A pop star’s road map to decadence
This year’s “50 Years of Hip-Hop” propaganda is not cultural celebration but a manipulation tactic. It follows Biden’s turning the Texas state remembrance known as “Juneteenth” into a spurious national holiday, and Nancy Pelosi’s donning a kente cloth and taking a knee at the Capitol, worshipping felon and drug abuser George Floyd, all to capture the black vote. A more authentic hip-hop culture event would recognize the 30th anniversary of The Chronic, the album that brought hip-hop’s political ethics to a close. After The Chronic, black Americans who used to fight against the godless, ethical decline of ghetto living simply gave up, relenting to the power of pop-culture persuasion. Thus began today’s moral concessions, such as policies in New York, the birthplace of hip-hop, whereby politicians give preference to ex-con drug dealers for licenses to sell marijuana, a.k.a. “The Chronic.”
In 1993, the album The Chronic (originally released the year before) broke through to hip-hop’s mainstream. It was the solo debut for rapper, songwriter, tour-de-force producer and future mogul Dr. Dre (Andre Young, originally of the group N.W.A). Snoop Doggy Dogg (Calvin Broadus Jr.) was only a featured performer on several tracks, but the lanky, laid-back — perpetually buzzed —performer marked the beginning of hip-hop’s descent into crowd-pleasing depravity, the enculturation of black American pathology that now includes Snoop’s entrepreneurship with white lifestyles maven Martha Stewart.
You can’t understand the milieu of post–George Floyd urban miscreance without knowing this apolitical album, which appeared on the heels of Public Enemy’s politically exciting masterworks Fear of a Black Planet and Apocalypse ’91, as if to deliberately nullify them. Over its 50-year history, hip-hop went from innocent ingenuity to political awareness to the aggressive, sexual decadence that prevails today. Every track on The Chronic drew that road map.
The Chronic’s audacious songs are so impolitic that they make everyday corruption swing: “Let Me Ride” mentions “hollow points” alongside shameless rip-offs of Parliament-Funkadelic party tracks. It is flagrantly profane. Dre proves himself a superb rapper — a skill by which, years later on the magnificent “California Love,” he stole the show from Tupac. Here, Snoop merely rides shotgun, but it’s an undeniable introduction of a star.
“Nuthin’ but a G Thang” was the album’s biggest hit. (“It’s like this and like that and like this and uh.”) The ordinary is given rhythm, an emotionally specific presentation of feckless behavior, as if justifying it. This is how pop stars validate the unconscionable — from selfishness to degeneracy and crime. Got qualms? Snoop answers, “Who give a f*** about those? / So just chill until the next episode.” My original review for the black-owned The City Sun called it “Nothing but a Genocide Thang.”
In this sense, The Chronic initiated Snoop and Dre’s manifesto: “Lil’ Ghetto Boy” quotes golden-era R & B artists Donnie Hathaway, George McCrae, and Gil Scott-Heron. Morally conscious R & B is noted but ignored. It’s Snoop’s most serious track (“What are you gonna do when you have to grow up and face responsibility”), never to be repeated.
On “The Roach” (“Make my butt the chronic / I got to get f***ed up”), Dre defines drug addiction matter-of-factly — the folk realism that Kendrick Lamar tries for.
Next, “A Nigga Wit a Gun,” lays waste to the euphemism “gun violence” through the verisimilitude of raw street toughness. (“They call me Dre Eastwood when I got a gun.”) Its sequel “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” advises, “Never hesitate to put a nigga on his back.” This is the real birth of gangsta rap because many listeners bought into it. Snoop’s high-voiced evil-conscience refrain advocates community self-destruction with drawling insouciance. Every politician should listen, learn, and stop the liberal pacifist pretense.
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Snoop’s low-down diatribes began three decades ago, with his infamous debut subsumed in Millennial celebrations that overlooked the rudderlessness of his course. Hip-hop used to be better than it is now, and that deterioration can be traced to The Chronic.
Sure, Snoop claims some neologisms (“Shizzle My Nizzle”), yet he’s never uttered an original thought. Stupid verbal exhibitionism disgraces hip-hop’s reggae, toasting, blues, jazz, and rock-and-roll origins (recalled in Van Morrison’s cover of Louis Jordan’s “I Want a Roof over My Head,” celebrating familial virtues that hip-hop has forsaken). This makes Snoop an agent of enculturation — the process by which youths learn and internalize the warped values of an aberrant social space. Snoop calculated those attitudes in a recent pointless attack on President Trump. That tirade paralleled a similar rant by Eminem, the token white reprobate and protégé of Dr. Dre’s degenerate Interscope/Death Row combine.
Corporate media’s “50 Years of Hip-Hop” scheme spreads across hip-hop’s spectrum of old and new performers and yet stays unspecific in order to keep black pop culture closed-minded — sexually, violently, psychotropically — and, ultimately, politically drugged. Breakout star Snoop still entices a mindless constituency through partisan pothead epithets that might even embarrass RINOs on the GOP debate stage. LBJ’s infamous warning about keeping blacks voting Democratic for the next 300 years can count at least 30 thanks to The Chronic and legacy media for perpetuating hip-hop decadence.