Fake Music History: What Would Have Happened to Hip-Hop if Jimmy Carter Had Been Reelected?
It’s an image most Americans over the ages 40 and over have burned into their brains: American tanks bursting through the gates of the U.S. embassy in Iran, blasting Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” as the stormed the building to rescue the 52 Americans languishing there, without one shot being fired. Many heroes were made that day: the Marines that stormed the embassy, the American hostages, Kurtis Blow, and, most significantly, Jimmy Carter.
As Carter campaigned for reelection against Ronald Reagan in 1980, “The Breaks” featured prominently, playing before and after every stump speech Carter made. The election was never really up for grabs, and America handily reelected the President that delivered the hostages.
A lot of media attention was focused on the Carter’s campaign song: who was this Kurtis Blow, and what was this new music that he was singing? If it could be called singing at all: Blow called it “rapping,” and it mainly consisted of stylized bragging spoken over funk break beats. A lot of Carter’s media advisers were worried that using a new, unfamiliar music produced by a black man would negatively affect Carter’s standing, especially in his native south.
But Carter had nothing to worry about; if he lost any old, white southern votes he more than made up for it in the young, urban votes. His campaign’s co-opting of youth culture was relied heavily upon by future candidates wanted to appear “cool,” most notably Bill Clinton in his “Rock the Vote” campaign.
The success of the song had media and marketing companies pouring into the Bronx, the epicenter of the hip-hop scene. Soon, every DJ with a turntable or two had a record deal. The studios largely called the shots as they all clamored for the next “The Breaks.” They found a goldmine in the Zulu Nation, a maelstrom of rappers, DJs, and graffiti artists with a gruff, bearded Jewish boy named Rick Rubin at the center of it all. He was in the process of founding Def Jam Recordings, a record label he wanted to use to record some of the rappers he had befriended. Seeing the potential for profit, Warner Brothers Music Group bought Def Jam outright, and signed almost every member of the Zulu Nation.
What followed was one of the most concentrated efforts at musical marketing ever seen. Rolling Stone’s Preston Claymoore wrote: “The years of 1983-88 were some of the most disgusting and artificial years in the history of American pop. Band rosters were arranged and re-arranged by the studios for maximum profitability. One DJ would be with two rappers on one release, only to find that same DJ paired with another DJ and rapper combination the next release. We were exposed to such dreck as Kool-DMC’s ‘Rock the Mic’ and J-Snazz’s ‘Balls at the Malls.’ It was the Monkees meets the Partridges meets African-American culture, commodified.”
It’s widely agreed that the absolute nadir of the “hip-hop” movement of the mid-80s was the cynical “We’re all One Nation” tour of 1987, where members from the Zulu Nation toured with an ever-changing lineup of pop stars, from Billy Idol to the Bangles to the Cutting Crew, culminating in “We Are The World”-like rap song “Feet on the Ground, Head in the Clouds” benefit song for the space shuttle Challenger’s victims’ families.
Thankfully, by the early 90s the hip-hop movement had largely died out, rejected by a marketing-weary American public, who enthusiastically adopted grunge as everything that hip-hop-saturated commercial radio was not. A few of the promising DJs of the 80s still make the rounds, appearing at state fairs and “Where Are They Now?”-type nostalgia shows on VH1. An irony-drenched hip-hop revival of sorts washed briefly over the music scene in 2007, where bands as diverse as the Strokes and Arcade Fire offered their own tongue-in-cheek covers of some of hip-hops biggest hits.
