These days we know Toure as a fairly ubiquitous talking head on tv. He is the host of Fuse’s “HipHop Shop” and “On the Record” and co-host of MSNBC’s “The Cycle.” Back in the Nineties, he wrote not only for The Voice, but for The Source, XXL, Rap Pages, Spin, Essence, and for the English magazine The Face.Here Toure goes deep. in his opinion, The Wu-Tang, J.U.N.I.O.R. Mafia (a/k/a Biggie Smalls’s crew), and the Suge Knight’s Death Row clique each comprised a hiphop family. All of them were following in the wake of “the first true hiphop family,” Public Enemy, differing from PE’s model “only in character, not structure.” He calls this phenomenon Blockism.
Cheo had suggested something similar in his piece for Rap Pages. “The rules for survival” in the hardrock section of every sprawling metropolis – Staten Island’s Stapleton Projects, in the Wu-Tang’s case — “are quite simple: Never travel anywhere without a crew of brothers ready to fight alongside you like the group’s collective ass depended on it. And never, ever leave home without your sword, kid.”
Cheo then went on to quote Inspector Deck as follows: “We on some real family shit, and if you don’t have your family, you’re fucked, man.”
But here’s Toure:
These families conform to the classic matriarchal African American family structure except that here the matriarchs are men – which is also traditional, since in African American families, roles are always adaptable. That black men organized themselves into largely female families speaks to sexism…but also to a hunger to experience maleness.
Toure ends with a very sympathetic, even lyrical, appreciation of the hip-hop-crew-as-family, by way of explaining why RZA decided to keep the music business at arm’s length and to rely on his homies instead:
Blockism, then, is a more pragmatic nationalism and the hiphop family a comfort zone for strangers in a strange land. A mobile home to make your trip – through the industry, across the Atlantic, from the cradle to the grave – a little mo better.
Whether or not this theory strikes you as deeply insightful or wildly fanciful, it is not standard hip hop critical discourse. I emailed Toure recently wondering why it didn’t earn him a punch in the eye when it was first published.
“I heard, much later, that some folks wanted to beat me up for that. But they never did. Maybe they didn’t know where to find me,” he replied. “Also The Voice was not a prime concern for those folks and their friends. That same piece in The Source would’ve been war, but The Voice was largely invisible to them.”
― Look at this joke I've recognised, do you recognise it as well? (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 21 May 2014 16:16 (twelve years ago)