Watching the above, I'm struck by that fact that Maher's criticisms of hip-hop aren't centered on profanity, violence, misogyny, or homophobia, the latter two of which his foil, the intellectual Michael Eric Dyson, is left to bring up. No, Maher is fixated on rap's tendency toward the self-referential, towards what he perceives, condescendingly, as "the virtues of the ghetto": criminal prowess and materialism. Dyson's response is first to introduce examples of "positive" rappers like Mos Def and Common, which is like defending rock and roll in the '50s by appealing to Pat Boone and Ricky Nelson (not an aesthetic judgment on my part); he then draws an amusing parallel between hip-hop's braggadocio and the cottage industry dedicated to churning out thousands of redundant histories lauding the brilliance of the Founding Fathers, which he suggests is chicken soup for white America's collective ego. The debate goes limp as Maher and his fellow white panelists, Congressman Rahm Emanuel ("These are great artists who don't use all their talents," whatever that means) and author Pete Hamill (who curiously cops to preferring Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, thus reducing respecting black culture to liking music produced by African-Americans half a century ago), attempt to get Dyson to concede that there is something innately defective about mainstream hip-hop; it occurs to me that a group of 40+ year-old white men have about as much of a chance of embracing the rap idiom as their parents would have had assimilating the Sex Pistols.
Perhaps a more effective counterargument would be to point out that the self-lauding aspects of rap serve the same function for its adherents that the Sunday Styles section does for the readership of the New York Times. Each is an orgy of materialism tailored to its audience: rappers rattle off clothing brands, automobile manufacturers, jewelers, and champagne houses; Sunday Styles investigates artisinal ice cubes (I shit you not), a 103 year-old mansion picturesquely perched on Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, and an ecological product line designed by Philippe Starcke (who designed this lamp, which, for those of you who like closed circles, would not at all look out of place in a rapper's boudoir). This connection may not seem intuitive, but perhaps this is because of the disconnect between white America's conception of the appropriate way to display or savor wealth and achievement - what Bill Maher terms "modesty" - and rap's more direct approach. The distinction, perhaps, is that while it's verboten to brag that you spent a million dollars on a chain from Jacob the Jeweler, drank a case of Cristal, or have a nice set of rims on your car, it's perfectly acceptable to flaunt your material success and possessions if the New York Times (or HGTV, or Martha Stewart Living) calls you up wanting to do a story.
Obviously, the above comparison is somewhat inexact: unlike the Times, a great deal of hip-hop is also focused on violence, criminal activity, explicit sex, misogyny, and homophobia. The latter two qualities I, nor anyone else, can convincingly defend; if those are two qualities you understandably can't look beyond, then broad swaths of mainstream rap are not for you. However, it is worth noting, with regards to misogyny, that rock 'n' roll is no better: for proof, listen to the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb", or Elvis Costello's This Years Model, or read Jess Hopper's superlative, insightful "Emo: Where The Girls Aren't". As for the former, well, rap is primarily a ghetto music, and there is crime and violence in the ghetto. Certainly a great deal of rap glorifies violence and criminality; so does the movie Bonnie and Clyde, what's your point? More to the point, so do much of the blues, concerned as they are with figures like Staggerlee, who killed Billy Lyons with a .44 pistol over a Stetson hat in a thousand saloons from New Orleans to Memphis to St. Louis. Granted the lingua franca has become more profane, taking the blues' thinly-veiled suggestiveness - like Robert Johnson moaning about the lemon juice running down his leg, an image so ideally filthy that thirty years later Led Zeppelin was able to import it wholesale without losing any of the punch - and rendering it explicit. Yet the connection is undeniably there; rap and blues both create and transmit a kind of folklore that is not, as Chuck D put it, "the CNN of the streets," but a kind of underhistory, a main circuit cable through American black culture. It is not, as Dyson astutely notes, the whole story of the inner city by any stretch, but it is kind of a negative image, communicating a quotidian reality all its own.
Ghostface Killah's verse from "The Heart Gently Weeps" on the Wu-Tang Clan's 8 Diagrams (2007):
Yeah, yo"Stagolee" as performed on a 1928 recording by Mississippi John Hurt:
I brought my bitch out to Pathmark, she's pushin the cart
Headed to aisle four, damn I got milk on my Clark's
That's what I get, not focusin from hittin that bar
My mouth dried, need plenty water quick, I feel like a shark
In the aisle bustin them paper towels and wipin my Wally's down
I stood up to face a barrel, he's holdin a shiny pound
It's him, he want revenge, I murdered his Uncle Tim
I sold him a bag of dope, his wife came and copped again
[singing] That bitch is crazyyyyy
And uh, she brought her babyyyyy
She knew I hard the murders, a smack
It killed her man though, now I got his fuckin nephew grippin his gat
You's a bitch - [singing] you better kill meeeee
You know you're bootyyyyyy
You pulled your toolie, out on meeeee... motherfucker
First thought was to snatch the ratchet
Said fuck it and fuckin grabbed it
I ducked, he bucked twice, this nigga was fuckin laughin
I wrestled him to the ground, tustle, scuffle, constantly kicked him
He wouldn't let go the joint, so I fuckin bit him
Shots was whizzin, hittin Clorox bottles
Customers screamin, then the f----- ran out of hollows
I had to show him what it's all about
Next thing you read in the paper, "A man who came to kill gets knocked out"
Po-lice officer, how can it be?
You can 'rest everybody but cruel Stagolee
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee
Billy DeLyon told Stagolee, "Please don't take my life
I got two little babes and a darling, loving wife"
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee
"What'd I care about your two little babes and darling, loving wife?
You done stole my Stetson hat, I'm bound to take your life."
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee
Boom boom, boom boom,
Went the forty-four.
Well when I spied Billy DeLyon
He's lyin' down on the floor.
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee
Gentlemens of the Jury,
What you think of that?
Stagolee killed Billy DeLyon
'bout a five-dollar Stetson hat.
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee
Standin' on the gallows, head way up high
At twelve o'clock, they killed him, they's all glad to see him die
That bad man, oh cruel Stagolee
