What is 'The Real'?
Hip-hop was born from the struggle of the streets. Emanating from the souls of the disenfranchised, hip-hop was the artistic medium the poor and underprivileged built to communicate and alleviate the daily pain, violence, inequity and strife faced by what seemed like a lesser category of American citizen. Whether through rap, breakdance, turntables, or graffiti, the hip-hop culture sprang from the hearts, souls and creative minds of those with quite limited means to the revelation of their condition. The 'Gangsta' of David Brooks' article, for instance, was largely the centerfold of hip-hop's early roots. However, the Gangsta was not some mere construed, illusory aspiration projected farcically onto the impressionable minds of urban youth. The Gangsta was real. He was male. He was African American. He was violent. He was criminal. And he demanded respect. As hip-hop's early centerfold, the Gangsta was an articulation of perhaps the only model for life and ascent in what was the lawless, overlooked and segregated street reality. The Gangsta existed before hip-hop. And as long as such pockets of curiously discrepant access to wealth, health and justice persist in our increasingly civilized world, the animalistic Gangsta will also unquestionably persist as a construction of what he is excluded from. However, when one narrows in on what the Gangsta meant and was for hip-hop origins, what emerges can be an immediate likening of Gangsta life, in general, to the substance of the early hip-hop genre.
A treatment of the Gangsta as substantive echoes the foremost and founding parameter for the recognition of 'the real,' or what Keeler refers to as the 'authentic', and its corollary in action of 'keeping it real.' In other words, one should always consider the content of rap and hip-hop as revelatory of the artist's situation, thoughts or environment. The extent to which the artist's content is real depends wholly on how effectively it communicates the truth of an artist's situation, be it external or internal, to others (but can also revolve only around the ability of communication alone; lyrical skill or rhyming capabilities, for instance). The truth must always relate to a listener. The following text prioritizes hip-hop's catchphrase of 'keeping it real' as its primitive and inherent purpose and definition. Briefly, it genealogically traces the shifting character of American hip-hop's 'keeping it real' in order to arrive at the eccentric and unique instance of the artist Kid Cudi. My short genealogy sets out, first, to identify the real in 'keeping it real' by offering three historical examples of its different substance in Grandmaster Flash, Common, and Lupe Fiasco. Second and finally, by exploring Kid Cudi, my genealogy provides an intimate analysis as to the characteristics of what should now be considered a new breed of 'keeping it real' in hip-hop—one which makes hip-hop and rap accessible and appealing, in a real way, to a far wider audience, by assimilating itself to an infamous philosophic movement of the past.
The Gangsta Narrative
First, created in 1982, Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" epitomizes the substantive truths of the hip-hop environment from the aforementioned Gangsta perspective, while highlighting precisely the psyche behind such a frame of mind. "The Message" itself, literally, refers to the communication of such truths. Specifically, the line "It's like a jungle, sometimes it makes me wonder, how I keep from going under" reflects the actual animal and barbaric nature of street life (the "it" to which Flash refers). The content of this early hip-hop elucidates the goings-on of the ghetto and highlights the material longing, moral shortcoming and larger social unawareness that ran commonly throughout these environments. The Gangsta narrative becomes the first real that hip-hop has to offer given the nature of its origins. Therefore, contemporary American hip-hop artists whose content does not move past these archaic articulations of a Gangsta narrative and who continue to elevate the old crudities of materialism, sexism, violence and racism, in an America which has moved forward, instantiate notions of contrived artificiality.
Artistic Consciousness
Second, the city of Chicago's Common recorded the following track, "I Used to Love HER," in 1994 largely as a protest against the heightened materialism and artificiality which characterized hip-hop's apparent direction. Common's track was a call for hip-hop artists to abandon the discourse of original hip-hop specifically because it was increasingly less relevant. Common's consciousness about hip-hop itself bears testament to the changing nature of 'keeping it real'. In the track , the "HER" Common refers to is hip-hop itself. The track's nostalgia for an age when hip-hop was real reflects Common's understanding that hip-hop which is not revelatory violates its very essence—'keeping it real'.
Political Consciousness
Last, Lupe Fiasco's "Conflict Diamonds" from 2007 takes up the highly political issue of the African diamond mining business and its exploitation of young labor. Taking up where Kanye West left off with his original "Diamonds" track, here, Lupe Fiasco brings to the forefront a globalized moral predicament. Taking to heart Common's 1994 plea, Lupe employs hip-hop as a medium to articulate to its audience the gravity of a contemporary problem. Lupe pushes hip-hop forward simply by his commitment to its original nature.
Romantic and Psychoanalytic Self Consciousness
Thus, we now arrive at Kid Cudi. What follows seeks not to provide a biography of the artist, nor to discuss his studio albums and mixtapes track-by-track. Instead, it brings forth the substance of his art, which is hip-hop, as quite simply, a new form of 'keeping it real' by centering on his first studio album, Man on the Moon: End of Day. That form? As one can experience by watching the video below, Kid Cudi injects the hip-hop genre with unadulterated emotional expression of his internal state-of-mind, wholly without explicit reference to unjust political and social forces. His form of the real brings hip-hop's primitive and inherent purpose, 'keeping it real', with what may seem like a wholly unrelated category, era and school of thought: the Romanticism of the second half of the 18th century in Europe.
The Romantic era was largely a time-period of the reactionary discovery and elevation of truths which stood apart from the scientific rationalization of nature, social and political takeover by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the aristocracy. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe. In an effort to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl and industrialization, Romanticism embraced the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant authentically by utilizing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape. By localizing legitimacy in the realm of the individual imagination, Romanticism effected a freedom from classical notions of form in art. (Thank you to Wikipedia for help here)
So how is it, particularly, that Kid Cudi's work not only makes him a Romantic figure but also brings Romanticism into hip-hop? First, through the translation of internal affliction into a vibrant soundscape which combines guttural vocal projections, symbolically burdensome and heavy beats and penetrating introspective lyrics. And second, by the substance of that internal affliction—the nonconformist escape from reality through drugs and imagination. Watch the video below (*I recommend you turn off the lights and turn up the sound):
Man on the Moon: The End of Day, pervasively emanates a problematic mood of melancholy, longing and emptiness, which Kid Cudi triumphantly overcomes in the very same album. For instance, in his track "Solo Dolo (Nightmare)" Cudi elicits a familiar darkness through a subtle artillery of soulful cries, internal questioning and a mysteriously simple and repetitive beat—the end-product can give one goosebumps. Another example, "Cudi Zone" can be characterized as a triumphant overcoming of self-over-system, of the individual over his moral insecurities, all brought together by a humming sound of salvation. Cudi's translation of his psychological states into an adventurous narrative and, most importantly, an accessible soundscape facilitates a demographic-blind appeal to the artist, and even puts into question whether his art should even be considered hip-hop. Garnering listeners through solidarity, Kid Cudi's hyper-individualistic exploration of his own self along with his thoughtful but aching unwillingness to conform resounds with any listener, of any race and any economic class, who struggles, albeit perhaps without awareness, with the tension between, on one hand, disinterested authoritative prescriptions and, on another hand, the radical human freedom within us all. The 'Man on the Moon', as Cudi calls himself, authors the revelation of this very psychoanalytic tension between what Freud would refer to as the Superego, or the internal authorial demand for perfection, and the Id, or the hedonistic pleasure principle. It is because such a tension runs commonly in us all that Cudi's Romantic form of 'keeping it real' effectively knows no bounds.