Bougie Dictatorship: The Strange Case of Leftist Hip-Hop
BY ANDREW RIDKER
Hey, remember that weird video from Game 5 of the NBA finals? Where Jay-Z just like, talked for three minutes, and superproducers/visual name-drops Pharrell, Timbaland, and Rick Rubin were all nodding along as if to say, ‘yeah Jay, totally’? And then at the very end, the screen went black and said SAMSUNG, like ‘ha ha, tricked you into watching a commercial’?
As we now know, the electronics manufacturer had pre-purchased one million copies of Jay’s new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, to give away to their subscribers for free, which in turn prompted the Record Industry Association of America to ditch the rulebook and declare the album Platinum-certified before it was even released.
We’d been warned. Here’s Jay in 2004 at his most quotable: I’m not a businessman / I’m a business, man.
Maybe it’s no surprise that there are so few leftist rappers. For one thing, hip-hop came to prominence in the late seventies and early eighties riding twin waves of Red aggression and Wall Street chic. The art form is rooted in the politics of marginalized communities, but those particular politics have always operated within our capitalist sphere. There are a myriad reasons for this, wrapped up in the intersectionality of race, poverty, and systematic oppression—not to mention the commodification of youth culture—all of which falls outside the limited scope of this article. But what can be said for certain is that hip-hop is the genre of our times, and our times are nothing if not market-driven.
Far-left rappers, already marginalized by their politics, tend to adopt extreme forms of delivery, either as a means of getting noticed or because they have the silver-lining luxury that attends independent distribution and cultlike fanbases: the luxury of getting to say whatever you want, however you want.
For Immortal Technique, that liberty is exercised through sheer, visceral anger. If you’re familiar with his work—and if you are, it’s probably carried over from a severely angst-ridden adolescence—you know that he won’t hesitate to conjure stomach-churners like “an aborted fetus in a jar” in service of his message. And though his base is in no small part comprised of suburban kids, his politics are firmly left.
In “Peruvian Cocaine,” for example, I.T. represents a cast of characters—including a farmer with revolutionary dreams, his oppressive overseer, and a white-collar American distributor (I had two governments overthrown / to keep our son enrolled in a private school)—conveying an unsubtle but uniquely complex impression of the drug trade.
On the other end of the tonal spectrum are Oakland’s The Coup, led by Boots Riley and DJ Pam the Funkstress. Riley and co. are consummate humorists; if Immortal Technique is leftist hip-hop’s school bully, The Coup are its class clowns. To quote Riley on the drug trade, rapping with an affected Transatlantic accent: Now philosophically, you’d be opposed / to one inhaling coke via mouth or the nose / but economically I would propose / that you go eat a dick as employment froze. Riley is a unique voice in hip-hop, but his work treads the thin line between novelty and novelty act.
Perhaps the only other notable name is Brooklyn-via-Tallahassee’s Dead Prez, whose modus operandi “Revolutionary but Gangsta” signifies a merger of hip-hop and leftist tropes. They’ve become moderately well-known thanks to Dave Chapelle’s use of their track “Hip Hop” as his entry music on Chapelle’s Show, but their fame peaked in a weird ironic twist over a remix of their signature track “Hell Yeah (Pimp the System).”
The remix features, of all people, Jay-Z, hip-hop’s own John D. Roc-a-Fella. A hyper-capitalist guest star, in theory and practice, muddles the leftist message—but then again, it’s hard to imagine anyone, even Marx himself, turning Young Hova away.
In the first verse, Dead Prez’s stic.man describes a get-fed-quick scheme: robbing pizza delivery boys for the food. The crime is an intentionally desperate one, and one that calls out Domino’s—which notoriously practiced “pizza redlining” (the refusal to deliver to certain neighborhoods) in the 1990s—by name.
The second verse by rapper M-1 proposes credit card fraud as a means of exploiting the system. But by the time Jay-Z appears in verse three, the rhetoric changes. It’s a memorable appearance, but Jay plays within the capitalist system, invoking supply and demand (with regard to both drugs and music) and his suburban aspirations.
It’s no surprise that Jay’s guest appearance got Dead Prez some notice, but we’ve hardly heard from them since. Hip-hop is a capitalist’s game, and Jay has won it—hold up, who you smackin’ on? he asks at the end of “Hell Yeah.” I’m only trying to eat what you snackin’ on. His belly is no doubt full.
Illustration by Michelle Nahmad