and down to maybe Washington, DC. But, and like you're saying these, these, these cultures became distinct. And in preparing for the day. It reminded me when I read about that a lot, like, which is also part of american cultural history, the blues. And it reminded me of country music because in a different but similar way, that type of music was also started by a certain class of people that generally were seen as the lower class of society in certain geographical and cultural pockets of the country. But when it spread to other parts of the country, you also had those changes. Like, country, like you're saying in Memphis, is different maybe than country or blues in Mississippi, even though they're of the same genre. So it's a very interesting observation in terms of how our culture impacted the genre.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, and that's going to be more difficult now. I mean, it's not impossible because you still got people, you know, on the grind, you know, and performing in clubs and, you know, developing sounds in different areas, but because everything goes to, whether it be tick tock, you know, Soundcloud or whatever, it. There is more national sounds, so to speak, or sounds that, you know, like the, the things that will be the less individual, you know. And that's kind of the biggest thing I said about that technology and just, you know, just to tie it up the. The rappers delight, you know, rappers delight, you know, with sugar, hey, Sugar Hill gang, 1979 being the first song that you referenced the charts, you know, gets on the charts and really introduces the, the world to more, you know, to hip hop, so to speak. So, yeah, that's, that's a nice incubation period. And then even from there, you know, like, you start ramping up in the eighties and, you know, becoming a commercial behemoth. Really doesn't happen until the nineties, you know, and so, like, but it's seeing the evolution, though, you know, is just one. And that that's, this is one where we talk about living memory sometimes. Like, we're in the, you know, this kind of generation x is kind of the generation that it really took hip hop and pushed it, you know, into society like that. And then now we've seen, it's multi generational in the way that now we've seen multiple generations take a crack at it and, you know, all pushing it to different areas or pushing it to different extents. So, you know, another thing, like, we now we, we watched, you know, a documentary. We looked, we wanted to kind of see what the culture was saying about the 50th anniversary. So there's a documentary where we'll put in the show notes. You know, we got it from Hulu. And so it's hip hop, you know, hip hop at 50 rhythms, rhymes, and reflections. And this is, it was, I think, spearheaded, spearheaded by Angie Martinez. But, you know, it had many, many, many contributors. And, I mean, it was, I thought, did a good job of bringing in different perspectives, and they talked about, like, four different planks in it, you know, social justice, women empowerment, financial literacy, and mental health, you know, in terms of how those things were present and or had evolved in hip hop, and then also just had a larger conversation about hip hop within the context of that. So which one of these or a couple of these, you know, discussions that were. Had these roundtables that they had with, again, you know, prominent artists or executives or social, you know, social organizers, whatever, which of these themes cartier your attention the most?
[00:13:00] Speaker B: I think all the four topics in terms of social justice, women empowerment, financial literacy, and mental health, I thought they were kind of on par with each other, so I can't say one stood out. The only one that I came into thinking about before the documentary was just a financial part, kind of. Okay, we all know that, like you said, hip hop started at zero, and now we have literally people that have become billionaires from the hip hop industry and being successful. So I had thought about that. I never really thought to focus on the inclusion of women early in hip hop and the contrast that that has and the positive kind of influence of female artists in contract with some of what we all kind of see as misogyny and the way that some men talk and treat women in the culture as well. So I found that an interesting contrast, something great that they. That they highlighted, which, by the way.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Isn'T something that's limited to hip hop. You know, that's something that you can point to the larger american culture, you know, and in terms of how, like many would say, oh, hip hop is very misogynistic, and it has been over times, but in many respects, hip hop is kind of mirrored the misogyny of the larger american culture.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's that you have.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: This lane of women empowerment specifically, and where women now are essentially as prominent as men in terms of the actual faces of hip hop as. I mean, that's something that. Where you're showing progress there that's on par or advanced beyond that of the american society at large.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that's a great point. I mean, it just reflects american society. And that's another thing that really, to me, hip hop culture, like, the whole evolution of hip hop, is so american.
If I can say it that way. It's a great reflection of not only american culture, but I think who we as Americans believe we are in terms of the entrepreneurial spirit. And like you said, each of those.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: Items that we hit on in the documentary. Yeah, hip hop, it reflects and it kind of pushes american culture.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's what I was going to say. The whole part about the women is a great reflection of that. And so. But just to finish off is the social justice. I mean, I understand it, but I see it more clear now, which we'll discuss. And then the mental health part, I was also.
I thought of a term here. I was smitten by it, if I can say that, because I just, like, I was like, wow, that's actually, I never thought of that. But the discussion of mental health today was happening in hip hop without hip hop realizing it back in the eighties, all the way through now. So I just thought those four all had a very interesting, you know, just part of the discussion. I don't know if there was one that I could say to me, I.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Would say there were all of them. Yeah, we're worthwhile and everything like that. You were just talking about the mental health. The thing that was interesting to me about the mental health piece, and you said how this has been kind of interwoven in, you know, but never, it was never the thing that people made it. Like, it wasn't made out to be about this, but it was just in the art form, you know, constantly, whether it be going back to songs like mind paint tricks on you, you know, anything like that. Like, just, it's always been around. It is just that. It's an art, you know, like, it. And art forms are oftentimes forms of expression of emotion and expression of bearing soul and so forth like that. So it's not a surprise that an art form would embrace or expose, bring forth mental health thoughts, conversations before society at large was comfortable with it. Because art is supposed to do that to us. It's supposed to get us talking about or thinking about things before we might do it on our own, you know, our kind of more linear minds, so to speak. The art. Art minds are supposed to take us there. So I thought, you know, like, just the acknowledgement that it did, it was cool. But I would say, like, that almost would be too expected.
I want to comment, though, on the social justice aspect of it, because so much of hip hop has been, you know, like, it was almost like, for a while, for a time, you know, like, the social justice aspect was almost the heartbeat of it in the sense that the before social media you know, there was, and the documentary got into this, like the window into what was happening outside of your own community. If things weren't being covered on, on the network news, that could be hip hop, you know, in terms of, you know, like how, how people were being treated, you know, whether it be some of the same things we think, themes we think about today as far as, you know, issues with police, things with policing and communities and so forth. These things were being talked about in, in hip hop, and but they weren't necessarily being covered in the news in the same way. And there was no TikTok, you know, Facebook, anything like that, where people were just, we're just, people were publishing and say, hey, look, look with this. Look what just happened here or something like that. So it was a window into what America in general found to be a very uncomfortable conversation, but was something that needed to be, that shouldn't be, I should say, plate swept under the rug and something that was kept quiet, which it was able to do for so much, so much time, you know, so hip hop was the beginning of kind of pushing that envelope. It also, you know, though, I mean, it, there, there was that aspect, and then there's also the aspect where people would say it romanticized certain things as well, which, again, as an expression, as an art form, it's going to do that as well. You know, like, it's not, you're not going to necessarily look at the artist and say, the artist is going to always see whatever is around them if it may not be the best thing in the world, and just stick their hands in their pocket and look down as, oh, yeah, you know, like, sometimes you are gonna glorify, you know, just for your own sanity, so to speak. So. But I think that that social justice piece, though, you know, it's something that you can always look from the beginning, you know, going back, you know, like they pointed to the message 1982, grandmaster flag, just saying how, you know, that the video music video 1982 ended with the guys getting arrested, you know, like, no, I didn't do it. I didn't do anything, you know, type of thing. And, you know, like, through the present, that's been like a constant drumbeat, you know, that hasn't been all of hip hop, but it's been something that's been present and prevalent in hip hop the whole time.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, I mean, look, if we can identify hip hop's 50 years old and began in 1973 and got its legs commercially in the 79 through the early mid eighties, I mean, think about it. 73, you're only five years away from the murder of Doctor Martin Luther King. You still hadn't had all these civil rights laws that we have now passed yet by the early seventies. A lot of those came during the decade of the seventies. So you still had this, you know, people alive in the seventies, obviously were alive in the sixties. So they either were participating in some of the demonstrations and the activity of the sixties, or they were kids and watching their parents or older relations do it. So I do think there is something to be said that, like when you and I were listening to hip hop, there was a much more kind of connection culturally to kind of the social justice movement, so on and so forth than we might have today. When you have a 20 year old rapper that was born in the year 2023, after a lot of the accomplishments of that hard work in the sixties had already started to come to fruition.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: 2003, yeah, 23, sorry, they were 2023.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: They'D be 2020 days old. So sorry. Thank you.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: Well, but it's a different struggle, though, so to speak, and we've talked about it.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Let me speak to that.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Let me say just real quick, because it's a different struggle because this is where, like, what you're saying more so is that they just lack the contact, they may lack the context of this whole time versus, you know, just looking at it and saying, everything that's happened in the last ten years is all there is to know.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But I just want to go back to kind of that beginning line through maybe the first 30 years, because where I saw some, some similarities with country music, actually, because to your point, as you discussed earlier, about what people were seeing, and if it wasn't on the nightly news, people could turn on, you know, a rap album and hear what's going on the streets, so on and so forth. It reminded me in that way of country, because country has been seen as kind of the working class man's music, and he's telling his story about what's going on. You know, my wife left, my dog died, you know, I'm drinking a beer, you know, like, it's like this again, it's the pain of living in certain ways in our society.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: So we gotta have a show where you do the whole show and that, with that. That'd be awesome, that accent.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: I wouldn't want to offend anyone, that twang.
But the thing is, is that, so here's where I saw some differences, because it's an interesting point, because why to me, hip hop so american, because it also has the stamp on it that America refuses to address, which is our racial relations and some of that history. Right? So if we look at what did hip hop sort of represent at the beginning was the demise of the working class and the middle class. Because if we look at from, like, as I thought about this with the social justice, I mean, this is galaxy brain stuff in a bit. And people might have to go do their own reading on this. But it's well documented in the fifties and sixties, a lot of black neighborhoods in urban areas that were very affluent and wealthy were destroyed via eminent domain. We live in south Florida. There's an area in Miami called Overtown which was seen as kind of like the Harlem of Miami. And what happens is, by eminent domain, they put a highway through it. And there was, there's well documented that this was done on purpose back then that just the system said, you know, we gotta put stuff somewhere. And we're, oh, there's a black neighborhood. Let's just put it there. So no one's ever really discussed that publicly. But hip hop came out of those ashes. And what you also had then next in the seventies was the hollowing out of the black working class jobs in the urban areas. So areas like Rockford, Illinois, or areas where you're from in Ohio, James, became the Rust belt first in the black community, where they started shipping those jobs overseas. So by the seventies into the eighties, you had a lot of unemployment, homelessness, and then what did you have? A new drug called crack.
And we started seeing the stereotypes of things like crack babies and all that, which has all been disappointed.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Even in the seventies, though, you had heroin. You know, you had heroin coming around and, you know, cocaine, crack in the. More in the eighties, but yeah, yeah.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: And the reason I say it made me realize similar to country is a lot of the discussions and songs that were coming out of hip hop in that era, seventies through the nineties, was about the pain and that struggle. And I look at it, how did our society treat those people? They treated them like they had a moral failing. And I kind of looked at contrast. Fast forward one generation to the early two thousands to now.
It's like that type of environment has hit white America, unfortunately, where we have a lot of, you know, we've seen the hollowing out of everybody's working class and middle class jobs. And what happened in the white community in the last 20 years was the opioid crisis. But again, the country didn't attack that group and say, well, you guys just have a moral failing and all that. The country actually said, you know what? This opioid abuse seems like a healthcare crisis, and it's a crisis driven by people not having something to look forward to in their future. So, again, I feel like hip hop was an early indicator of where the society was going, and it's like a canary in the coal mine. But because it was in inner cities with black people, no one really said, hey, you know, we should be paying attention to that. And it took two generations for the country to say, hey, you know, maybe we got to do something about this. Labor markets, drugs, things like that.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Well, I mean, but the art form, you know, actually demanded attention of it to some degree. Now, whether there was empathy for it, you know, like, or whether there was an open ear, so to speak, is another story. But just to transition from that, I did want to mention also the financial piece, because you mentioned, you know, hip hop as birth billionaires. And I think one of the key distinction there is that you're talking about not amongst the. The people who are already in the ownership of ever everything, you know, the people who were owning the. The record labels or whatever, but actually, amongst the. The participants, you know, the artists, so to speak, were able to progressively get more and more. And I think that's something. And for hip hop, that has pioneered, you know, in terms of pushing the envelope for, you know, at a different time period, you know, they talked about how, you know, like, you were. Artists were more beholden to record labels and so forth to be able to get their information, their music out, you know, and, you know, you look at. I mean, it's the part of the documentary that we watched talked about the locks and, you know, in their dispute with Diddy and bad boy records in terms of, you know, like, the contract they signed, I talked about, you know, like, these are standard contracts that we signed. And so, yeah, you go back to the nineties. The standard contract was the artist giving away everything and bucking against that was the. Did the masterpiece of the world or the Jay Z's of the world who, you know, basically were able to set up their own mechanisms to maintaining, you know, through their own record labels and the kinds of deals they were doing to not negotiate the. Or to not just sign these standard contracts, which were predatory. They're contracts of adhesions. It's like, look, if you want in, you got to sign this contract that gives me everything, so to speak. And most people coming up don't have leverage to deal with that. So you kind of have to establish yourself first. And then if you go to the record company, once you've already established yourself, then you can negotiate more. And so that kind of blueprint was laid then. Fast forward to now. This is not uncommon, you know, where people can come in to the game through whether it be against tick tock, Soundcloud, whatever it would be with Instagram, with a following, you know, and so when they show up and say, okay, I want to get into music, they're not just saying, oh, you know, please, you know, help me, you know, like, let's get this thing on the radio. It's like, hey, I'm coming in with x number of followers or, you know, people on TikTok. And, you know, so if you want me, here are the terms of my deal. And so it's almost for people who can do it, you know, it's flipped it on its head in terms of who has the leverage in this situation. And so we saw the seeds of that pre social media in hip hop. And so I found that to be pretty interesting just because there's still, you know, like, the way the music industry worked. And it had, it wasn't special to hip hop like that. That's how it worked in the sixties. That's how it worked in the fifties and the seventies and so forth. In terms of, you know, when you sign these record contracts, it was just, you were signing away a lot, and it was very few and far between where an artist was able to get a fair shake on the art that they were creating. So I'm happy that hip hop is associated with, you know, that aspect of it. So, final thoughts? I don't know if you want to get the mental health or, you know, anything, but let's get.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: No, I think just some final thoughts on just what you just said. I think, yeah, that just like, like we're saying that hip hop is a microcosm reflects so well the kind of just the american spirit of capitalism. I thought of a quote as you're talking, which I'll say here is from Jay Z's, one of his albums. And he says, I came into the game 100 grand strong, nine, to be exact, from grinding g packs. And that's his saying. He said, I came into rapping already with 900 grand because I was selling drugs. And I've read a lot of things that there's just a lot of truth to that. It wasn't just boasting and making it up. So the idea is that a lot of guys were already entrepreneurial minded. I mean, I'm not trying to sit here saying, advocating for selling drugs. It's a good way to be an entrepreneur. But I'm just saying, the mindset of the hustle, that's something that hip hop really embraced. And, like you're saying there's certain guys.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: Where there's not just the hustle, but the hustle with, with the financial component in mind, because many artists hustle.
[00:28:56] Speaker B: That's what I mean by the hustle.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: You know, to make the music. You know, like, they're, they're grinding. They're grinding and to make the music, and it's like, I'll just let somebody else worry about the money. And that's a, that's a bad setup, because those guys. Money are not gonna. Not gonna be sitting there just handing it to you. You know, that Jay Z on the hook.
[00:29:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Like Jay Z, doctor Dre, Diddy, these kind of the early guys, that pioneer guys, I started making the real money, to me, remind me of, like, the guys that we've done shows on from the gilded age, like Vanderbilt or Rockefeller and JP Morgan, meaning they went out and we're like, no, I'm gonna take this. You know, and they saw something that.
[00:29:31] Speaker A: Those are the guys, really, those are the guys that were the most well known and most successful, so to speak. But the forebears for that, you know, with the masterpiece, and then the e. Like, there were people before they saw that example and then took it to another level.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And just like the. The gilded age guys, like we mentioned that the industrialists, there was also a whole kind of scaffolding of professionals below them that I'm sure did very well. These guys got lawyers, accountants, and they're bringing these guys all with them. And then the last piece on the mental health side, I thought, again, was very interesting. Without realizing it, these guys were telling stories. And again, I keep bringing back reminds me of country or the blues, the emotional plight and the difficulty of life when you're at the bottom of a society and the ability to tell that narrative. And that's why I say, in such an american way, both country and hip hop represent very similarities there, but then are divided because of how we culturally divide ourselves via race. So, again, like many things in our country, there's a lot more similarity between us, all of us culturally, but we don't see that because of our culture of, in America, of race. So that, to me, was interesting. And that goes back to a little bit what we mentioned earlier about the drugs and the kind of scene in the eighties where when you listen to a song like mind playing tricks on me, by ghetto boys.
Like, now that we're adults and we can kind of reflect with a little bit of maturity and understanding mental health and things like that, it's like, yeah, growing up in an area where you're in public housing where there's drug use and gang violence right outside your door every day and where the police kind of control the situation. And, I mean, you know, it's well documented now through video and technology that the police in certain inner city communities play more of an authoritarian role and not a protect and serve role.
One can assume that kids growing up in that environment might have some mental health issues. So that's, you know, to me, that was why that stood out to me a lot that I never thought.
[00:31:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, and just poverty in social is difficult, you know, poverty in general. But, I mean, I think that not for nothing, I mean, the, it's a compelling story arc, so to speak. You know, like the, you know, starting, you know, low and then, you know, trying to build yourself up. I mean, that's, you look at, you know, if you look at movies, you know, for example, just our books, like, a lot of them have an arc where someone starts with a difficulty and then works to overcome that and so forth. And so that can be captivating. And so that hip hop had that to tap into readily. You know, I'm sure it was helpful in terms of the development and the popularity of the art form. So. But, you know, like, I want to, the last thing I want to talk about with this is just that we know that art reflects culture, and but art also changes culture. You know, like, so hip hop, you know, in itself is, you know, something that has been, you know, evolved out of culture that exists and then also affected the culture that it's been in. And so what's most notable to you about how hip hop has affected our culture and also, you know, like, how the larger culture has affected hip hop?
[00:32:37] Speaker B: That's a good question because as you're asking the question, I'm looking at myself in a little box with a Wu Tang clan t shirt on.
And as you're talking, it makes me realize, yeah, I don't know if I'd ever gotten into, like, subtitled Karate movies when I was a teenager, had it not been for these guys.
So it's kind of like, it's interesting because, remember, those guys were older than us, so they grew up in the seventies, early eighties. So they brought to our generation the culture of the seventies between blaxploitation films and some of those illusions as well as things like the martial arts genre and all that. And then, of course, you know, there's stuff being brought today. So I know that it's interesting from that standpoint, culturally, but globally, I think hip hop, it's amazing how I think it went along with the global spread of technology in general, kind of like television, satellite radio, than the Internet, where hip hop became the cool thing for young people in the 1980s and the nineties, while the world was globalizing and connecting from a technological standpoint. So I don't know if it's that hip hop kind of got lucky with where it was in the journey of technology, or if no matter when hip hop started, this would have. Hip hop would have had such an outsized influence. But again, just like I keep bringing it back to hip hop being such a reflection of american culture and just so american, because it's just like we exported Hollywood from the 1930s and forties, and the rest of the world became kind of americanized from watching our movies and television shows. And it's like the last 40 years or so has been the same thing, but through hip hop culture and music. And so let's talk about that.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: And you've referenced that in different times about your time living in Australia.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I moved to Australia in 1991 when I was a teenager. Just my mom remarried, just to explain that one. But, you know, I'm moving into a place on the other side of the world before the Internet came about. And, you know, my classmates were white Aussie kids listening to NWA straight out of Compton and gangsta gangster and those kind of songs. And that, to me, was, it was, first of all, it was cool because at least I felt like I could show up and relate to these kids, at least, you know, we had something in common. So that was cool. And then the second thing was, looking back now as an adult is it was interesting to think about how many australian kids really looked up when were influenced by these black american artists. So I think that's something that I noticed because then I've been to Japan, I've been other parts of the world, and even 25 years ago, hip hop was a big deal in these other.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: Parts of the world.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: So, yeah, I think that's something that we don't recognize as much in America, how much influence that hip hop.
[00:35:26] Speaker A: We just may not pay attention to it, because, like, one of the things, when you listen, when you watch commercials or when you watch, you know, movie trailers or things like that, you, so many of those will be set to a hip hop beat. Or, you know, different things like that. And so that subtle influence right there that it's just like, okay, yeah, this is so a part of the culture, or the culture. You want to be a part of that. If somebody's trying to sell something, they're sticking it to a hip hop beat, you know, or a song from. From whatever. One of the key things about hip hop and its influence on the culture is how it has become and stayed really a music of the youth. And the youth are the ones, oftentimes that push the culture. And so that is something that I don't think that that's luck. I mean, I think that's something about the nature of the art form and who has been doing it historically and who does it now and so forth. But that it maintains that position as the. The kind of the big. The real prominent thing that are a real prominent thing that youth are doing. It has kept it refreshed over time. It hasn't gotten stale, and it's just gotten. It keeps going now. You know, older people look at the younger people like, oh, y'all just mumbling now and things like that. So, I mean, you always have that kind of tension anytime something becomes multi generational. But one of the one interesting thing they brought up in the documentary, as far as how hip hop has influenced culture, though, is that they was mentioned. I think Fat Joe might have said that Obama was the first hip hop president in the sense that he was conversant in hip hop styles or, you know, like, the ways of being in a way that it may have familiarized himself with a lot of people. And, you know, because this is a big country, but people in this country, you know, especially by that time, most people were familiar people, you know, if you were 40 and below at that time, like, you were very familiar with kind of the stylings of hip hop. And so somebody who, in a speech will, you know, knock the dirt off his shoulders, it is kind of, you know, that's. That's a signal. Oh, okay. Yeah, you kind of know where he's going with that. So I think there have been many examples of how hip hop has influenced culture. Now, as far as how the culture has influenced hip hop, I think where that is, is with the youth, because the culture is constantly evolving. And so what the people in what. What the youth was concerned about or doing in 1988 or 1995 is just inherently going to be different than what they're worried about in 2015 or 2023. And so there's always this. Wherever the culture is going now or is now is that hip hop has remained on the forefront of that. But it's also because the people who were doing it 20 or 30 years ago, many of them are still around. It still has a foot there as well. And so the way the culture, like there there creates almost a disconnect, but it's. It's a disconnect in the same way. Like that, that evolution where things can sprout up separately and then you see later on if they merge or if they just stayed under the same umbrella. But the. The culture, hip influencing hip hop, what they talk about now beyond just the. The normal kind of, you know, men and women or, you know, I'm gonna beat somebody up or I'm tougher than this guy. Like that kind of man to man kind of stuff. A lot of the themes, you know, are they've evolved or they. They are. They're. They're more modern in a sense, in a way that doesn't always happen with art forms, that that kind of gets. May get stuck in a certain time period.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think based on what we've already discussed, it explains why. Right? Like, like part of when we said 1988, I mean, I'm just thinking about. Because I was alive and I was listening to hip hop already, right? I remember public enemy, you know, groups like that, NWA. So it was still about this kind of coming out of this struggle and, and black people not feeling like they were still accepted as 100% participants in the system. And I think now is interesting because of the wealth that we discussed that has kind of also followed hip hop, and it's become its own economy, in a sense, or a micro economy within a larger economy.
We don't see a lot of artists coming from the same area of, I'm here to talk about this social justice struggle. Now, that's different from people saying that, you know, I'm coming from the inner city or something like that. But this idea that collectively, we as a culture, as black Americans, have this struggle in that way is definitely not the same as it was back then, and rightfully so, because, you know, my joke, I say integration worked. So at some point, you know, you know, after. After a generation or two of the initial struggle, it will be different. And I think you're right. I thought about that, too, in preparing today and reading all this stuff about how hip hop was always, like, a teenager's movement.
And I was thinking, like, yeah, I'm not a teenager. No. So I'm just an old fart now, just complaining about all the youngsters. It just. It's inevitable.
You just gotta be honest about it.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: And it's funny because I think Nas came out with a new album, like, last year, and he's 50 now, and I was all looking forward to it because I'm like, yeah, it's gonna be the type of hip hop I like. He's gonna do this.
Like, I can't listen to this stuff on the radio. So I feel like someone of my, like, my mom's generation who maybe listened to the Eagles or the Beatles or something back in the sixties or seventies, and they're, like, in the. In the. In the, like, early two thousands, like. Or nineties, man. What's this nirvana stuff, man, and this pearl jam, let's just crap? You know? Like, this isn't the same stuff I grew up with.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: So it's all, you know, I mean, in that. But the thing about hip hop is that it's still. There is room for all of that, you know, and so. And then it'll continue to evolve, you know? And. But I think you raised a good point as far as now, you go back to 1988. It's not everybody that are rapping about that spend a lot of their time or that they're their kind of images to rap about the struggle. I mean, you still had, you know, the ll cool jays of the world or just yet. Like, there were. There was. There was. It was by then, it was diverse as well, so we shouldn't frame it as it was all one thing. But I do think, though, that the. There are new struggles now, though, that certain artists and you, you know, because we're not in the, you know, in that demo of the youth that are pushing the envelope now, we may not see it, but, you know, like, we just had this whole, you know, black lives Matter and, you know, George Floyd and Ferguson, Missouri, and, you know, protests a few years ago, you know, like, so it's not like the social justice struggle has just, oh, it's all good now. You know what I'm saying? Like, oh, we're just skipping along the road. Everybody, you know, like, that stuff is still there, and that stuff is still reflected in hip hop, you know? But what I do think is that commercially, it seemed like the, you know, a lot of, like, the NWas and the public enemies of the world were much more prominent.
If you go back then, and maybe that's. There could be a lot of different reasons for that. I don't. I don't know why that is, but they were a lot more prominent, whereas now, in this now. Well, maybe one of the reasons is, you know, again, it's homogenized. You know, like there is a general sound of hip hop because everything's been kind of blended together, and you don't have, you know, as much people isolated and creating on their own without any influence from, from this part of the country or that part of the country or this style or that style. What's commercial is less of that. What's commercial is almost, it's become, the commercial stuff has become more cookie cutter over time as opposed to things that may just catch on because they're either pushed, you know, by a record label. You know, I'm not, I'm not trying to present some kind of romanticized version of what happened in 1992, but, or, you know, it might have just caught on, on the radio, you know, but then algorithms, you know, like, algorithms are also determine what we see, what we, what we watch, or, you know, what we see, what we hear, what we like, because it may be done over and over and over again and influencers, you know, like tastemakers, so to speak, which are more dispersed now. It's not just somebody sitting in a record label room deciding what's going to be. What are we going to hit the public with. You know, it's not just that, like, it's, it's more democratic in a sense, but also it's less democratic in the sense that we got machines, you know, these algorithms making decisions for us as far as what we're gonna see. So all of that stuff plays a role.
But, you know, I don't think we can say that it's less conscious now. I can say that the conscious stuff is probably less prominent.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, I agree with you, I think. But that's where, to me, it's, it's, it's all that kind of train from the sixties and that influence on the culture to now. Right, because, and you make a good point, and I'm glad you said that because I don't want to make it appear to someone that's not immersed in the culture like we've been, that somehow hip hop in the seventies through the nineties was all about, you know, this kind of like, the struggle and all these things that were all kind of like, you know, very serious, but also maybe, you know, discussed in rap songs. Rap was always a big part of it was about having a good time, partying, having fun, the whole breakdance movement.
And it was actually started. I mean, I think it's important for us to say, just note this, that hip hop was started as a positive way for young people to get their energy up. Breakdancing in New York replaced gang fights, and that was the community itself made all that happen. So instead of, you know, two rival gangs having 20 guys going to bludgeon each other to death in the back of an alley, they would decide, hey, let's have a break dance battle. Kind of like a duel back in the day. You know, let's but not kill each other. Let's just see who's got the better dances. And so, and unfortunately, you know, some of those, you know, later on did turn into gangs that decided that they didn't want to. Again, like we say, war is politics by another means. They no longer wanted to break dance it off, and they just started getting violent again. I mean, that's kind of the regular human part of certain things. But this idea that it was the conscious rap was also, and by conscious, I mean, people that were really putting an effort to be very thoughtful in their rhymes about what they saw in their society and the culture, as opposed to, let's say, gangsta rap, which did maybe reflect what was going on out in the street, but did it in a much more vulgar way and was.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: Purposefully more full of embellishment for art. It's art if you want a news reporter to tell you exactly what happened, that's different than going to a artist. For them to tell you an artist is going to try to get a reaction, a reaction out of you, try to get emotion out of you and not necessarily try to give you the play by play. Exactly. And so, actually, our second topic we're going to discuss goes along these lines. I want might as well, you know, we might as well jump into it. What, basically, over the past few weeks, we've seen they come out that prosecutors. And this deals with, you know, moving past just the 50th anniversary of hip hop, we're going to talk about a hip hop story. And prosecutors, there's a rapper, young thug, and he's being prosecuted right now. And the prosecutors want to use his lyrics in his songs to, as part of their case, just, you know, just to try to convict the guy. And we saw Fat Joe, who is a rapper, been out there for 30 years, you know, and he came out and was saying, this is, this is crazy. And, you know, like, his, his money quote, you know, was 95% of what I've said in my raps is, you know, not truthful. So, you know, 95% of my rat, you know, my songs, you know, contain stuff that's not truthful, so, you know, it. That catches the headline.
[00:47:09] Speaker B: But.
[00:47:09] Speaker A: So what do you think about both the effort, you know, that the prosecutors have, which is that this isn't the first time, you know, this is something that was actually, we. This was talked about a lot in the nineties, you know, like whether, you know, with different artists, you know, Tupac, whatever. Like, we talked with this. This came up before, but this effort by prosecutors to use lyrics against him, and then fat Joe coming back and, you know, kind of trying to lay the gauntlet down and saying, hey, this trying to show how ridiculous this might be.
[00:47:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I find that as potentially another reflection of our american culture, because to your point, I mean, I'm not going to say hip hop's the only art form or kind of modern, just cultural thing that's been targeted this way by the justice system at times because there could be others that I'm just ignorant to. But to your point, I remember when we were kids. I'm talking about, like, 25, 30 years ago, actually, probably more like 30, because Tupac was killed in 1996. So I remember when he was younger, in his rap career in the early nineties, some guy had shot a police officer that had. This guy had nothing to do with Tupac, but he claimed in court as a way to defend himself. I don't think it worked, but that he had been listening to Tupac songs while he was driving, and that's why, when the cop pulled him over, he had lost his mind and killed his cop. So the idea of using rap lyrics in trying to either get out of something or accuse somebody or something in the justice system isn't new. And the reason why I said it, again reminds me as a reflection of kind of just the way american culture has been. As much as some people don't want to address this is because I look at it, that we don't assume that when Arnold Schwarzenegger, you and I were growing up and watching his movies like Commando or whatever, the Terminator, that as a human being, he really behaved like that. He just walked around into buildings and started shooting people. We knew that he was an actor, right? Yeah.
[00:49:14] Speaker A: Or, you know, Marlon Brando, you know, the godfather and all that, you know.
[00:49:19] Speaker B: That even to music like the heavy metal and death metal of the eighties and nineties, where people were talking about, you know, drinking blood and, you know, Ozzy Osbourne bit ahead of a bad office at one of his concerts. I mean, you know, these guys behaved in a very, you know, vulgar way. Themselves. But. But people didn't take those lyrics and say, well, I think he was drinking blood. Let's go take him to court and see if. Let's get him on the case.
No, but what I'm saying is actually using it in a court case. And my point is just saying that it seems that this case is where. And this is why I don't want to be too stereotype, especially not being in a case. But from the outside, I'll say, I'll discuss it.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:50:02] Speaker B: It looks like here's a young black kid in his twenties that's being accused of something. And in order to make the case work, now they're gonna start using everything, including his lyrics, and not allow him that deference of freedom of speech because he's an artist. To say, no, I don't actually live like this every day I'm performing as an artist. Just like, if I painted a canvas of a guy stabbing another guy, doesn't mean I did that myself. I'm just an artist painting a canvas. So I think that's what I mean by this american thing, that it's just the demographic of who this guy is makes it interesting. I've never heard of a court case taking someone who's known to be an artist and then taking their art and saying, well, we're gonna apply this and assume that's how you are with the rest of your whole life. Cause that means every actor in every action movie gotta go to jail.
[00:50:53] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things going on there. You know, like prosecutors. I mean. Cause Fat Joe was saying, even like, prosecutors know that this is ridiculous. And, you know, like, so one of the things that's going on is that they're, the prosecutors are purposefully trying to play on the bias with what they believe the biases of the jury will be. You know, like, they. So they're like, okay, yeah. Whether or not we actually think this, we're trying to win, you know, that's kind of that zero sum game, which is not good. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but I think there is a piece about this that makes it a little bit more in depth of a story. And that part of hip hop, and I mentioned this to you offline, but, like, part of hip hop is about what some. Not all hip hop, but certain aspects of hip hop, whether when we saw the gangster rap and stuff like that, or just other different types of the art, is about selling authenticity in yourself. You know, it's about that oh, yeah. I really am like this, you know, like, and so, therefore, I'm dangerous, and so, therefore, that makes me more marketable and so forth. That doesn't have to be true. But you are trying to sell the public on, like, on a Persona which to be. To indistinguish, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Marlon Brando. They don't have to sell. Marlon Brando doesn't have to sell the public that he actually is a don in order for people to go watch or for more people to go watch the. The godfather, you know? And so there's.
[00:52:22] Speaker B: But because that wasn't true.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: Say what I say.
[00:52:26] Speaker B: You mean that wasn't true.
[00:52:32] Speaker A: I'm saying this without judgment, though. Like, to me, it's interesting in the sense that, like, I remember hearing stories, you know, and. Or watch things talking about how in professional wrestling, like the heels and the baby faces, the good, the guys who sold themselves as part of the wrestling show, as bad guys, were not able to. Those are the heels. And then the babyfaces are the guys that sold themselves as the good guys. Those guys were not able to, after the show, go out and have a beer, you know, together. Like, they couldn't go to the same spot and have a beer together because then people would get upset about the wrestling show. So maybe this is all about the kind of the gullibility of the public in general. The prosecutors right here are playing on a gullible public like, yeah, yeah, we know this guy's an artist. But you dopes, don't you guys think that if we. If he says this stuff on a record or then you can be persuaded that he really does this kind of stuff in the same way that people who did professional wrestling were like, oh, yeah, yeah, we can't. I can't go out. Hulk Hogan can't go out with. If he's beefing with Randy Savage, he can't go out with Randy Savage at the same time, even though they're friends in real life, because then put. The public's gonna get mad. And so, I mean, maybe I would mess my.
[00:53:47] Speaker B: Amen. That would have messed my ten year old brain up hanging out after. I'm telling you, man, I used to believe all that point, though, is because.
[00:53:54] Speaker A: Authenticity, so to speak, is, and once you, once you look at pro wrestling and then you, once you look at hip hop and you understand that they're selling a product in addition to making an art form, then you can understand that off that authenticity kind of thing. But, yeah, there should be no expectation that everything you say in a rap is true. But there may be, I mean, at least based on, you know, like, the way people would behave, there may be some benefit and make people think that the stuff you say is true. Like, you just earlier today, you were talking about how Jay Z and his, you know, it came in the game 900, you know, it went $900,000. Like, oh, yeah, well, you know, maybe he was rich, and we don't know that, but he said, you know, so. But he benefits, though, if we think that that's true.
[00:54:37] Speaker B: Yeah, no, he does. And, you know, that's where I think it's an interesting contrast. I mean, where it's rare that I've seen it, that in our society. And I agree with you, and I appreciate you saying, obviously, the prosecution is trying to win, so they're going to.
[00:54:53] Speaker A: Use, don't get me wrong, I don't want to save this for the end. I think it's wrong that the prosecution is doing this.
[00:54:58] Speaker B: No, no.
[00:54:59] Speaker A: Criminal justice is not a football game. Like, it's not just, oh, I wanna win. It's like, nah, man, you're supposed to be an officer of the court. You're supposed to not try to trick the jury, play on the jury's bias to win a case, you know, like, you know, do better, you know, kind of thing is my mind.
[00:55:16] Speaker B: Well, it'll be interesting to see if the prosecution does prevail using this tactic, if it were to maybe cause a little bit of, you know, muting of other artists talking certain ways, because maybe people would say, hey, look, I don't. I don't want to be. I can't predict if I'm gonna be in some situation that's, you know, gets me into a courtroom. I want to. I don't want to say certain things. So it's, it says again, that's why I say it's an interesting discussion, which we won't have now, but, but about freedom of speech and the state maybe potentially having a chilling effect on the ability of artists to feel free to express, like you said, even if it's b's, like, like worldwide, sorry, wwe, the wrestling, it's still entertainment. And so that's just, that's a whole separate, interesting conversation. I didn't even think.
[00:56:02] Speaker A: I mean, in your. Not for nothing, you're right about, like, oh, if somebody painted something, you know, it wouldn't be. But if somebody, like, you know, went and stole it, I'm sure Bernie Madoff wouldn't be out there painting pictures of him stealing money from people. Yeah, like, that would be a bad idea. You know, I wonder if it would.
[00:56:21] Speaker B: Be like, his finger, you know, just like this in someone's pocket or if he'd be, like, typing on, like, he stealing electronically. That'd be interesting.
[00:56:28] Speaker A: But there's just this kind of, you know, thing at play going on with, you know, like, almost like performance art, so to speak. And how, like, again, like, it seems like we're, we the public are the dupes here, because, of course, an artist should be free to express themselves and, you know, not have that come back on. Like, if you. You're gonna do other stuff, then prove to prove they did the other stuff. Don't point at the artist.
[00:56:54] Speaker B: I'm laughing because the whole time you're talking about wrestling, all I thought about is our politics today.
[00:56:59] Speaker A: Well, that facing heels, too.
[00:57:01] Speaker B: It's like, I'm sure Trump and Biden probably going out to have a beer tonight in DC.
Like you're saying, like, they couldn't let us see that, but they're probably laughing.
[00:57:10] Speaker A: Like, hey, man, well, but see how we got to wrap up? But the interesting thing about that is that that actually was closer to the truth in, like, the nineties and the early two thousands. And then there was, I think what happened was. And, like, literally, like, the people would fight hard and, you know, like. But then they would play softball games together or have beers together and, you know, like. But what evolved, particularly as cable news became more prominent, as social media became more prominent, is that the people who were kind of in on it and that, you know, hey, we behave a certain way, but, you know, we're all, we're all part of the same fraternity. Those people started leaving, and the people that started replacing them thought it was real. So it's like in wrestling, the new, the people are, like, really trying to hurt these guys.
[00:57:57] Speaker B: So then it's like the analogy. So. So then one day, maybe that's what January 6 was, was the idiot to the top of the ropes, literally jumping on his head and.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: Yeah, really hurt the guy. Yeah, exactly.
I thought we'd been doing this the whole time. Like, nah, man, we. This. That was for show. So. So, yeah, but we can, we can get out of here on that one. But we appreciate everybody, for joining us on this.
[00:58:21] Speaker B: Hold on. We started a show on hip hop and ended on Jimmy the superfly snooker doing super power driver from the edge of the ring. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know how we.
[00:58:32] Speaker A: Hey, man, superfly. Yeah, there you go. So off the top ropes, man.
[00:58:37] Speaker B: That's how we got in that one out for you.
[00:58:39] Speaker A: All right. All right. So, yeah, we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of call like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review us, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Check us out on YouTube. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:58:50] Speaker B: I'm Tundale Milana.
[00:58:51] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
