Erica Beckman
Tanz: not "hip hop"??
Details
Related Content
More About
With your glory days in the past, you wonder if that original spark even exists anymore, especially after you sold out so thoroughly in the '90s. Then other days you think, hey, maybe my best days are yet to come! What sounds like the tortured musings of a middle-aged cubicle rat are actually the sounds of hip-hop at age 30. With that ache of age comes a certain amount of reflection—and books.
One story within hip-hop that hasn't been told until now? The story of whitey.
"In some ways, my book really isn't about hip-hop as much as it is about white people. It's really more an investigation of whiteness than it is about hip-hop, per se," says Jason Tanz, author of Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America (Bloomsbury, $24.95). Tanz was raised "at the end of a cul-de-sac" in the suburbs of Tacoma, where he experienced a "pretty Andy Griffith-esque" upbringing that included whiffle ball, he says, speaking to me recently by phone. As a graduate of Brown, editor at Fortune Small Business, lifelong hip-hop fan, and resident of Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood, Tanz has the perfect résumé for this cultural overview of the Anglicizing, co-opting, and commoditization of hip-hop.
"All the hip-hop books were coming from a particular standpoint—very invested in the culture, detailing how it came about," he says. "I would read those books, but I wouldn't quite relate to them. Like a lot of people, I loved hip-hop, but I'm not 'hip-hop,' as that term is often used. I partake of it from a distance. And I was interested in talking about that distance.
"I intended to implicate every reader with this book—myself most of all."
And that he does; in fact, his overwhelming desire to be taken seriously, to lock eyes with "caramel-skinned" beauties or insist "I'm one of you guys," induces frequent cringes.
Tanz says Kerouac exhibited "wiggerish tendencies" in On the Road when the Beat poet wrote about "wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night." Tanz, too, might properly be considered a wigger by asking, at the book's end, "What could be more thrilling, more noble, more fulfilling, more terrifying, than living in somebody else's skin?"
Total Chaos, the new essay collection on "the art and aesthetics of hip-hop," edited by the granddaddy of hip-hop historians, Jeff Chang (author of Can't Stop Won't Stop), offers a barrage of topics and opinions, including the notion that "hip-hop without blackness" is simply an impossible construct. But for others like Tanz, it's an all-encompassing part of the dialogue, and hip-hop's presence in white territory is not the end of it.
"I think there is a tension within hip-hop; there's this question: Is this pop music, or is this black music? It's both, obviously," he says. "'Rapper's Delight' was a pop song. And the people who were first recording records were not trying to make music that reflected the black experience, they were making music to try and move a crowd."
