Hipocalypse now

Hip-hop pre-millennial tension

by Alex Pappademas

Ever since Bob Dylan, that nappy-headed rhyme sayer known for his obscure press persona and healthy diss-respect for authority, visualized New York as a post-nuclear ghost town in 1963's "Talking World War III Blues," rappers have been picking the mike up to stare down Armageddon. Dylan's yarn was basically just a crack at human self-absorption, including his own, phrased as a droll shrink's-couch freestyle about joyriding down 42nd Street in a stolen Cadillac. But the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- a non-event that still forced America to contemplate its own destruction, sort of the Y2K Problem of the '60s -- gave Dylan's goof a considerable degree of topical resonance. What could have been mere surrealist tambourine banging turned into a warning wrapped in one-liners.

Fast-forward to 1998: Dylan's chillin' on the airport set of Wyclef Jean's "Gone till November" video, and in multiplexes across the country celluloid worlds are ending. Most people who saw the cataclysmically dopy Deep Impact shrugged off its vision of destruction-by-comet in less time than it took them to unstick their Pumas from the theater floor. But Busta Rhymes -- like this even needs to be said -- ain't most people. Busta took the title of his cusp-of-'99 album Extinction Level Event (Elektra) from Impact; the album cover restaged the film's climactic tsunami shot as an impressively realistic Photoshop fireball.

Too hyper an entertainer merely to stand back and pontificate, Busta packed the album itself with spring-loaded space jams and Janet Jackson steambaths, skipping over Armageddon and hailing a limo for Block Party 2001. But "Intro: There's Only One Year Left!!!", the album's opening skit, had hyperbolic hypotheticals (and exclamation points) to spare. After an adorable kid asks "Daddy, what's it gonna be like in the year 2000?", a genial white-dude father figure (whose voice gradually morphs into a studio-tweaked Satanic rumble) forecasts plagues, fish deep-frying in a boiling ocean, carnivorous extraterrestrials, and bloodthirsty cyborgs.

Busta's vision was built on thematic samples from junk-food blockbusters -- Deep Impact, but also Volcano and Independence Day, and the flash-forwards from the Terminator movies, all jumping off in a lurid pile-up worthy of Napalm Death's old LP sleeves. With its Hollywood-shuffled imagery, the skit exemplifies what writer Stephen D. O'Leary has called "popular millennialism" -- as if the Heaven's Gate sect had explained their mass suicide in jargon borrowed from Star Trek and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or the Columbine kids had built a rationale for murder out of mistranslated KMFDM lyrics.

There's still a lot of old-time-religious terror in America's conception of the Last Days, of course, but increasingly we seem to imagine the world going out not with a bang but with a secular pop. Busta's ill cyborg/alien montage, therefore, is both a sign of the times and pre-millennial hip-hop's defining moment: apocalyptic apprehension spilling out as slapstick overkill, the clamor of box-office nightmares blowing up in your face.

Paranoidly zooted but also deep-rooted, Y2K rap's sprawling, frequently self-contradicting visions of the future tap into themes that have been with hip-hop, and black music in general, since way back: distrust of authority, the early blues' yearning for an Earthly Promised Land, technophobia (and, occasionally, guarded technophilia), Five Percent Islam's the-black-man-is-God dicta, the cosmic loneliness of brothers from another planet identifying with the stars. Decades before Method Man Mad Maxed and relaxed, before the UFOlogists of LA's millennium-mad Celestial Recordings label bought one-way tickets to Planet Cybertron, before Canibus even had an e-mail account, Delta bluesmen were performing narrative songs about flood waters rising to erase their home towns, songs that gave Biblical catastrophe (not to mention the countless non-Western flood myths) a local, personal sting. My theory about all this is that the "flood song" re-entered hip-hop subliminally in 1989, via a Johnny Cash sample -- "How high's the water, mama?/Three feet high and rising" -- on De La Soul's first album, thus paving the way for songs like Outkast's "Da Art of Storytellin' (Part 2)," which is essentially just another talking blues about close-to-home disaster.

Ultimately, though, I think it's a mistake to chalk up pre-millennial hip-hop to the influence of any specific religious tradition. Busta and Brand Nubian draw on Islam, Goodie Mob and Outkast from various Christian faiths; and the Wu-Tang Clan throw both in the blender with a bugged garnish of Jeet Kune Do and Egyptology. Chances are that January 1, 2000, won't signal the Christian Rapture or the Islamic "haji," or "hardship"; what's harder to predict is what the next millennium has in store for black America. It's that fear -- specifically, the idea that unseen forces are inventing a future where the good guys have already lost -- that cuts across Y2K rap's religious divisions. As Goodie Mob's Gipp puts it on "Cell Therapy," "It's kept low how the new world plan/Means the planet without the black man."

Conspiracy-theory raps like "Cell Therapy," full of unmarked helicopters and computer-chip implants, could be installments from the African-American X-Files. But though Chris Carter's series (and movies like Oliver Stone's JFK) play on our shock and incredulity at the idea of a deceitful "shadow government" -- our sense that "it couldn't happen here" -- black America doesn't have the luxury of viewing this stuff in the abstract. From the Tuskegee Experiment to COINTELPRO in the '60s all the way up to new revelations about "racial profiling" on interstate highways, black America's been burned so many times that even the farthest-fetched accusations seem entirely believable.

In other words, Y2K rap isn't a subgenre that holds out a ton of hope for the future. Although rappers like Phoenix Orion and Canibus get geeky kicks from our increasingly virtual world, hip-hop as a whole is becoming more like Detroit techno, a genre in which the idea of an industrial society's selling the inner city for parts has always been less a scary what-if than a foregone conclusion.

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The hipocalist

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