Hip-hop has endured numerous shifts through its existence, and Washington Post contributor Touré chronicles the genre's transition from warning listeners of drug's pitfalls to terrifying them with substance abuse-riddled stories.
Hip-hop's journey between those two mind-sets happened as the unemployment rate among black men soared to twice the level among whites, passing 21 percent in 1983. A year later, the FBI's antidrug funding increased more than tenfold — just in time for the start of the crack epidemic in 1985. (That's right, the war on drugs was declared before the crack epidemic began.) The battle helped bolster Reagan's tough-guy image; he was a valiant hero fighting wild black criminals. "Blame Reagan for makin' me into a monster,"Jay-Z rhymed on the 2007 song "Blue Magic.""Blame Oliver North and Iran-contra/ I ran contraband that they sponsored." …
MCs who grew up in the 1980s would brand themselves veterans of the drug trade because drugs dominated their economic possibilities, and those of an entire generation of young black men. But by the end of that decade, hip-hop had been transformed in response to a world filled with crack, rich and ruthless drug lords, militarized police forces, a level of violence not seen in the country since Prohibition, prison sentences as long as basketball scores, and lives ruined by a drug that was insanely addictive.
By the mid-1990s, the U.S. incarceration rate was the highest in the world, damaging or destroying countless black families. Studies show that the number climbed from the 1980s, when less than 500,000 Americans were imprisoned, through the 1990s, when more than 1.5 million were locked up. (Many of those who contributed to the rise were black men ensnared by the war on drugs: In 1995, 16 percent of non-college-educated black men in their 20s were incarcerated, and the percentage rose in the decade that followed.)
Read Toure's entire piece at the Washington Post.
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