Facing Hip-hop Love Addiction

January 11, 2005

Facing Hip-hop Love Addiction

Surveying the wildly divergent reactions to Greg Tate's latest, Jeff Chang asked if there is a generation gap between older heads like us and those born after the mid 70's or so.

I think he's on to something there. I think it's a lot easier for younger heads to maintain a healthy relationship with hip-hop, because they are in a better position to see and accept hip-hop for what it is. While us old folks are still caught up in a fantasy version of hip-hop that either no longer exists or never existed in the first place. It's the difference between being in love and being love addicted.

That’s right, my fellow fogeys, we have a disease. And it’s time for us to start owning our reality and find a path to recovery. So let’s start breaking down the addictive cycle step-by-step.

1. In her book Facing Love Addiction, Pia Mellody builds on the premise that “people fall into love addiction because of the unhealed pain from child abandonment.”

How does this apply to us as 30+ hip-hoppers? Well as I said here we all grew up with a profound sense of abandonment, coming of age right when our parents’ activist/political movements were fading away, leaving us with little leadership and less momentum. And nowhere was this void more pronounced than in black community. And this inevitably led to the next step:

2. As Mellody explains “one way such children may escape the pain of severe abandonment by the parents is to fantasize about being rescued by a hero of some kind.” And as adults, this leads us to seek out “unhealthy relationships based on intensity, delusion, and unrealistic expectations, and not mature healthy love.”

Sound familiar? As soon as the late 80s “conscious era” came around, this was the relationship we all sought out with hip-hop, to one degree or another. We convinced ourselves that these young rappers were just the heroes we were looking for, to swoop in and fill that activist void. And just like in every addicted relationship, at first it all seemed so perfect…

3. When the love addict first enters a relationship, according to Mellody they experience a tremendous initial high as their fantasy is triggered, and they revel in their “fantasy image which they place like a beautiful mask over the head” of their partner.

What sweeter high could there be than what we felt in that golden age, when we truly believed in Greg Tate’s “Afrocentric dream of hiphop's becoming an agent of social change.” And for a while it was all too easy to believe the dream could come true.. so easy that some of us started to lose sight of all the artistry that really made the golden age golden. We became blinded to the whole of hip-hop’s inherent worth, focused only on that activist mask we had put over it. But fantasies never last too long..

4. Then Mellody describes the next stage, when the love addict continues showing more neediness than the partner can possibly fulfill, and the partner starts to put up walls and pull away from the addict. But the addict remains in denial and cannot see.

As I lamented here two years ago, the golden age was truly golden in many ways, and much of that magic was lost as the music got assimilated into America’s mainstream hive-mind. Just as this co-optation was going into high gear NWA’s gangsta eclipsed PE’s righteousness to establish a new paradigm of profitability for the industry, and a new standard of “realness” and manhood for the artist and audience. The game would never be the same.

Hip-hop has still remained beautiful in many ways, though, since it started down that path. Added many new layers of meaning atop the compelling musicality that is always its foundation. But for us, the golden age love addicts, our delusions have been all we could see. Even as hip-hop pulled further and further down its natural path and away from our irrational needs, we could see nothing but our fantasy mask, and kept hoping all these young artists would soon reveal their true identities as raptivist superheroes. Until one day we each reached our breaking point.

5. But at some point, the book warns, every addict reaches a point when they can no longer maintain their delusion in the face of mounting evidence, so their fantasy and denial start to crumble and they enter a state of withdrawal. As the addict truly sees their partner for the first time, and realizes they are not that fantasy hero at all, the addict often develops an exaggerated sense of resentment towards the partner. They may then become consumed with a desire to lash out the partner, or seek revenge.

How many times have we seen this? How many indignant, brokenhearted “hip-hop is dead!” manifestos have come from those among us who finally hit that wall and watched our fantasies die? Even the mighty Greg Tate, the godfather of us all, slips a bit into this trap with that Voice piece. As much as he is correct in assessing what hip-hop is in 2005, the tone of his analysis and the conclusions he draws are overstated and misguided in classic love-addict form.

I hadn’t read O-Dub’s excellent take on Tate’s piece until I was almost done writing this, and I wish I could start from scratch with his thoughts in mind. But I have to agree with David that Oliver may be crediting the piece with more nuance and balance than it actually has. The Dub is surely right that hip-hop has far reaching influences and importance beyond making booties shake, and these dimensions deserve analysis. But not much good can come of that analysis if it’s built on the assumption that hip-hop is a failure, or in Greg Tate's words that "hip-hop sucks," because it never fulfilled the unrealistic needs of our love-addicted fantasy.

So unless we can all get on the road to recovery, it may be the analysis we need will only come from these younger heads, who came of age when hip-hop was already within the mainstream machinery, and are thus burdened with none of our illusions. It doesn’t appear to me that heads like Hashim (who was maybe a little too harsh with Greg, yes) want to dismiss entirely the issues that Greg raises, and define the music as merely entertainment and nothing more. They just seem to have a more clear-headed, and non-judgmental/non-resentful, sense of how much hip-hop is merely commercial entertainment now, and how much it is not. So they are able to love hip-hop for what it is, and cultivate a healthy relationship with it, with ample room for constructive criticism and collective introspection. And that's the place us fogeys need to get to. But it’s 4AM, and I may just be rambling now.

---------------

BTW I also believe that the role music plays in our lives, with its musicality, goes far deeper than making booties shake or providing “entertainment,” and we are selling it short in that regard. But again it’s 4AM and I’ll have to get to that another time.

Posted by jsmooth995 at January 11, 2005 05:34 AM | TrackBack

Comments

wow, Jay. Just wow. This meme has gone in places that I didn't think it would stretch to. Clap it up for the collective power of blogs to turn a static essay into a vibrant conversation in less than a week.

Was I too "hard on Tate"? Eh, I don't know. I did use some hyperbole and exageration to make my point, gain attention, and spark response- all of which has happened. But my premise is solid, I believe. Tate's age is causing him to be bitter and to judge hip-hop based on social merits instead of art first.

Posted by: Hashim at January 11, 2005 10:22 AM

Yes �The Loneliness of An Over-30 Hip-hop Head�
It�s been tough to watch my fellow fogeys move on to other genre-loves but I feel like� maybe they never got it anyway!!
The best hip-hop (from any era) makes me feel like a teenager again� it doesn�t mean I can�t get my �grown-ass� on and handle the mortgage� and it�s not escapism (since, believe it or not, Mr. Tate, relevant social critique still exists in some of them dope rhymes).
But the best always captures that energy, abandon, assuredness and naivety of youth�.especially that connection between a kid and an idol.
The way hip-hop expresses or conducts that energy just changes with time and location.

Posted by: rio rocket at January 11, 2005 10:26 AM

Let me also clarify- Jay is right about my intentions. I'm not sdismissing the problem of the corporate co-opting of hip-hop. However, with music critisicm I beleive in art first, social merits second.

Posted by: Hashim at January 11, 2005 10:26 AM

question for you, jay: i've seen a couple of comments from you in the past to the effect that there is a lot of good hip-hop on this week's show, and you seemed surprised. in all this conversation about hip-hop & our generations (i was born in 79), i wonder: how much contemporary hip-hop do you listen to? i know you get off on prince (and who doesn't) but, ironically, i know nothing about your tastes in hiphopmusic.

Posted by: squidhead at January 11, 2005 11:34 AM

yep, i totally agree. and you know i used to review albums up until fairly recently. after five years of enjoying the process it finally got to the point where it was PAINFUL for me to have to review Fabolous and the Nelly remix album and shite like that, one after the other. i was too old and jaded and totally knew i was out of touch with the people who actually bought (what i freely admit i consider it to be) this kinda crap.

it's true- i'm over 35, hip hop's moved on and i haven't. for some reason i don't feel quite the same about dancehall- i'm disillusioned with it, but not as painfully. (born in '69)

Posted by: beelove at January 11, 2005 11:44 AM

um, almost over 35.

Posted by: beelove at January 11, 2005 11:44 AM

Hashim: Your premise and mine are just about the same, actually?

Posted by: Jay Smooth at January 11, 2005 12:29 PM

howdy,

great articles just stumbled on the site. completely off topic, but i'm trying to dl some of the mixes from the archives...? are they down now?

tanks.

Posted by: dirtydel at January 11, 2005 02:43 PM

great stuff jay. for those who want to hear some actual examples of hip hop from 2004, you can paste this link or click on the name to listen to my hip hop charts for 2004. No speculation needed... the evidence is right there.

http://www.stinkzone.com/cgi-bin/archives/000100.html

_eric

Posted by: hip hop charts 2004 at January 11, 2005 03:11 PM

the best part is you can superimpose jay's analysis on top of a human-to-human relationship and see if it fits. just replace hip-hop with the name of your current "love" object.

and, i say, while i enjoy some of the current hip hop, i don't have the same spiritual connection in early 90s, etc. during my "grieving" period, i too cursed "commercialism" but have come to a state of acceptance -- and now i just listen for a groove and lyrics that are not too ____ (fill in the blank)

Posted by: irina at January 11, 2005 03:14 PM

Jay: Great post! The analogy is very illuminating.

That said, I think its too brilliant to be flawless. As you said, the only true essence of hip hop is its musical form. Anything above that, including the lyrical content of raps, puts it in a specific cultural context which is open for interpretation. If that's true, then you are putting too much responsibility on the interpreter for understanding the current state of hip hop and not enough on the musician for creating it, not enough on the consumer for creating the current market. It is not the interpreters fault that there were once more seeds of social change embedded in hip hop than there are now--you didn't just see something that wasn't there. Its just that there has never been a manifest destiny for hip hop.

So don't be a martyr taking the shot for hip hop. The musical form itself hasn't changed, though it could be argued that there's less musicianship. And there's a bunch of copy cat mcs running around who misunderstand why Tupac promoted the thug life. All the original cultural messages that have ever been a part of hip hop are still there, somewhere. The perfect chemistry of the golden age has just been distorted by the consumer power of people who don't know the music's history at all, and its okay to say fuck that.

Posted by: Joe at January 11, 2005 03:26 PM

Aghh..I wish I could rewrite that last post. I don't think I was very clear. By interpreter, I guess I mean long time hip hop fans or journalists, fogeys like jay who see more into the music and its potential than the average cat. Those who once understood its social role and predicted its direction. I think that the failure of hip hop to turn into what they thought it would be shouldn't cause them to question their understanding of its nature. Or concede to young heads who happen to drive the sales of the latest cam'ron album or whatever. The current state of hip hop culture is the result of very specific artists who took the music in a certain direction at crucial times of maximum exposure, and doesn't necessarily reflect a massive miscalculation by my "interpreters."

I think its part of a natural process to decry the direction of an artform right before a renaissance of some kind. Everyone said rock was dead in the 90s, and now we are witnessing the resurgence of guitar driven rock. Bottom line, there's no reason to conclude yourself a delusional love addict just because at the moment hip hop isn't everything it could be. Believe in your principles!

if i didn't manage to say something sensical by now i never will. this 24 year old is done with his diatribe.

Posted by: Joe at January 11, 2005 06:20 PM

wasn't trying to start an argument with my previous post, but i really am wondering: do the 30-somethings mourning hip-hop's death, or just debating this voice article, actually listen to hip-hop any longer?

Posted by: squidhead at January 12, 2005 12:55 PM

Or perhaps, we can say that the "younger heads" are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

http://web2.airmail.net/ktrig246/out_of_cave/sss.html

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