THE DAY THE NORMALZ TOOK OVER

It's Saturday morning and I'm somehow still awake. This is bound to be trouble later, for sure. I'm supposed to go shoot hoops this afternoon — chances are I won't make it. But so long as I'm up, I want to expand on my post about Snoop getting old and lame:

The comments to that entry quickly brought up Ice Cube (that's "Cube" — don't you dare add the "Ice," even though that's how he's still registered with SAG; you'd think he could change it if he really wanted to.) There's no use arguing that Snoop and Cube have not both lost their "edge." Of course they have. But for their own longevity, if not their "cred," it's good that they did. As Dre said on "2001": "How much Tupac in you, [do] you got?" The gangsta lifestyle is unsustainable, and each of them figured that out some time ago. Living that way for very long gets you AIDS (Eazy), shot (Tupac, Biggie*), overdosed (ODB) or otherwise dead.

Not that their fans care to hear that point of view: They pine for the days of "Death Certificate."

But I say Cube and Snoop (and Dre) should be commended for escaping their hard-living pasts. Snoop apparently coaches (or at one time coached) his son's Pop Warner football team. Dre's just another top-shelf producer. Cube is making family films. They didn't "lose" what made everyone get into them in the first place. They consciously shed all of that.

Does that make them role models? Despite their success, I don't think so — not unless you're already standing on a corner with a strap on your back. Their stories begin on the wrong side of the law, either in deed or boast. It's admirable that they've grown beyond that, but anyone looking to their career track for guidance would start out in a gang, selling drugs, pulling drive-bys, et cetera. They're lucky to have escaped that; most can't/won't/don't. Unfortunately, it's their winking-at-criminalism early years that made them famous. Would people have rushed to buy "Doggystyle" in the numbers they did (first rap album to hit #1 in its first week of release) if Mr. Calvin Broadus hadn't been an ex-Crip charged with murder? (Would I have it playing in the background right now, twelve years later? Perhaps — it is a terrific collection of songs, one of the defining albums of the decade.)

For these artists, there is a precarious balance between authenticity and going soft (as there is for virtually every popular recording artist, though with less deadly results if, say, Isaac Brock chooses wrong). Most would say Snoop, Cube and Dre have tilted further toward the latter state. I say that's a good thing, even if it makes them "lame."

To paraphrase another Dre line from the same song referenced above: They moved out of the hood for good, [can] you blame them?

P.S. Much of this pertains to what's wrong with the NBA today. But that's too big to get into now, much less at this hour. I'd like to hear Bill Cosby weigh in on the above, but I'd especially like to hear more from John McWhorter on this. He's the best on this subject (this post owes a lot to him; hold all calls, reschedule previous engagements, and read this now), but he hasn't written much about it recently. And so far as I know, he's never said a thing about the NBA.

P.P.S. — Did you know that Cube's cousin is Del Tha Funkee Homosapien? I didn't until just now. I suppose that's common knowledge for anyone who follows hip-hop. So I'm officially out of the loop. But I'm pretty sure I knew Cube (née O'Shea Jackson) was schooled at the Phoenix Institute of Technology.

P.P.P.S. Apparently the German title of "8 Mile" is ... "8 Mile." Thanks, IMDb! (By the way, I think all of the above applies equally to Eminem; he's good evidence that rap/hip-hop cred ultimately is more about class than race.)

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*If you've never seen Nick Broomfield's Biggie & Tupac, by all means queue it up on Netflix. It's much superior to Broomfield's also-interesting (and largely Portland-based) "Kurt & Courtney," simply as a documentary. But the interviews with Biggie's mother (a great lady), Tupac's biological father (interesting) and the jailhouse sit-down with Suge (very interesting, not to mention scary) alone make it worthwhile. Broomfield's a mixed bag as a documentarian, but he stumbled onto a great story with this film.

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posted by WWB at 7:15 AM |