Hip-Hop Journalism Roundtable: Raquel Cepeda's "And It Don't Stop"

By Angela Morris

As visitors squeezed into the back rows of the packed auditorium at Joseph and Violet Pless Hall at New York University, on Tuesday, October 26, 2004, Professor Jason King joked, "As you can see, hip-hop is just too popular for NYU."

King, who teaches the undergraduate class "Conversations with Hit Makers" at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, was acting as master of ceremonies for the event, a panel discussion on hip-hop journalism on the occasion of freelance journalist Raquel Cepeda's new book, And It Don't Stop!: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years. Besides Cepeda, the panel featured hip-hop entrepreneur and music writer Bill Adler, music journalist Nelson George, and rock critic Robert Christgau, among others.

Twenty-five years ago, such a gathering would have been inconceivable. In the 1970s, hip-hop was far from the mainstream, and journalistic coverage was limited. Nelson George recalled receiving a rejection letter from The New York Times in response to a query about a hip-hop story. The subject, said the Times editor, was "too specialized for the Times audience." Judging by the SRO crowd in Joseph and Violet Pless Hall, things have changed.

The seven established journalists on the panel have chronicled hip-hop from its backstreet beginnings to its present platinum-hit popularity. They were: Cepeda, who is working on a pilot for a VH1 show on international music called Next Stop Hip Hop; Dream Hampton, co-author of hip-hop star Sean "Jay-Z" Carter's autobiography The Black Book; Bill Adler, author of Tougher Than Leather: The Rise of Run-DMC; Robert Christgau, senior editor of The Village Voice and self-styled "dean of American rock critics"; Nelson George, author of Hip Hop America; Ta-nehisi Coates, writer for The Village Voice; and Sacha Jenkins, freelance journalist.

"The role of a journalist is to write with a sense of the vernacular and the willingness to be provocative, but it's also to think." - Robert Christgau

Although the panel was supposed to discuss Cepeda's book, the discussion quickly switched to how the coverage of hip-hop has changed over the years. As George noted in his introduction to And It Don't Stop, when hip-hop first emerged, the media deliberately avoided covering it. "I remember receiving hostile reactions from many editors when I tried to write about it [hip-hop]," he said, "as if hip-hop were an infection that could be cured by simply ignoring it." According to Cepeda, it wasn't until the release of Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in 1979 that the mainstream media deemed hip-hop worthy of coverage. "By the time 'Rapper's Delight' was released," she wrote in And It Don't Stop, "hip-hop, which was initially being covered as just listings and blurbs in the black press, had surprised us all and gone pop, sprouting up and out of every crevice of the planet where youth culture expresses itself through art, music, dance, and fashion."

Now that the genre has gone beyond mere recognition in the mainstream media to pop-culture dominance, the importance of responsible hip-hop journalism matters more, the panelists noted. "The role of hip-hop journalists is to document hip-hop with integrity," said Cepeda. "Nowadays, I don't find much journalism infused with integrity. Unlike other kinds of music, a lot of us grew up with the [hip-hop] artists, so it's hard to draw the line between a professional relationship and personal relations." Given the extent to which the hip-hop artists' personal lives often overshadow their significance as musicians, reporters such as Cepeda sometimes find themselves caught between journalistic ethics and loyalty to an artist she knows personally.. Hip-hop journalists have to decide whether they want to report all of the facts, or just the facts that help create a specific image for the artist. The result, said Cepeda, is articles that are often more public-relations hype than objective fact.

Ironically, Cepeda pointed out, these artist-friendly articles often accentuate the negative, promoting the notion of the hip-hop artist as pimp, gold-digging bitch goddess, or, most often, gangbanger. Often, she said, hip-hop features are pegged on which artists have just been arrested, rather than musical innovations. This may have partly to do with the fact that, the more dangerous the artist's life has been, the more popular he is with hip-hop fans, Cepeda said.

In addition to the romanticization of inner-city pathologies as the "thug life," a deeply ingrained misogyny has also become part of the image of hip-hop culture. The emergence of the "video ho" is just one of the ways in which women have become a kind of commodity in hip-hop culture. (A "video ho" is a woman who makes her living appearing in music videos as a scantily clad bimbo.) This misogyny infects hip-hop journalism, making it even more difficult for female reporters to cover the music and the scene in a thoughtful, substantive way.

When asked about the role of women in hip-hop journalism, Dream Hampton said that maintaining her integrity as a reporter meant always keeping in mind that confronting men about sexism and the patriarchy was part of her job. "There are times when sexism is the only thing you're writing about," she said. Female reporters sometimes feel that they have to choose between Doing the Right Thing—uncovering misogyny in hip-hop culture—and Doing the Professional Thing: sticking to the assigned angle.

Hampton faced that very conflict when she was writing a feature article on rapper/producer Andre "Dr. Dre" Young, who had been accused of hitting a female reporter around the same time Hampton was reporting her story. Hampton set up an interview with the owner of Dr. Dre's record label, Marion "Suge" Knight, while she was covering the story. According to Hampton, Knight commented that she had a pretty face, noting that she shouldn't say anything stupid in print that might cause her to "get her face all fucked up." Her initial thought, said Hampton, was, "Nigga, I'm from Detroit!" Instead, she maintained her composure and continued the interview—a wise move, in turns out, in light of Knight's ties to L.A. gangs and history of violence. Knight's thinly veiled threat did not appear in the published article, said Hampton, because the editors had decided that the incident did not fit in with the rest of the article.

Likewise, Cepeda has experienced sexism in hip-hop journalism, especially while working as editor-in-chief at One World, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons' now-defunct hip-hop magazine. Working for Simmons was difficult, said Cepeda, because he liked the way she looked, yet had little confidence in her ability to do her job. "Russell liked my ideas," said Cepeda, "but afterward, he would check with one of his male co-workers to make sure they were valid." Cepeda's authority was undermined by Simmons's mistrust, she said; she found it difficult to promote her editorial agenda knowing that Simmons was second-guessing her decisions solely because she was a woman.

During the conversation on sexism in hip-hop journalism, Christgau chimed in with a characteristic zinger. "Sexism sucks wherever it occurs and it should be criticized by men and women," he said. "My strategy as a critic is to insult the manhood of men who insult women—you know, talk about their dick size."

Despite its corrosions, however, sexism took a backseat to racism as the front-burner issue for most of the panelists, who had varying opinions of the effects of multiculturalism on hip-hop culture. In Cepeda's opinion, race wasn't an issue in hip-hop until rap became pop music. Initially, she argued, hip-hop was defined as underground music, strictly for the inhabitants of the urban ghetto. With the explosion of West Coast and Southern rappers such as O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson, Dr. Dre, OutKast (Andre "Dre" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton) and Cornell "Nelly" Haynes, Jr., hip-hop moved beyond urban subcultures, into white suburban youth culture. The co-optation of hip-hop, originally the soundtrack of black and Latino inner-city culture, by the white mainstream raised racial issues, she implied.

Both George and Christgau disagreed with Cepeda, saying that they believed race was an issue in hip-hop before it penetrated the white mainstream, although they disagreed about the degree to which major newspapers, such as The New York Times, covered hip-hop. Christgau said reporters at The New York Times were covering hip-hop music even in its early stages; George adamantly disagreed, stating that the editors at The New York Times did not want freelance writers to cover hip-hop for the publication. "Hell no!" he exclaimed. "I can tell you about many black journalists, including myself, who got rejection letters from them all through the `80s because they didn't want to hear from outside voices. The Village Voice and the alternative press were the only places where you heard both younger white voices and young black writers who loved hip-hop."

Most of the panel agreed that hip-hop is now a mainstream genre. George had a bittersweet reaction to the genre's coming of age. "Because hip-hop has become so mainstream, the audience has been expanded, but it's also gotten narrow because people take a certain amount of knowledge [about hip-hop] for granted," he said. In other words, when journalists write about hip-hop culture today, they often assume that their audience is familiar with hip-hop music and the culture that surrounds it. According to George, this means that the reporting has become less informative, more narrow in scope. Sacha Jenkins noted corporate involvement in the mass-marketing of the music as a contributing factor in the mainstreaming of hip-hop. "Hip-hop doesn't exist," he said. "Rap culture exists, corporate culture exists. I've had a longer-lasting career than your average rapper."

At the same time, the globalization of American consumer culture, through corporate marketing, has made hip-hop an international phenomenon, the panelists agreed. "I don't think [America is] the epicenter of hip-hop anymore," said Cepeda. George noted the emergence of hip-hop abroad, citing hip-hop in Brazil and Algeria as evidence. According to Jenkins, hip-hop culture is more vibrant overseas. "I've been in train yards in Italy with graffiti artists, running around in the dark," he said. "I felt like it was 1982 in New York all over again. In America, hip-hop is dead. Long live rap. Long live people making money off of it."

Even so, argued George, hip-hop still has an effect on U.S. society. He believes that rap artists could become the inspiration that the hip-hop generation needs in order to mature into citizens who are involved in their community and their government. "What you're going to see now," he said, "is the maturation of people who grew up on hip-hop moving into the political process. Asking artists to be leaders is a mistake, but as long as their [fans] are using their juice to make people aware, that's the role they should play." Ta-nehisi Coates had a different perspective on the position of hip-hop fans, particularly journalist-fans, in the realm of social activism. Journalists, he said, should maintain a certain objectivity. "I try to keep as far away from activism as possible," he said. As a reporter, he argued, he has "to keep open the possibility that the activist might be wrong."

Bill Adler summed up the role of the journalist in one statement. "As a reader, I want to read something entertaining," he said. "Aspiring writers, whatever your goal is, make it fun to read or you're gonna lose."

Angela Morris is a student in the NYU Department of Journalism.

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