Kanye, Katrina, and the Future of Black Music

There's a remarkable track on Grammy Award-winning hip hop artist Kanye West's brand new LP Late Registration entitled "Crack Music" which flips the cultural devastation of the 1980s introduction of crack cocaine on its head. Crack, obstensibly invented by the CIA as a means of curbing black nationalism, has backfired on its masters, fueling as it did the hip-hop culture which has now invaded the homes of the rich and privileged, who will gladly pay rap artists handsomely for another "fix". The key verse here being:

We took that shit, measured it and then cooked that shit
And what we gave back was crack music
And now we ooze it through they nooks and crannies
So our mammas aint got to be they cooks and nannies
And we gonna repo everything they ever took from grammy
Now the former slaves trade hooks for grammies
This dark dixon has become America's addiction those who ain't even black use it.

I mention this because West has been outspoken in his criticism (live on NBC!) of the Bush Administration's handling of the Katrina aftermath, going so far as to say "We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war now fighting another way and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us.... George Bush doesn't care about black people."

And if some of the wilder conspiracy theories have even a shred of truth to them, West is not far off. It's a terrifying notion to think about, but we must: the poor of New Orleans may have been deliberately dispossessed (and demonized as "looters") in order to make way for the rebuilding of New Orleans on the sterilized theme park terms of the rich. Goodbye Robert Johnson, hello Robert Johnson Hotel and Casino Resort Complex.

Yet Poor Black America will have the last laugh, and blues/jazz/rock/hip-hop is only the beginning. Indeed, the addictive capacities of black (or "urban", as the PC phrasing goes now) music cannot be denied, as proven by recent hits of the last few years, from Outkast's "Hey-Ya!" to Missy Elliot's "Work It" to that ridiculous "Milkshake" song.

The establishment may indeed poison poor communities and flood their streets with soul-destroying opiates and leave thousands to rot in disaster-struck coastal cities, but the vicious earworms of Black America, imported from Africa and filtered through centuries of suffering, are in but an intermediary stage of the formation of something far more gruesome: a planetary meta-song so danceable it will shake the shackles of Avarice and Greed out beyond the asteroid belt, and install a Global Order of Peace and Stank-Funk-Nasty Ecstasy through the power of its cell-rejuvenating BEAT.

That hip-hop has been essentially been coopted and assimilated by Capitalist Realism is besides the point: hip-hop has found a foothold in the popular consciousness, and who knows what demons -- let loose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- will follow it through the door.

UPDATE: Chuck D. weighs in.

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