No Country for Old Heads

Why is it so hard to imagine a space in hip-hop for our elders?

Here's one from the archives as I continue to work on further plans for this Substack. The following was originally presented remotely during the COVID-upended 2020 Pop Conference and has been lightly edited to reflect the passage of time. This piece is also dedicated to the memories of DJ Mister Cee and Rico Wade, two pivotal figures in hip-hop who passed last week, far too soon.

When Kanye West included the line "We wasn't s'posed to make it past twenty-five / Joke's on you, we still alive" in The College Dropout's first song "We Don't Care," he did it in defiance of the young-Black-and-dead image that had been plaguing the Chicago of the public imagination circa the mid-aughts. But it also comes across, at least a little, as a parallel nod to the Tupac-and-Biggie reputation of hip-hop artists as people limited to the work they made when they were young, whether by choice, circumstance, or tragedy. That was Kanye at one year past 25; as of 2020, at 43, he'd become some kind of MAGA punchline with a shrugged-at Christian rap album and his consensus masterpiece a decade in the rearview. It's the kind of career arc that spurs an eternal question: how the hell do you age gracefully in hip-hop, which more than any other genre has stylistically bridged multiple generations even as it puts its youth-culture status in the foreground?

Back in July 2020, the Medium-based Black culture blog Level posted a list of the 40 Best Rappers Over 40. #1 was Jay-Z, who might as well be a default answer for that question at this point, but ever since he dropped that "30's the new 20" track on the fake-retirement-ending Kingdom Come in 2006, his reckoning with maturity has been occasionally brilliant but kind of uneven -- rap's equivalent of the Stones in the '80s, even if I'll take 4:44 over She's the Boss. Second place: Royce Da 5'9", who's definitely active and prolific but not necessarily a mainstream zeitgeist type of rapper. The remainder of the top 10 include performers who are either still great "rapper's rappers," like Pusha T and Black Thought, or ones who are more famous than consistent, like Rick Ross and Eminem. The closest there is to an act that's both still arguably near the top of their game while still having widespread mainstream attention is Run the Jewels, and more on them later.

At the same time, this site published a semi-humorous piece about "The 6 Best Hip-Hop Songs About Being Washed," which in their case meant "theme music for the 30-and-up crowd." Their idea of what that meant were songs about taking Viagra, doing laundry, being too old for the club, being an overprotective dad with a teenage daughter, and nostalgic reminiscence. (Those latter two were by Nas, who famously had to battle back from accusations of being washed only seven years after Illmatic; it is now 30 years after Illmatic.) An accompanying list of the 20 Best Albums By Rappers Over 40 was full of good-to-classic records, but almost all of them could be broken down either into artists with hardcore underground followings -- Roc Marciano, Pharoahe Monch -- or well-known rappers who deliberately addressed their maturity and legacy, like Jay-Z on 4:44 and Dr. Dre on Compton.

My presentation's premise originally stated that despite some strong veteran presences, hip-hop is still considered a youth movement by mainstream media, and there are reasons for this that aren't necessarily just marketing bullshit. Kool Herc's first DJ set was a back-to-school party, and for most of hip-hop's first couple decades -- initially as a live mobile soundsystem phenomenon, then as an actual segment of the record business -- it operated as one of the only artistic outlets that actually advocated for a young, Black working-class segment of pop culture, even if its scope could sometimes be limited to a fairly narrow definition of what that segment was actually like. Chuck D, one of the most authoritative voices to ever rock a mic and one of hip-hop's most preservation-minded artists, has stated in profiles like his 2008 Red Bull Music Academy lecture that when Public Enemy was just getting started, he thought he missed his shot when he was a teenager in the late '70s, and that his biggest potential to make inroads in hip-hop as an adult was to design album covers. Thankfully he changed his mind, but he was getting called an "elder statesman" at 28 when It Takes a Nation of Millions dropped. Compared to LL Cool J and Roxanne Shante, technically, he really was.

But then again, young people nowadays aren't necessarily expected to "get" Public Enemy, at least if you ask an NPR intern who was born in the '90s and first "really cared about a rap song" when he heard Drake's "Over." Austin Cooper's unfavorable assessment of Nation of Millions went viral in 2012 on the back of the outraged response from music critics and old heads, but the defenses of Cooper's article basically boiled down to the kind of sentiment expressed by the Guardian's Alex MacPherson: "It's as though they expect today's teenagers to validate their parents' radical youth by obediently following the set texts… I hope to see many more young music writers who don't give the tiniest damn about what the music establishment tells them to listen to." David Turner got a similar amount of grief for taking the same approach to De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising for MTV.com, with one sentiment really standing out: "it's fun, but it's also super-super-sample-based, which I know is real hip-hop, but feels so distant to what I enjoy about the genre in 2016… instrumentals and ad libs that come closer to contemporary EDM than old-school rap."

There are so many questions I could ask from here. Does this mean sampling itself is irrelevant to hip-hop as '90s babies understand it? Does the access-to-everything nature of current streaming models wind up algorithmically narrowcasting genre selection to narrow listeners' tastes, or does it encourage exploration of older music without that easy hook of nostalgia? Is the past, god forbid, for boomers? I bring up that particular specter because (a) I am an internet user over 40 and therefore constantly mortally self-aware of my cultural obsolescence in the single most important venues for my ideas, and (b) so is J-Zone. The New York rapper/producer, whose debut album Music For Tu Madre came out in 1998, put out a whole album 15 years later about facing the idea of being an aging underground rapper. And the fact that he titled it Peter Pan Syndrome should tell you a lot about what he thinks about his prospects there.

But a more telling sign is a track called, deceptively, "Rap Baby Boomers." Technically he's addressing his (and my) Generation X -- cue the aggrieved "uh, like, we exist, whatever, breakfastclub dot gif" attention pleas -- but he invokes the boomers not as the Source Of Everything Bad, but the sad comparison point of the oldster who can't actually retire because they don't know what to do with the rest of their lives. And the kids? "This is what they think about us," J-Zone intones, before playing a clip of Soulja Boy mocking Ice-T for being "old as hell… why you still rappin' for, dog? The game has changed… and nobody wanna hear that old shit no more." That last bit's looped three times for emphasis. J-Zone is now playing drums for a funk band, the Du-Rites, who are great but also probably less subject to people who can't yet legally drink clowning on you for thinking the styles of the past were interesting. As he stated: "Rock stars, jazz stars… do it into their eighties. Dolemite was talking about bitches until his eighties, but if you do it over 30 you're not mature in hip-hop."

But there have to be other options besides trying to schlep your ass back to a 9-to-5 after a couple decades living onstage and in vocal booths. Making lateral moves into cratedigger funk is a good one, or spending more time making beats than spitting over them; when your crates are dusty, people tend to overlook whether you're dusty, too. Still, is rap ever going to have a Johnny Cash or an Ornette Coleman or a David Bowie, someone who makes legitimately great music well into their sixties or seventies? Are we ever going to get over fears of resigning oneself to cornball status once you pass a certain age? How many ways are there to get old in hip-hop that aren't permanently connected to the threat of falling off? I figure there are three that are the most pertinent.

#1 is the hiatus: just vanish long enough, and when you come back people will generally appreciate you at least somewhat based on what they've missed. A lot of ado was made over A Tribe Called Quest's excellent 2016 comeback We Got It From Here… Thank U 4 Your Service being not only their first album since 1998's The Love Movement but their best since 1993's The Low End Theory. And that was compounded by Q-Tip's last notable solo release being The Renaissance in 2008 before he diverted much of his attention to production. Given the reunion's origins in a particularly charged "maybe we still got it"-inspiring performance on Fallon the same night as the Paris Bataclan theatre massacre, and the passing of Phife Dawg providing the album's closure-heavy context, Tribe made for a singular example that's only really approached by Jay Electronica finally releasing his debut A Written Testimony at age 43.

The second route is rebranding. Either take the Run the Jewels route and find someone whose rare combination of chemistry and new perspective lights a fire under your ass, or just switch up your whole shit entirely. The biggest critical and artistic success story in that latter case is Ishmael Butler, who went from Nixon-era-invoking retro-soul jazz in the Digable Planets' early '90s heyday to kicking the whole idea of linear time to the curb as an Afrofuturist in Shabazz Palaces, whose only clear reference point is the Entire Damn Cosmos. Butler going from a Grammy-winning throwback as a younger artist to an indie-innovator forward-thinker who put out yet another great album at age 50 should be the kind of career arc that turns the entire washed-older-rapper narrative on its head. Him, I can definitely see maintaining well into Pharoah Sanders levels of longevity.

And that brings us to the third and most reliable route: the indie resiliency gambit. The thing about the whole backpacker / indie rap movement that emerged in the '90s is that, in resistance to the idea of hip-hop as a limited major-label commodity with burn-bright-burn-fast planned obsolescence, there are a lot less people to be beholden to. And even if you're able to make something of a living out of it, it's not going to be the kind of living that breeds complacency, puts you out of touch with your origins, or affords you the kind of fuck-you money that can helpfully cushion any cases of Detox-caliber writers' block. billy woods, Ka, Homeboy Sandman -- I could start listing more names and still leave some out by omission. If you're old enough to have learned how to juggle a work-life balance and still maintain your hunger and your drive, you're lucky, but thanks to the levels of long-term fandom and support that indie and DIY methods cultivate, that luck seems to be at least a bit more evenly distributed than in the old days.

However, I have to admit here that the pandemic threw a huge wrench into the narrative I was planning to build this piece around. Artists are still dropping albums, but they can't tour behind them, and in the longer term the real threat to older artists is the inability to connect with fans in the live-show context where they spent decades honing their craft. These artists are part of the first generation to come of age with the internet as a crucial backbone of their careers' emergence, so hopefully they can adapt with new approaches like livestreaming and quarantine-inspired creative binges until the live-music opportunities return.

Open Mike Eagle, who's one of my favorite artists working in any genre right now and turns 40 this fall, released the title track to his 2011 album Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes shortly after he hit 30. The lyrics hint at far worse things than falling off: "Because they took rhymes serious / Most of my heroes will die penniless / And while they're alive and ruined by pain / Rap fans shall not Google thy name." We need a better way. Let's hope that finally, maybe, we're getting there.