The History Mixtape

Selections Explained

So, if you’ve been keeping up with Culture Club, you can see we’ve rolled out a ton of great new columns, columns you should be following, tweeting, and loving. Our editor asked me to contribute, and I was all about it. They didn’t pay me to say that; I’ve been checking them out and they’re dope.

My creation, The History Mixtape, takes great moments in history and pairs them with some real ghetto, ignorant, hype-ass rap. Beyond the obvious play for laughs, there are a lot of reasons. Rather than waiting until one of my pairings pissed someone off, I figured I’d be better served to explain myself from jump. I’ll be fleshing this stuff out a little more in the coming weeks and months, so this explanation will be relatively brief.

The first reason has to do with this quote from Langston Hughes:

“We know we are beautiful. And ugly too…”

It’s glossed over in favor of more profound sounding Hughes quotes, and I get that. But it’s more relevant than ever.

We’ve got a Black president with a beautiful wife. We’ve got Black CEOs, Black women are the best educated group in the US, the most popular sports feature prominent black faces, and so on and so forth. That’s all beautiful. But what about the ugly? Many of us try to hide the ugly the higher we go. There’s reason for this: the ugly tends to stop some of us from going any higher. But getting into why the ugly begs hiding is less important than talking about why the ugly is ugly in the first place.

Much of our ugly? It ain’t ugly. It’s just different.

“Ghetto” is ugly. “Hood” is ugly. But why? These two words describe the same place, the same mindset. It also influences fashion, music, sports, global culture and expression. When exported and repackaged, it becomes lucrative and acceptable, while the original is decried.

That’s horseshit.

The original can be just as beautiful as the mainstream knockoff. Truthfully, it’s often more beautiful. But Macklemore’s bank account will tell you that black creation only gets its due when detached from black bodies. It’s why models wear durags, why half of Hollywood’s got gel and weave, why one of the Kardashians is “brave” for rocking half a head of Leroy braids, and why Bieber and JT will sell ten times as many records doing what black artists do at the BET awards. If we embrace the ugly that isn’t, we’ll see the beauty in it. And maybe that extra beauty can help us confront the real ugly.

The juxtaposition with the beauty of our history might help. It might not. I’m gonna try, and hopefully get some jokes in.

Next, a lot of the music I’m going to pick is sure to be misogynistic, violent, and angry. I want to get a few major points out of the way.

First, misogyny, violence, and anger are pillars upon which all of American music stands. Jimi Hendrix’s Joe shot his girl for cheating. Ray Charles’ woman way over town knew her place was “right there in her home.” Guns N’ Roses used to love her, but they had to kill her, and Niel Young spent years angry at the whole south. And they’re still there today. Of all the things unique to Hip Hop, these aren’t.

If we want to figure out why rap deals with these American staples the way that it does, we should ask where rap comes from. Once we’ve figured that out, we should examine the features shared in those locations, why they’re there, who put them there, and why they won’t go away. When we answer those questions, we’ll know why rap lyrics approach women, authority, and capitalism the way that they tend to.

Note: In light of what I’ve written above, I want to make this clear: I won’t be using this space to post wildly offensive shit. Ross’ “molly all in her champagne,” and Wayne’s Emmitt Till line? That shit is right out. I know some of it is bound to offend a few heads, but that’s not the intent.

We can celebrate the creativity, the jokes, the production and the emotions in rap songs in one breath, and attack the conditions and mindsets that they feature the next. I’ll be doing the celebrating with this column. I hope to gather my thoughts and do some attacking in some longer form pieces.

In the meantime, in between time, enjoy The History Mixtape, and free Biggavelli.

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