Jeff Chang: Total Chaos

Hip Hop on Both Sides

Author Jeff Chang has released his second of two aesthetic oriented hip hop books called Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop. Chang argues that the capitalist structure in America has shifted the hip hop community to focus solely on the music. This equates to only one percent of what hip hop represents and ironically, has consolidated the true spirit of hip hop and it’s cultural expression. He believes that today’s hip hop heads have become passive and are allowing themselves to be force fed with what the media monopolies decide is distributed through each venue. Chang was introduced to hip hop at the age of 12 listening to the Sugar Hill Gang and knows hip hop is something that was created in the struggle of not conforming to the system.

Scheme: How did hip hop music transform you into becoming an author and releasing your first book “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop”?
Jeff Chang: When I moved to California after I graduated high school, I was at Berkley during the mid 80’s and this is around the time when the underground Bay Area was about to drop. Like you’d be up on Telegraph Avenue, which is a main strip for young kids over here on the East Bay, and there would be ciphers all the way down the block. Kids dancing, kids rapping, and people cruising up and down the street with there woophers going off. You would see folks around, you would see Shock G. from Digital Underground and they were getting their first record out. You would see Hammer stopping in front of Leopold’s running the records in to get them sold on consignment and Too Short and all these cats that were kind of there and accessible and I was at the radio station. A lot of the times, we would be the first folks in the Bay Area to play these records. I was just a kid like, “Oh man look at these guys!” I saw one of Digital’s Underground first shows, Paris was coming by…all these folks. I was also getting into activism at this time, so I was a activist by day and doing a lot of stuff around anti-racist issues and at night I’d go down to the station and DJ and watch folks like Davey D. or Billy Jam, who are all huge and famous now. So the writing came a little later because I was doing a story on these graffiti guys and I hung out with them and did a little story on them.

So being bored at my day job I kind of fast talked my way into the morning shift which was 3am-6am in the morning. Since I had a lot of radio experience, I moved up really quickly. A lot of magazines started popping up, the Source and URB, URB Magazine got started in LA. So I had all these interviews coming through: Cypress Hill, Michael Frantee, and Disposable Heroes and all these different folks, and I was like, “Wow, this would be really cool to turn these into stories.” So I wrote to URB and was like, “Hey, I would like to do some stories for you.” I sent them a sample story I had done for Sway and Tech, so they brought me in and I started writing and they made me a columnist by the next issue. At the same time, I’m meeting people like DJ Shadow, Chino XL, Blackalicious and Lyrics Born and we all crewed up and started this label called Soul Sides. I started getting my clips around and I got called byLA Weekly and Vibe when Vibe was starting out so it just kind of evolved out of my enthusiasm for hip hop. I had an niche about trying to place it in the context of race, multiculturalism and all those kind of issues. It was a different type of voice than what other people had which people valued and it was just after the riots in LA so it was a real intense time.

Scheme: Its interesting to see that dynamic because LA is so diverse and multi-cultural, I really don’t think you would see that much resistance versus starting out writing on the east coast, I don’t want to assume but I think there may have been a sense of reluctance to allow you to voice your opinion and perspective regarding hip hop?

Jeff Chang: Yeah, it’s possible. I think about it from time to time but in LA, at the time, the underground was primarily African-American but it was still going to be more diverse than crowds that you got anywhere else. You’d go to a party and half the people were Black, there would Asians and Latinos but you would never see White kids at the show. It was still primarily folks of color, so the DJ’s were Davey D. and Kevy Kev, kids that were coming from the Bronx. So, I did realize that I was different from other Asians (laughs) but I also realize that there were people before me. There was Nasty Ness in Seattle and Q-bert and they were blowing up at the time.

Scheme: Why did you decide to name your book Total Chaos?

“It’s funny when people talk about the Golden Age because even back then people were always in disagreement and fighting about stuff. Now, it looks like a done deal and everybody came up and it was what we were trying to do. Everybody had a oneness and a unity of mind (laughs) and it just wasn’t like that.”

Jeff Chang: Actually one of my favorite lines from Parish (EPMD) is, “…total chaos/no mass confusion…” from Strictly Business and I didn’t know what it meant at the time, I mean, I think I get the general thing he was trying to say but there still may be a specific meaning to it. I don’t know if it’s some five percenter philosophy. The case I was trying to make is that hip hop arts movement is not just about rap but so much of our perception of it and scholarship around it is framed by what gets put through media monopolies. We focus on the product and the product is usually the CD and to a lesser extent, the video. If you take the big view of it, the capitalist view of hip hop is what frames hip hop and when you take that frame out, it’s total chaos. You got people that are doing hip hop theatre and you have people that are writing novels. Danielle Smith is writing this beautiful hip hop novel and people are looking at it like, “There is some rap in it, but how is it a hip hop novel?” Then, you have people taking hip hop into graphic design like Say Adams or Brent Rollins, hip hop in photography and hip hop in film. So, once you take the organizing frame that capitalism provides, it looks crazy, like this unfathomable universe. This universe is expanding, so let’s look at the voices and the artists that are making this stuff. Let’s find out what they are talking about and the deeper you get into it the more it looks like chaos. There’s a consensus now that there may have been a consensus back in the late 80’s. It’s funny when people talk about the Golden Age because even back then people were always in disagreement and fighting about stuff. Now, it looks like a done deal and everybody came up and it was what we were trying to do. Everybody had a oneness and a unity of mind (laughs) and it just wasn’t like that. Fools were fighting at the Source about the Source. Fools were fighting about sexism and hip hop back then and there were all these types of arguments that were happening back then. Bringing that back to what’s in the book, if we can sort of accept that there is chaos maybe we can get a deeper understanding of it in the end. We start out with Harry Allen and his conclusion is we’re doomed towards entropy and the spirit of hip hop is becoming more and more dissipated. I wanted to take the general idea of the Big Bang and say maybe, on the other hand, there is still this expanding universe but people may have just lost interest in different things and maybe our time in the Big Bang has passed.

Scheme: I had a conversation with Bobbito Garcia and he said when it comes to anything regarding hip hop there is always a search involved. Would you say that hip hop still exists or is it just something you have to look for?

“Ninety-nine percent of it is not going to get picked up and distributed through the media monopoly system and there are a lot of parallels to hip hop in the early days.”

Jeff Chang: A lot of us are talking about that now. The hip hop that is the subject of most of our attention, analysis, angst and that kind of stuff is hip hop produced by one percent of the hip hop’s creative output, at any given moment. Ninety-nine percent of it is not going to get picked up and distributed through the media monopoly system and there are a lot of parallels to hip hop in the early days.

“People are weary and so tired. Haven’t we been discussing hip hop and mysogny for 15 years? Snoop Dog came out in ‘95 and now I’m 25 and he’s still saying the same thing. Why do they want to screw with my head so badly?”

Hip-hop was a lived experience. You had to be there and before 1979, you had to be one of those kids who knew where the community jam center was going to be. The interesting thing is that now that hip hop has become the under-grading of all these artistic genres, the places where you can have that moment of surprise have greatly expanded. I’ve been doing a lot of speaking engagements and the dominant chord is weariness. “People are weary and so tired. Haven’t we been discussing hip hop and mysogny for 15 years? Snoop Dog came out in ‘95 and now I’m 25 and he’s still saying the same thing. Why do they want to screw with my head so badly?” The second thing to say is, “Hey, When have you been out lately? When did hip hop become this remote control thing? When did this passive experience begin?”

Scheme: Where it supposedly had to come to you…

Jeff Chang: Yeah! Where all of the sudden you’re complaining about what they are force feeding you and you’re not saying, “wait a minute, I can cook my own dinner!” That’s the thing I try to challenge people on like why do we sit around here and complain? Hip hop’s founding spirit was built on “nobody is going to do it for us, we have to do it for ourselves.” So, I think there is a really big role to be played by activists that are decrying hip hop and I’m one of those folks but at the end of the day that doesn’t create new art and you can’t be a reactionary all your life. So, you either have to shed it out or create something new. So one of the big under lying questions is, “What does it look like if we win?” What does it look like if we have the power to get rid of the things we didn’t want?

Scheme: It’s almost like getting reparations…
Jeff Chang: Exactly! That’s exactly it, and then you’re faced with a whole new set of questions and it’s not to say the struggle right now isn’t important. It’s to say the struggle is nothing without a hope for something new and if you can’t imagine what that something new is going to be, you’re not going to create that. That’s the big discussion. “What is the something new that hip hop is going to create and is their liberation and freedom after hip hop?

Scheme: Would you say one of the challenges is if you were born in 1985 or 1990, you don’t know what to look for and the only sound you hear is what’s given to you?
Jeff Chang: Yeah, it’s the constant struggle that each generation goes through. You learn your lessons and all of the sudden you get to a point where the younger folks look alien to you. Those people who came of age in the 80’s are looking at those who were born in the 80’s like that now. The other question is, “What are we going to leave with younger folks to liberate them and have them form there own thing that might move beyond hip hop?”

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