Black Stage, White Crowd
By Simon J Black
Published: 11/22/2007
In his latest article for POUND magazine, Simon Black tries to make sense of the black stage/white crowd phenomenon in live hip-hop.
Rock The Bells was a true celebration of hip hop; respect given to the new voices and honour paid to the legends. But when Chuck D urged the crowd to pledge allegiance to the revolutionary cause, I’ve never seen so many white fists give the Black power salute. With an overwhelmingly black line-up, the whiteness of the crowd had me perplexed.
This concert didn’t take place in Hartford, Connecticut. I could understand the ‘Black stage, white crowd’ dynamic if this was the case. The venue was Randall’s Island, in the heart of NYC, just a couple of miles from the cultural epicenter of African-American life, Harlem; a couple more from the birthplace of hip hop, the South Bronx. Queensbridge projects are a few subway stops to the east.
The irony was not lost on those who attended, from hip hop journalist to beer swilling frat boy. In the New York Times, reviewer Kelefa Sanneh quipped, “African-Americans were a tiny minority in the crowd; cargo-shorts wearers most certainly were not.” XXL columnist, Byron Crawford, raged against his Black brethren for not stepin’ up there hip hop love noting that despite the quality of the performers, RTB “wasn’t even on Black people’s radars.” NYC-based blogger Jose Vilson recalled his conversation with an inebriated “white dude”: “You know, you're like the 11th Black person I've seen at this event,” he told Vilson, “…it's funny how at an event like this, where there are Black performers performing Black music, almost the whole audience is White;” proving that it didn’t take a sociologist to observe that 90% of the artists were Black and 90% of the crowd was white. But why? After RTB’s west coast show threw up the same racial dynamic, peeps were searching for answers.
Rolling Stone speculated that maybe most Black hip-hop fans saw Rock the Bells as “a Rage Against the Machine concert with lots of opening acts” and decided to stay away. Usually on point, Sanneh at the Times mused that most of the rappers at RTB “shared the kind of rebellious energy that attracts rock fans,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Other commentators put it down to dollars, or the lack thereof. Given the racialized nature of economic inequality, with Blacks disproportionately poor and working class, can many afford the luxury of an RTB ticket? On his XXL blog, Crawford entertained the argument before asking “who wants to bet how many of us show up to the Scream Tour with T.I. and Lil’ Bow Wow or whatever?”
To trouble the matter further, the ‘Black stage, white crowd’ phenomenon is not exclusive to RTB. For lack of a better term, ‘conscious hip-hop’, in its live manifestation, draws a whiter crowd; a fact grudgingly recognized by artists who’ve been lumped into this genre, from The Roots and Public Enemy to Mos Def and Pharoahe Monch. And for many artists, it’s becoming a point of contention. On one of Tech N9ne’s latest joints, “Message to the Black Man”, the Kansas City MC laments the lack of Black people at his shows: my people you supposed to be/ my people ain't cha/ but my people ain’t something that I see/ cuz they not never you at my shows.
We’ve got to dig deeper, beyond the superficial explanations
and pseudo science, to get at the root of the matter. ‘Black stage, white crowd’
has its origins in the political economy of hip hop; that is the power
relations – between white and Black, between corporations and artists, between
artists and consumers – upon which the business of the culture has been built. Jeff
Chang, hip hop scholar and author of Can’t
Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation drops some serious
knowledge on this question. According to Chang, the racial divide in ‘conscious
hip-hop’ began in the late 1990s. Chang
was involved in the West Coast’s “underground” hip-hop scene and saw the racial
make-up of audiences change dramatically: “In the late 80s through the mid-90s,
artists were playing at places like the Bomb parties in San Francisco, or Unity
or the Good Life Cafe in Los Angeles, to crowds that were very diverse, but
largely still working-class or middle-class kids of color,” a pattern repeated
in most cities with significant Black and Latino populations. “When acts
started getting signed by majors in the late 90s – say Jurassic 5 or
Blackalicious or Mos Def – they were perceived by majors as niche artists –
‘conscious rappers’ – and so they were pitched usually toward college-educated,
upper middle-class audiences,” Chang told POUND. “Advances were relatively low,
so artists really made their money by going on the road. But most cities still
had a strong anti-rap bias, so a cottage industry grew up around building tours
for collectives…and were sent largely to smaller, predominantly white college
towns for door prices that actually made the artists some loot.” Chang says the
pattern is now established as “there is still no tour circuit for most rappers,
unless it's going to be arena-sized, and for formerly ‘underground’ rappers,
the prices are by now way too high, and the venues are too alienating for most
kids from the hood.” But Chang doesn’t blame the artists; most would prefer
diverse audiences: “They have to make a living in a difficult industry, and
everything that the industry sets up for them reinforces the narrowcasting, the
whitening of their audiences.”
Rinaldo Walcott, a sociologist at the University of Toronto and expert on Black
popular culture, agrees with Chang but adds that ‘Black stage, white crowd’
goes back as far as the 1920s, being part of “the ongoing history of white
youth attraction to Black expressive culture.” In addition, Walcott believes
that the so-called ‘conscious’ artists and legends like those who performed at
RTB “are no longer in vogue among trend setting Black youth…their is a
particular kind of white hipness that imagines it now knows and appreciates those
groups better than their assumed communities – it is a kind of cultural
snobbery.” But it is not merely a matter of cultural preference. Echoing Chang,
Walcott argues that so-called ‘conscious rap’ has been marketed in a way “that gives
artists a strong identification with middle class white audiences.”
So is ‘Black stage, white crowd’ a problem? Corporate America is not colour blind and it seems that the exclusion of Black youth from some spaces of hip hop culture, either symbolically through marketing or physically through venue choice and ticket pricing, simply mirrors injustices found in the broader society. If this is the case, then yes, ‘Black stage, white crowd’ is a problem and we in the culture need to confront it.
Published in POUND Nov/Dec Issue