One sunny afternoon during the first week of this month, a group of brightly attired teenagers loitered in an alley just down the block from Philadelphia’s Theatre of the Living Arts, trying to explain something they themselves didn’t really understand. “I don’t think he’s gay,” said Jorge Benitez, an 18-year-old New Yorker who had traveled by bus to Philadelphia earlier that day. “But if he is, either way — who the f*** cares?” His older sister Laura, 21, agreed: “He’s happy, or he’s gay — it doesn’t matter.” Nearby, Dave Willis, 19, was more definitive. “I don’t think he’s gay,” Willis said. “But he’s definitely a little out there.”
The “he” they were speaking of, soon to climb onstage down the street, is Lil B, the 23-year-old Oakland, Calif.-based rapper born Brandon McCartney, whose furious online campaign for fame and recognition — by his own count, he’s released more than 2,000 free songs on the Internet, and garnered more than 50 million YouTube views — recently made a dent in the real world at California’s Coachella Festival in April, when he announced the title of his next album: “I’m Gay.” The announcement prompted death threats at the time — at least, threats of the Twitter-based variety — and much self-searching in an already uneasy hip-hop community. Less than two weeks earlier, the legendary 44-year-old New York deejay Calvin LeBrun, who works under the name Mister Cee, had been arrested on charges of public lewdness.
Together, the two incidents, ranging as they did across generations of hip-hop fans, from terrestrial radio to the depths of the burgeoning online world, and from a working artist to a revered industry veteran, raised questions about levels of tolerance in the traditionally conservative — when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender — rap world. They spawned reams of commentary from the sidelines, as critics alternately celebrated the genre’s brave new era of acceptance and despaired at the intense backlash promptly suffered by both McCartney and LeBrun.
As for McCartney himself, well, he wasn’t even sure if he meant what he’d said. “I think this title is going to make a lot of people have some self-discussions,” he said in Philadelphia later that night, leaning back on the couch in his dressing room, weary from nearly two hours of performing and another hour of signing autographs, which he did until there was nothing left to sign. But he was quick to separate himself from those he seemed to be advocating for: “I’m not a homosexual man,” he said wearily. “But I am gay because I am happy, you know what I mean? And I support the happy people.”
Who the “happy people” are, exactly, remains a source of much debate in hip-hop, a genre in which coded speech and double-entendre have long since achieved the status of art. Are artists like Lil B helping usher in a new, more tolerant form of rap music, or are they simply young enough, and Web-savvy enough, to know a good marketing plan when they see one?
Though rap has in many ways become the default form of pop music in America over the past decade, the genre, like the rest of the industry, is suffering. In this climate, gay and lesbian audiences, who’ve lately helped fuel the outsized success of everything from “Glee” to Lady Gaga, may represent not just a new social frontier for hip-hop, but a commercial one, too.
“There’s so much money to be made from the gay community,” said Kenyon Farrow, the former executive director of Queers for Economic Justice and a New York-based writer and activist, citing the success of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Rihanna, three artists with large gay followings. “If you’re not trying to do what they’re doing in terms of sales and marketing and strategies to make money, then you’re not playing in the current paradigm.”
The controversy-prone rapper 50 Cent, one of hip-hop’s most consistently commercially savvy artists, was one of the earliest and loudest defenders of Mister Cee in the wake of his arrest. No stranger to backlashes himself, 50 Cent was blunt about the financial cost of homophobia in an increasingly liberal consumer market. “If you say it’s not fine, you’re going to be attacked — you’re going to write apology notes,” he told HOT 97’s Miss Info, whose real name is Minya Oh.
She agreed, and noted that innovation in the rap industry — with its ever-increasing proliferation of clothing lines, perfume brands and artist-owned labels — has a long history of being sparked by economic concerns. In 2011, “I think there is an understanding of different lifestyles” in the rap audience, Oh said. “And it’s unreasonable for you to keep growing as an artist or in your audience if you insist on expressing a lot of hatred toward other sexual orientations.”
What effect this belated revelation will have on the genre itself is still an unanswered question. Even among those who acknowledge the need for rap to become more tolerant, if only for purely commercial reasons, there is a fear that, in seeking new audiences, hip-hop risks losing old ones, or at least its traditional sense of self-identity.
For the past 30 or so years, “rap music has been viewed as one of the only vestiges of black male masculinity in the community I come from,” said the Atlanta-based rapper Killer Mike, born Michael Render. “So the lines have been pretty stringent on the machismo aspects of being a man: making money, having women and essentially living a playboy’s lifestyle in a much more urban environment.”
Increasingly, though, Render and others concede, masculinity has come to mean a much different thing, in and out of rap music. “I think over the last five to 10 years, the phenomenally narrow orthodoxy about what constitutes realness and manhood has eased up a lot,” said critic Jay Smooth. “Hip-hop has kind of become sort of the soundtrack to this middle-class American complacency, instead of being some particular edgy rebellious thing.”
What may appear to be a liberalization of the genre, in other words, may merely signal the latest stage in the ongoing assimilation of a subculture.
Ironically, for all of hip-hop’s “panicked freakouts,” in the words of Smooth, around issues of homosexuality and gay identity, it may in fact be the gay community itself that still has the most reason to be suspicious in 2011. “If people are going to use the gay and lesbian audience and embrace them for their money, then you had better be prepared to be a cultural advocate for them,” said Render.
“An artist like Lil B is either going to be congratulated as someone who stood up early on the behalf of the gay and lesbian community, or he’s going to be called to task for just using them for his own gain.”
“And that,” said Render, “totally depends upon what he does post-record-release.”
The “he” they were speaking of, soon to climb onstage down the street, is Lil B, the 23-year-old Oakland, Calif.-based rapper born Brandon McCartney, whose furious online campaign for fame and recognition — by his own count, he’s released more than 2,000 free songs on the Internet, and garnered more than 50 million YouTube views — recently made a dent in the real world at California’s Coachella Festival in April, when he announced the title of his next album: “I’m Gay.” The announcement prompted death threats at the time — at least, threats of the Twitter-based variety — and much self-searching in an already uneasy hip-hop community. Less than two weeks earlier, the legendary 44-year-old New York deejay Calvin LeBrun, who works under the name Mister Cee, had been arrested on charges of public lewdness.
Together, the two incidents, ranging as they did across generations of hip-hop fans, from terrestrial radio to the depths of the burgeoning online world, and from a working artist to a revered industry veteran, raised questions about levels of tolerance in the traditionally conservative — when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender — rap world. They spawned reams of commentary from the sidelines, as critics alternately celebrated the genre’s brave new era of acceptance and despaired at the intense backlash promptly suffered by both McCartney and LeBrun.
As for McCartney himself, well, he wasn’t even sure if he meant what he’d said. “I think this title is going to make a lot of people have some self-discussions,” he said in Philadelphia later that night, leaning back on the couch in his dressing room, weary from nearly two hours of performing and another hour of signing autographs, which he did until there was nothing left to sign. But he was quick to separate himself from those he seemed to be advocating for: “I’m not a homosexual man,” he said wearily. “But I am gay because I am happy, you know what I mean? And I support the happy people.”
Who the “happy people” are, exactly, remains a source of much debate in hip-hop, a genre in which coded speech and double-entendre have long since achieved the status of art. Are artists like Lil B helping usher in a new, more tolerant form of rap music, or are they simply young enough, and Web-savvy enough, to know a good marketing plan when they see one?
Though rap has in many ways become the default form of pop music in America over the past decade, the genre, like the rest of the industry, is suffering. In this climate, gay and lesbian audiences, who’ve lately helped fuel the outsized success of everything from “Glee” to Lady Gaga, may represent not just a new social frontier for hip-hop, but a commercial one, too.
“There’s so much money to be made from the gay community,” said Kenyon Farrow, the former executive director of Queers for Economic Justice and a New York-based writer and activist, citing the success of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Rihanna, three artists with large gay followings. “If you’re not trying to do what they’re doing in terms of sales and marketing and strategies to make money, then you’re not playing in the current paradigm.”
The controversy-prone rapper 50 Cent, one of hip-hop’s most consistently commercially savvy artists, was one of the earliest and loudest defenders of Mister Cee in the wake of his arrest. No stranger to backlashes himself, 50 Cent was blunt about the financial cost of homophobia in an increasingly liberal consumer market. “If you say it’s not fine, you’re going to be attacked — you’re going to write apology notes,” he told HOT 97’s Miss Info, whose real name is Minya Oh.
She agreed, and noted that innovation in the rap industry — with its ever-increasing proliferation of clothing lines, perfume brands and artist-owned labels — has a long history of being sparked by economic concerns. In 2011, “I think there is an understanding of different lifestyles” in the rap audience, Oh said. “And it’s unreasonable for you to keep growing as an artist or in your audience if you insist on expressing a lot of hatred toward other sexual orientations.”
What effect this belated revelation will have on the genre itself is still an unanswered question. Even among those who acknowledge the need for rap to become more tolerant, if only for purely commercial reasons, there is a fear that, in seeking new audiences, hip-hop risks losing old ones, or at least its traditional sense of self-identity.
For the past 30 or so years, “rap music has been viewed as one of the only vestiges of black male masculinity in the community I come from,” said the Atlanta-based rapper Killer Mike, born Michael Render. “So the lines have been pretty stringent on the machismo aspects of being a man: making money, having women and essentially living a playboy’s lifestyle in a much more urban environment.”
Increasingly, though, Render and others concede, masculinity has come to mean a much different thing, in and out of rap music. “I think over the last five to 10 years, the phenomenally narrow orthodoxy about what constitutes realness and manhood has eased up a lot,” said critic Jay Smooth. “Hip-hop has kind of become sort of the soundtrack to this middle-class American complacency, instead of being some particular edgy rebellious thing.”
What may appear to be a liberalization of the genre, in other words, may merely signal the latest stage in the ongoing assimilation of a subculture.
Ironically, for all of hip-hop’s “panicked freakouts,” in the words of Smooth, around issues of homosexuality and gay identity, it may in fact be the gay community itself that still has the most reason to be suspicious in 2011. “If people are going to use the gay and lesbian audience and embrace them for their money, then you had better be prepared to be a cultural advocate for them,” said Render.
“An artist like Lil B is either going to be congratulated as someone who stood up early on the behalf of the gay and lesbian community, or he’s going to be called to task for just using them for his own gain.”
“And that,” said Render, “totally depends upon what he does post-record-release.”
