Hip-hop hell
Marcus Berkmann
Iwas on a number 43 bus the other afternoon, on a sparsely populated top deck, on my way to pick up my daughter from school, when three teenage boys came upstairs. If you travel on buses as much as I do (having never learnt to drive), you assess the potential for trouble in fellow passengers in a split-second, and these boys looked harmless enough. They were black and a bit cocky and wore baseball caps at very precisely calibrated silly angles, but they were noisy and cheerful — it’s the sullen, glowering ones you need to watch out for. A stop or two later, opposite the ancient crumbling charms of the Holloway Odeon, one of them switched on a radio and bloody awful hip-hop started blaring out. They were sitting at the back, as teenagers are compelled to by custom and raging hormones, and everyone in front of them went rigid, with what I’d like to think of as a cocktail of emotional responses. Needless to say none of us said or did anything. One woman gave them a sharp look, but she was going down the stairs at the time, so she was safe. A stop or two later the boys themselves left the bus, distributing defiant looks to the rest of the passengers, as though challenging them to respond. But there was no violence there, merely rebelliousness, stroppiness, the disinclination to play by the rules. It really was delightful to see them go.
Afterwards, it occurred to me that only hip-hop could have done this. If they had played the most recent Oasis album, not only would we have all been very surprised, but we would have marked them down as fools or dolts, who really should listen to something more edifying. Hip-hop, though, is a self-evidently ugly music — jagged, harsh, aggressive — and after 20 years in the mainstream, it hasn’t moderated any of these characteristics one jot. I have given it a go, I really have, but with the exception of the occasional OutKast single, I can’t be doing with it. Which is unusual, as most types of music give me something, and many give me everything. I talked to several fellow music obsessives — all, admittedly, white middleclass men in their forties — and it turned out that this response was not unusual. One said rather forcefully that he liked hip-hop, with the same look of challenge in his eyes as those teenagers, but he also listens all the time to godawful modern jazz and his life is falling to bits, so I was willing to make an exception. But most of the others felt as I did. They knew all about hip-hop, had given it a go, couldn’t get on with it and, in most cases, had returned with relief to white blokes with guitars. There was just the feeling, untinged by strong prejudice, that This Isn’t For Me.
Is there anything racist about this? Of course not, we agreed. Well, it might be for some people but it wasn’t for us. Perish the thought. Nonetheless, it’s unusual in today’s throbbing pop marketplace for any genre or sub-genre to spark such strong feelings. You really like hip-hop or you really don’t. Everything else seems to span the age-groups and the nations. On Radio Two the other day a small boy rang Chris Evans with a request. He was as bourgeois as they come, in daddy’s car driving back from a family holiday in Cornwall. And it was daddy’s request: ‘Teenage Kicks’ by the Undertones. It’s like Don Henley seeing a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. Anyone can like anything. It’s allowed.
Hip-hop is different. One of its primary purposes, I’d suggest, is to annoy people on buses. Teenagers can play it knowing that most grown-ups will hate it; black people can play it knowing most white people will hate it; men can play it knowing most women will hate it. If you play hip-hop in your convertible, to what extent are you enjoying the music and to what extent are you declaring something about yourself to the wider world? Maybe that’s not the way to think about it: maybe the two are utterly intertwined. What’s clear is that it works: hip-hop is a gigantic industry, staggeringly lucrative, which has constantly and cleverly renewed itself over 20 years. You have to admire it, if only from a distance. At least one double-decker-bus length will do for me.
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