Consider This from NPR - How Hip-hop Is A Mirror That Reflects The Problem Of Gun Violence In America
Episode Date: November 11, 2022Takeoff, from the Atlanta trio known as Migos, was shot and killed at the beginning of November outside a bowling alley in Houston.The issue of violence, specifically gun violence, is often associated... with rap culture. But those who follow the industry closely, and know its history, say the culture isn't the culprit.We speak to A.D. Carson, a professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia, about how death and violence have impacted the rap and hip-hop industry, and how the music is just a mirror reflecting back the larger issue of gun violence that plagues all of America.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at considerthis@npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Fans gathered on Friday for a memorial service in Atlanta for the rapper known as Takeoff.
He was one-third of the Atlanta trio known as Migos.
Takeoff was shot and killed on November 1st outside a bowling alley in Houston.
He was just 28 years old.
Now, he may not have been the most visible member of Migos in comparison to Quavo or Offset,
but Takeoff, born Kirshnick Karibal, was seen as the glue that kept the North Atlanta family music trio together.
Migos was a real family. Takeoff and Offset were cousins, and Quavo was Takeoff's uncle.
Quavo told me that Takeoff got his rap name from the fact that he could record his rhymes,
even back then as a child, in one take and didn't have to re-record them often. Jule Wicker is an Atlanta-based entertainment and culture reporter,
and she says that Migos was a rap group with a distinctive sound.
They're known for this kind of triplet flow.
That they popularized. Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace.
That they popularized.
And, you know, if you talk to a lot of music critics, they'll tell you rap didn't sound the same after the Migos, right?
Migos had split up recently with Quavo and Takeoff producing music on their own.
And before his death, Takeoff released an album with Quavo titled Only Built for Infinity Links. I mean, I think the strength of the album, one of the strengths is that it really gives Takeoff
room to shine. You see, Takeoff, he was always really the quiet member of Migos, the least
flashy of the crew. Something about that consistency really helped him emerge as like the best lyricist in the group over time.
And he was finally at the point where he was starting to get credit or get the credit he deserved.
And really he was coming into his own.
That is Rodney Carmichael, NPR hip hop staff writer and co-host of the podcast Louder Than a Riot.
He says Takeoff did stand out in his own way.
You know, his heart was still with the streets. And even though Migos reached the high aspirations
that they really started off rapping about, Takeoff, he still really rapped first and foremost
for the Trap Boys, trapping out the band, though, which is how and where they started from. Now, hip-hop fans are looking back at Takeoff's legacy, something that seemed to be
on the artist's own mind in recent years. Here's a clip of an interview Takeoff did with Complex
Magazine in 2018. I want longevity. I want to stay consistent. I want to be eight, ten years,
twenty years later, you still remember my music, still be able to live on.
Yeah.
And you still remember me and still remember all the work we put in.
Takeoff's death by gun violence is not the first in the industry.
Many other hip-hop and rap artists have been killed over the years.
And that, for some, raises a couple questions.
Is violence, particularly gun violence, a problem that's connected to rap?
And is hip-hop culture itself to blame for that?
Well, here's how Jewel Wicker sees it.
You know, we can have conversations about lyrics and that as an art form,
but I also argue that the gun violence that we've seen that has claimed the lives of so many of our beloved rappers
is a microcosm of the gun violence and the endemic violent issue that we're seeing
throughout America in general, right? These rappers are a part of the local communities
that are a part of the United States that is experiencing an increase in guns and violence.
And I think when we talk about it, I want us to be careful to not make it seem like it's a
quote-unquote rap issue because I really think it's a systemic cultural issue.
Consider this. Violence and guns may be a recurring theme in rap and hip-hop, in the music itself, in media coverage of the industry.
But for those who follow the industry closely, it's just not true that its culture is to blame for the deaths of some
of its stars. We hear how hip-hop is simply holding a mirror to the larger problem of gun
violence in other currencies.
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It's Consider This from NPR.
Go back to the 1990s, and it was Tupac and Biggie. Rap star Tupac Shakur died last
night after a brief life in a rough business. He was 25. With a 24-year-old rap artist known as
Notorious B.I.G., Christopher Wallace was shot early Sunday morning. And more recently, the list
of rappers who've been killed has only continued to grow. Thousands of fans of Grammy-nominated
rapper and community activist Nipsey Hussle
are in a state of shock today.
They are mourning the hip-hop star's ultimately
and violent death.
Nipsey Hussle was murdered.
Pop Smoke was known by some of the biggest names
in the business, like Nicki Minaj and 50 Cent.
His murder has stunned fans everywhere.
Rapper PNB Rock was reportedly shot to death at a restaurant in Los Angeles Monday afternoon.
Violence and death seem to hang like a cloud over rap and hip-hop.
But we wanted to hear from someone who has been following the industry for a long time
to try and go beyond the myths and stereotypes that have grown around this topic.
And for that, I spoke to A.D. Carson.
He's a professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia,
and I asked him to explain how death and violence have impacted the industry.
I believe that, of course, it's incredibly tragic.
And that expectation of tragedy, the expectation of death,
then it becomes, sadly, in a strange way, like it is a part of the
marketing logics of what it means to be an artist. And what I mean by that is when Pop Smoke is
killed, his music is selling, or when someone like Lil Peep dies. And so it seems as if there's a
kind of consumptive logic that says that in death, we will honor you by consuming your music.
And I think that lots of artists then are compelled to say, I hope you give me my flowers
while I'm here. Or as Tupac said before he died, when I die, I want to be a living legend.
And then I think that folks who are rappers and myself included,
we find ourselves as rappers in the position of talking to people who are no longer here.
And you can see examples of that at the most popular level if you listen to something like
Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, where we find out that over the course of the album,
he's been having this conversation with Tupac, you know, in the context of the artistic
presentation.
So you do think that this is something artists in the industry are totally talking about,
that the violence that leads to so many deaths is something that there's a great deal of
concern about?
I think that what we might call despair, or might call hopelessness or we might call nihilism
that exists in the music exists because of the conditions that folks are living in in this
country that ultimately end up with people in prison or dead. Yeah.
Right. I mean, there are some people out there who might just assume, look, violence is just a part of hip hop culture, especially because it's
something that rappers make songs about. What do you say to that assumption, this thinking that
all these tragedies are just expected in this kind of music, in this industry?
Would you blame the mirror for what it reflects?
And what I mean there is that the United States
is an incredibly violent country.
So we should expect in the same way that we expect
that our films are violent and folks engage with them
as though it makes sense that they happen.
Our books, many of them are violent.
Our television shows are violent. We're a country
this deeply historically and contemporarily steeped in violence. And so it would make sense
that any kind of cultural product coming out of this country would be violent, or at least it
shouldn't be surprising to anybody that it is. So my question in response to that question is always, what is it that's happening in hip hop culture? Or what is it that's present in hip hop
culture that makes people feel that the violence that's happening there is exceptional in some way?
And I think that in a very strange way, it seems as if we are after the death of someone like PNB
Rock, or after the death of someone like Nipsey Hussle, or the death of someone like PNB Rock or after the death of someone like Nipsey Hussle or the death of someone like Takeoff.
Then it seems as if much of our questioning about what happened makes it seem as if we're saying they should have done something to not have been killed the way that they were killed, rather than talking about the conditions that exist that led to the circumstances
of them dying. Well, do you think that rap culture and the rap industry has a responsibility to
address the epidemic of gun violence in this country? Well, my response to that or my question
would be like, where is the power that the hip hop culture is going to have that supersedes the power of the folks that we elect into public office to actually change the laws?
I mean, absolutely. The people who hold power in this country have a responsibility to address the epidemic of gun violence in the U.S.
But do you think the rap industry specifically also has a responsibility to respond in some way? There have been consistent responses from the communities that are represented by hip hop against senseless violence and against all of these things that folks country to hold that accountability in place and to ask those same kinds of questions of other cultural products that do the same kind of glamorization and glorification of senseless quotidian violence that we have or that we blame on hip hop. So then we would have to ask, well, what is our value of
film where, you know, like the primary mode of communication is shooting a gun at someone?
Yeah.
So we would have to ask the same kinds of questions of all of the other kinds of cultural
products where guns are present and they insist on a kind of access to guns that we have that is unfettered. And we're
not asking those questions in those other places. And so my question again would be, what is it that
makes rap exceptional? And I think the thing that makes rap exceptional is the same thing that makes
rappers scapegoated in all of these cases. And that has everything to do with a kind of pathologizing of
Black bodies and Black life, Black living, and also Black death. And so then these become the
exceptions to the rule, even though it's not exceptional at all that a person gets shot
regularly or that there are mass shootings every weekend, every day. And it's gotten to the point
that we don't even report all of them when
they happen. I mean, I know you're someone who's been studying hip hop and its history for a really
long time. And I'm curious, how have you seen the way people perceive the genre and the industry
evolve over the years? Yeah, well, this is interesting, because I think that what we see
happening in the music has a whole
lot to do with these public perceptions around hip hop. And there's a way that people are writing
about hip hop. If you think like the 1986, the stadium tour that Run DMC takes in 1986 after
the Raisin' Hell album and the violence that happened in the places where there were tour stops somehow
seemed to always conveniently be blamed on the fact that there's a rap show there. And then
whenever that gets written about, it's written as if this hip hop concert is the cause for the
fighting, as if the artists on stage are telling the people in the audience to fight with one another, and then Run DMC has to kind of go on what might seem like an apology tour where they're saying,
we do not support or condone violence. And so they're having to explain away what happens
among the people who listen to their music because people are trying to make the correlation between
the fact that there was fighting with the fact that rap was there. And that becomes a hard thing to have to work with and against. But it's also a
way that people know that they are going to be written about if they get asked questions after
violence happens. After a violent incident happens, then people are going to ask rappers, what's your responsibility?
What did you do?
How did you guys cause this?
Or is rap just too violent and can we not handle it?
And it seems like we've been asking and answering that question for like 40 years straight.
That was A.D. Carson.
He's a professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia.
Earlier in this episode, you heard excerpts from interviews
conducted by NPR's Aisha Roscoe and Adrian Florido.
It's Consider This from NPR.
I'm Elsa Chang.