A White Man’s Look at Race and The Hip-Hop Industry

Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip Hop in White America, By Jason Tanz

Book Reviewed by Donnell Alexander
The San Francisco Chronicle
February 25, 2007

The title of Jason Tanz’s book about white America’s use of hip-hop culture, “Other People’s Property,” is also a knowing reference to Naughty by Nature’s 1991 hit “O.P.P.,” an abbreviation for Other People’s Property — or Other People’s Slang for Vagina, one of the two. Either way, Tanz’s title is an inside joke inside an inside joke, and it suggests the sort of playing around to come.

“Other People’s Property” is a very good book that is at its best when its author acts like a DJ. But don’t get it twisted: Tanz sees hip-hop as text more than as sonic phenomenon or, for that matter, stone groove. “Other People’s Property” is made up of nine journalistic pieces, each a mix of reportage and personal reflection about race and the industry of hip-hop. It’s freaky, equally in love with Western philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard and the classic albums from hip-hop’s golden era. In a very hip-hop effort to get his shine on, the author mashes up his prose, cutting in and out of reportage and confessional styles. The flourishes of philosophical debate are as boldly gratuitous as rapper Jim Jones‘ “Ballin’.” Tanz aims high and has achieved, if not a heavyweight piece of pop culture like, say, Jay-Z’s “Reasonable Doubt,” then at least something like a nerd-rap classic.

The minor phenomenon of so-called nerdcore rap is the point of entry to Tanz’s concerns about hip-hop and black culture. As a young white kid with (what came across to me as) socialist leanings, he wants hip-hop to end well. He doesn’t want it just to be another instance of husking freed slaves of their culture. Tanz seems as if he knows how the movie’s going to end. His cultural critique pretends that the tens of thousands of friends and family and plain ol’ talented people who have lifted themselves out of poverty through hip-hop’s extended industrial influence don’t exist. The only recurring shortcoming of Tanz’s book is that the author behaves as though Jay-Z’s latest dalliance with corporate culture never happened.

On other subjects, though, our writer/MC stays on beat. He’s very good on break dancing, analyzing the iconic movies “Flashdance,” “Beat Street” and “Breakin’ ” in one piece, keeping the essay from turning into what might otherwise have been like a glossy magazine profile of a poignantly marginal break-dance crew. The juxtaposition between those box-office successes and the street culture that spawned them says loads about the corporate media’s complicated relationship to hip-hop. Yet we’re also taken on a tour of New York’s hip-hop historical spots and uneasily reminded that hip-hop couldn’t wait to sell out.

Tanz is all torn up about this quest for lucre, and he looks for redemption, or at least the assurance that some critic’s not going to call him a “cracker” when his book comes out. His is a thoughtful, surprisingly un-bummeristic journey, full of fake Canuck G’s, Eminem, “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” Wisconsin “churban” radio station programmers, Caucasian homeys who rhyme about computer code, Three 6 Mafia at the Oscars and the always-available Bill Adler.

Hopelessly self-obsessed, Tanz’s personal nonfiction dabbles a bunch in issues of who has claim to hip-hop, but is ultimately focused on one of hip-hop’s most unusual qualities: its alleged inaccessibility to white people, even those who really love it, like Tanz.

As a colleague from the music industry recently told me, hip-hop takes a toll. And it’s “Other People’s Property’s” moral excavation of the music and its culture that keeps Tanz likable. Beyond all of the analysis, his book gives the abiding sense that the white boy is really trying hard to come to terms with his white guilt and its parent, white privilege. And that really is the missing ingredient for some cats who are hip-hop mad. By the episode late in the book in which Tanz engages in something called hip-hop karaoke, he’s no longer a spectator. He’s in the building, on the mike, and he’s feeling himself.

Donnell Alexander’s next book is “Rollin’ With Dre: Tales From Inside Death Row and Its Aftermath” (One World/Ballantine).

Source: sfgate.com