Juicy
I always rap on and on about how hip-hop is the natural extension of postmodernism, but rarely offer up much on the subject. In an effort to start getting some of it on paper, I’m going to start tackling the topic here.
Saturday I went down to Mountain View for Rock the Bells. Mostly for Dead Prez. After their set, I get into the postmodernism speil with April, a poet herself, when a golden gem of an example presented itself.
Dead Prez’s set included a rap over the beat from The Notorious B.I.G.’s Juicy (video). But Dead Prez went beyond the simple example of intertextuality of borrowing another’s beat. They offered up their own version of one of the most famous verses in hip-hop, Biggie’s first verse in Juicy:
It was all a dream,
I used to read Word Up magazine;
Salt-n-Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine.
Hangin’ pictures on my wall,
Every Saturday: Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl.
I let my tape rock ‘til my tape popped,
Smokin’ weed and bamboo, sippin’ on private stock;
Way back, when I had the red and black lumberjack,
With the hat to match.
Apparently released as “B.I.G. Respect” on their mixtape Turn off the Radio: The Mixtape Vol. 1, Dead Prez’s version isn’t just an unrelated rap over the same beat, but follows the same pattern of Biggies’.
It’s the story of their coming to age into their experience of hip-hop. It even follows the same general pattern.
It was all a dream!
Started organizing in my late teens,
Malcolm X and Huey P, who I wanna be.
Marcus Garvey on my wall.
I was just a young G, thought I’d been through it all.
Fuckin’ with po-po, used to stay “lock”.
Tryin’ to get my aim right, learning how to shoot a glock.
Way back, used to rock the army green fields jacket,
We was known for that.
This coming of age story has already been told. It’s part of the established hip-hop dictionary. Dead Prez just fits their own experience into the existing mold.
Just another example of the death of stylistic innovation common in postmodernism. As Jameson puts it:
We thus face an aesthetic dilemma: if the experience and the ideology of the unique self is over and done with, then it is no longer clear what artists and writers of the present age are supposed to be doing. It would seem that, in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all they can imitate are dead styles.
However, hip-hop, I believe embraces this dilemma and lives within it. Art doesn’t need to be stylistically innovative.
