Reading Hick-*‐Hop: The Shotgun Marriage of Hip-*‐Hop and Country Music
Tressie McMillan Cottom Could there be two musical genres more diametrically opposed to one another than hip-*‐hop and country music? Born amid Reagan’s urban apocalyptic landscape in exotic places like Brooklyn and the Bronx, hip-*‐hop music is a decidedly black cultural product. Unlike jazz, rock, and be-*‐bop before it, hip-*‐hop maximized a unique moment in a disrupted corporate music industry to afford black artists control of the iconography of the latest iteration of race music. Country music may have once been the poor white man’s attempt at singing the gospel and the blues but it evolved as the symbolic culture of non-*‐elite, working class whiteness. It’s attendant values proudly defy middle class cultural conformity and racialized urban imagery. Country fans unironically embrace faith, family and country in a cynical pop culture world. Hip-*‐hop fans may embrace the free market ethos of money over bitches but mainstream hip-*‐hop is largely resistant to sentimental ruminations on hearth and home. A record company could not brand you the best. Only your peers – other black kids – could make you the best. This guerilla legitimization was a bottom-*‐up process. By the time record labels caught on to the noise coming out of Brooklyn (or the Bronx, depending on your orientation) they were still thinking of it is as just race music 2.0 (or, maybe 3.0). It would be years later before they understood what those badass black kids were really making: youth culture. By then a crop of brash young black entrepreneurs owned much of their product, and as a result, much of their culture and some of its capital. Russell Simmons, Puff Daddy, Jay Z, Dame Dash and others were then in a position to sell its youth culture to the major music labels. That ownership meant a type of legitimacy of the culture as black and of blacks as the gatekeepers of the culture. This precluded a total whitewashing of hip-*‐hop. For sure, major music labels eventually co-*‐opted most independent black hip-*‐hop makers, but they never got a chance to buy it wholesale, cut out the black middleman, repackage it and sell it as authentically white. In 1920 a white business executive like Jimmy Iovine would have stolen some beats from Dr. Dre and lyrics from Jay Z and used them to make an Eminem. In 1994, Iovine had to bring a white kid to Dr. Dre who, in turn, made him Eminem. When MTV, Fab Five Freddy, Kid Rock, mp3 sales, billboard rankings and corporate radio made it official – this hip-*‐hop culture was THE youth culture – it had to do so using black iconography. That was the only legitimate iconography. Industry could not strip the blackness from the cultural product being sold without devaluing the product. The culture being shipped out from the powerful east and west coast conglomerates to Middle America and rural America was then decidedly, irrefutably black. To be cool, to participate in the dominate youth culture as every American generation has sought to do for generations, white youth had to engage it through black language, black dress, and black sound. To be young, in many ways you had to affect blackness. Hip-*‐hop and country music construct authenticity similarly. That similarity provides a mechanism for white audiences to exert influence over black cultural adoption in white rural country music sonic landscapes. Nelly’s verse on the Florida-*‐Georgia Line remix is notable for its presence but also for its seamlessness. Nelly’s hip-*‐hop career was always anchored by his authentic claims to mid-*‐western southern-*‐ness. The same could be said for Atlanta rapper Ludacris’ verse on Jason Aldean’s remix of “Country Road Anthem”. Nelly and Ludacris work while LL Cool J’s verse on Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist” does not and not just because LL Cool J appears to be issuing a blanket forgiveness of racism on behalf of all black people. It falls flat, in part, because LL attempts to drag country iconography to the symbolic urban jungle of his native Queens, NY from which he derives his hip-*‐hop legitimacy. In contrast, Nelly and Luda linguistically slip into the rural white imaginary as familiars. The hoods from which they derive their authentic cred are suburban country. They are likely closer in actual and social distance to the poor suburban and rural hoods of white country fans than elite whites. The crossover is made possible by the same U.S. spatial segregation that allowed Eminem access to black Detroit from 8 Mile. Nelly and Luda’s visit to country music is paved by the historical spatial and cultural co-*‐existence of non-*‐ elite whites and blacks. That’s authentic history, authentically shared if not authentically owned by white country audiences. How country artists toe the line of authenticity while yielding to the popularity of hip-*‐hop iconography exposes the limits of that power over the only musical genre that centers white poverty. Honky Tonks, White Donks, and The Country Imaginary Country music has been at odds with pop music for decades. However, when the dominant popular music is hip-*‐hop music, the authority of country masses to contest what is authentically country gets extra complicated, real fast. Because the country audience is one of the most loyal it can also be the most rabid. The sanctions issued for violating the complex code of authenticity and values that define country music can be some of the most artistically and economically severe meted out by anyone not named McCarthy. For examples of the price of pop success and country sanctions see Dolly Pardon in the 1970s or The Dixie Chicks and Faith Hill in the 2000s (and, note the penalty appears highest and most often for women). The Dixie Chicks case is especially illuminating. While they were exiled not for crossing over but for violating country’s political ethos, the swiftness of the country audience response is noteworthy. The pervasive belief is that big, bad, corporate country radio stations orchestrated the near immediate elimination of The Chicks from country music and popular culture. But Princeton researcher Gabrial Rossman’s study of the Chicks controversy shows that the pressure to put The Chicks out to permanent pasture was exerted by the country masses i.e. poor rural whites. Top-*‐down imposition of culture from elites has its limits. While the poor white rural country music audience may lack the material power to define themselves in the dominant ideology, they can and do shape what constitutes authentic country music. This constrained authority exposes how class defines the authority of whiteness differently. It also frames how poor whites have contested the ways in which hip-*‐hop has been allowed to infiltrate country music. To draw on popular culture memes is to necessarily draw on black culture and because of the unique black legitimacy of hip-*‐hop, to draw on that black culture country music has to engage blackness directly. Yet, this pursuit of popular relevance risks violating deeply engrained racial beliefs of country’s loyal, brutally responsive white poor rural fanbase. That is particularly dangerous as many of those poor whites feel that they are being marginalized by economic elites, losing their social identity in an increasingly diverse America that doesn’t necessarily default American to white, and competing with ever more ethnic groups for a dwindling pool of good jobs and beneficial citizenship arrangements that have long been a social salve for their economic pain. Yet, to not engage this black culture that is now youth culture, artists risk irrelevance as the youth contingent of their core white poor rural fanbase listens to and adopts much of the hip-*‐hop/youth culture. The top-*‐selling examples of “hick-*‐hop”, or this cultural fusion, exemplify the difficulty of that dance while their approaches to navigating the tensions of cultural legitimacy speak to the fault lines running through race, class, gender, and culture. There’s the wink-*‐wink good times approach. This is epitomized in Trace Adkin’s “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk”. The term badonkadonk is a black euphemism for a woman’s ass. But it does not refer to just any ass. In the black cultural imagination there has long existed a beauty ideal that has simultaneously internalized white beauty norms and resisted them through the valorization of “uniquely black” phonotypical traits. As complicated as the notion may be, a rotund ass is one of those ideals. Even as white norms have been internalized as a preference for light skin and straight or curly hair (as opposed to dark and nappy hair), a black woman’s supposed “natural” dominance in the genetic market of rotund asses has resisted white adoption. When Sir Mix a Lot wrote the official ode to rotund behinds, there was a reason that a stereotypically white valley girl voice, named Becky, opens the song with disgust for a “big ol’ butt”. As fat has become a class marker among whites, it has necessarily become a racialized class marker. A “big” anything has been conflated with “fat” in a way to make poor bodies non-*‐normative. Black bodies become trapped by this, oddly enough no matter our class, forming one of many other well-*‐documented essentialized hegemonic distinctions that makes black inherently non-*‐normative in ways that money cannot buy you out of. If you doubt me, ask Oprah. For all her money, she’s still fat with a big ol’ black booty, and it has caused her no small amount of existential crisis or marginalization. It has been rumored that Joan Rivers once told Oprah to hurry up and “lose the weight, honey.” Oprah is one of the wealthiest women in the world. She could buy Rivers a thousand times over. However, being fat opened Oprah up to a classed critique from someone many times her economic junior. This is how great the conflation of fat and inferior black bodies. A billion dollars can’t buy you out of it. Some feminists and black womanists have long understood that beauty is not just about being aesthetically pleasing. Beauty is a means of granting a certain type of legitimacy with attending access to material resources through, for example, marrying “well”. Honky-*‐tonks play country and western and maybe for a pretty girl, as Montgomery Gentry tell us in “Hell Yeah”, they might play a little Bruce Springsteen. But, Colt Ford warns in “Hip-*‐hop in a Honky Tonk” that a proprietor would be smart to keep the hip-*‐hop off the jukebox because “rednecks” don’t come to a honky tonk to hear no hip-*‐hop. The etymology of “badonkadonk” is inseparable from a black female beauty ideal. All such cultural ideals are a way of defining sexualized interest and attention. What we make sexually desirable in our culture also risks affording its power to its possessors. Women with a badonkadonk in a hip-*‐hop song yield a certain power over men, albeit always constrained by dangerous hetereonormative, misogynistic authority to define acceptable female sexuality. Still, black feminism is clear that any power can feel like a tool for liberation when all of your identities exist at the axis of multiple oppressions. A country musician could no more allow a symbol of black female power into a country song through an earnest appreciation of a badonkadonk than could a honky tonk in Colt Ford’s world play Snoop Dogg. There’s cultural appropriation and then there’s cultural appropriation. To blunt the blackness of the slang, Adkins must divorce the badonkdonk from black women. He does this by situating it within the honky tonk, where it is clear in country music that no blackness should be allowed to transverse. The humor is a signal that Adkins will be back in another tune with an appropriate ode to a blue-*‐eyed girl he is allowed to sexualize earnestly sans humor. Employing the honky tonk as qualifier doesn’t just place this hip-*‐hop euphemism into a country music imagination, it situates it within a proper discourse of acceptable cultural exchange and sexual norms. Black lexicon and rhythms are acceptable within narrowly defined constructs that signal to listeners that white norms, including beauty, are still privileged. Songs like Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem” take a different approach than Adkins. But for the guitar riffs and the slowed down delivery, this is a hip-*‐hop song through and through. It is brash, male and it big ups Aldean’s hometown. It has liquor, partying, and women and it’s riding the beat not entirely unlike LL Cool J’s 1980s hi-*‐ hop love song, “I Need Love”. There is no melody. Aldean does a country spoken word performance for most of the track. As in classic hip-*‐hop odes to place like Jay Z’s “Empire State”, Aldean draws on imagery and narratives of the down home country towns that he loves. Unlike, however, Jay Z’s ode to New York City, Aldean’s isn’t a love song to a specific town. This is an allusion to a material reality: there really isn’t a “country” anymore. Family farms have given way to industrial farm giants like Monsanto. Watering holes have been enclosed by zoning laws and planned communities. Spray painting the water tower can constitute a violation of the Patriot Act. You need expensive automotive computers to fix up pick-*‐up trucks. People may be rural in that they do not live in cities but they are increasingly suburban, not country. As white poverty as increased so has the spatial concentration of poverty been impacted by the decline of rural America. Suburban poverty has grown faster than anywhere else in the country over the last decade, at a rate of 64% since 2000. A 2013 report from the Brookings Institute says that “job losses triggered by the Great Recession in industries like construction, manufacturing, and retail hit hardest in suburban communities and contributed to rising suburban unemployment and poverty." That might explain why one rarely hears a country artist sing an ode to an actual rural town anymore. Instead, they harken back to the town of their childhood, which today is as likely to have a strip mall and a couple McDonalds as it is a drag strip and a Main Street. Or, like Aldean, they romanticize a fictionalized Anytown, USA. In this town of Aldean’s the boys live to fight, learn to love their women, and get in trouble on Friday nights. These are all old country music tropes. Only here, Aldean waxes poetic using the linguistic styling of hip-*‐hop. There are the sixteen bars (ok, 18ish or so), a musical bridge, and even space for a little call and response should the song be played live. And it has been played live. In fact, Aldean says the song started out as a tune strictly played at his live shows. He had no intention of making it a record. However, his band noticed the extreme positive response from the audience every time they played it. Through the magic of cell phone videos and social networking, the song had become a record on its own as fans ripped, remixed, and reworked it as a single sans distribution. It could be argued that Aldean tripped into a hip-*‐hop cipher and played catch up by releasing the song on his album. Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem” is unique for its earnest deployment of hip-*‐hop elements. It is not using it as comical capital for “cool points”, like Adkins or the tragicomedy that was Cowboy Troy. “Dirt Road Anthem” is also notable for who wrote it: Colt Ford. The same artist who wrote for himself the redneck anti-*‐hip-*‐hop manifesto, “Hip-*‐hop in a Honky Tonk”, also wrote Aldean’s quintessential country hip-*‐hop song. Born in 1970, Colt Ford would have been two years younger than LL Cool J, nine years old when Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rappers Delight” brought rap to the mainstream, and a teenager when Run-*‐DMC saved Aerosmith’s career with their remake of “Walk This Way” in 1986. Ford likely understands the tensions between hip-*‐hop and country and represents so eloquently it’s dueling duality in the music he produces because he, like his audience, embodies it. “We’re Losing Our Country” In many ways poor white people are right when they talk of losing their country. However, they are not losing it to blacks or immigrants. Neither are they really “losing”, as that implies poor whites once owned this nation’s promise in the material sense. The cultural divide between the white elite and redneck white poor has existed in some form for generations. However, the hope of escaping one’s redneck past is becoming less likely while even the comfort of an actual country to ease that sense of loss is being gobbled up by suburbanization, the collapse of middle class work, and rising income inequality. Poor whites are not losing their country but their “country”: the symbolic hope of the utility of their whiteness to improve their material lives by rendering them visible and autonomous. And, they’re losing it to the white plutocracy. Sadly, rich white folks don’t have a banging soundtrack. Black folks do. And when people like uber rich, uber white Gwyneth Paltrow is on national television dropping hot NWA bars from memory, it is easy to see how poor white people can conflate the encroachment of black culture into their symbolic spaces with the dominance of the white economic elite over their material spaces. They live a million social miles from both. The success of hick-*‐hop is grounded in mutually constituted authenticity of two genres that both value their respective authority to define that authenticity. While they cannot control the boundaries of popular culture, country fans can still erect limited boundaries of acceptable cultural remixing. The contestation of boundaries of that cultural remixing signal an awareness among poor whites of the structural limitations of whiteness as necessary and sufficient for social mobility. Most Black Americans have been socialized to develop an awareness of the external constraints of blackness, eloquently described in WEB DuBois’ theory of double-*‐consciousness. The historical privileging of whiteness as a master identity has left poor whites with few such tools to navigate what that means in our new economic reality. Branding poverty with a black urban face simultaneously makes black poverty ubiquitous while erasing black lives but it erases poor whites almost entirely. Historically, participation in popular culture promised a type of upward social mobility into higher status whiteness. It created a shared culture in which poor whites could assemble cultural tools like language and dress to transverse mobility bridges out of backwoods USA and into middle class white USA. That bridge now seems only to lead to blackness and god knows no one should ever want to end up there. The youth culture is developing a shared language but the language is being shared, and in many ways controlled, by blackness (if ultimately for the economic benefit of corporate media). That this might actually represent similar cultural bridges to mobility really only antagonizes the diminishing utility of one’s whiteness, or at least the perceived diminishing utility. Sociology suggests its still pretty good to be white in America but it is quite true that it’s not uniformly good to be white in America. It is understandable how the benefits of whiteness can be hard to see for poor whites on which country music depends. It certainly must not feel true in their daily lives as they experience joblessness, poor health outcomes, shrinking social safety nets, and the near erasure of the poor and working class from television, movies, and pop culture save but a trailer park minstrelsy or two. It could be that the shifting economic realities of poor whites is exposing an emerging group identity crisis. Living with that at your 9-*‐to-*‐5, or in your search for a 9-*‐to-*‐5, may be one thing. Dealing with it in the spaces where you should be able to exert some control – your personal spaces, your homes, over your children, in your honky tonks, and at your tailgate parties – could present a particular kind of crisis. Their invisibility in national discussions of poverty may be a kind of privilege (one black Americans surely do not enjoy) but it is not without its perils. The erasure of the structural demise of social mobility for poor whites leaves them with few uncontested spaces, symbolic or material, to work through that group identity crisis. That it is hip-*‐hop that provides them tools, albeit in limited and constrained ways, to explore that crisis is a function of hip-*‐hop’s domination of popular youth culture, residential segregation of the haves from the rural have-*‐nots, and shifting corporate logics. All of this structural change is reflected, as such things usually are, in the beautiful ugly culture people make as they try to construct their ideal selves under less than ideal conditions.
When Trashfume falls off and the bots go back to not buying tickets for December, not hoping for a performance, not hearing their fav song on radio, not knowing if she will live to see another day.
