DRUG MESSAGE CHANGES FROM JUST SAY NO, TO GO, GO, GO

Drugs have always played a role in popular music, from '60s acid rock
and the ganja-slowed rhythms of reggae to grunge's heroin-wracked
self-loathing.

But none of these narcotics have influenced a genre as intensely as
crack-cocaine has hip-hop.

For the past year, the subgenre known as crack-rap -- a.k.a. cocaine
rap or, more poetically, trap-hop -- has dominated the charts. Nearly
every major hip-hop album has sniffed around the subject, but rather
than describing their own habits, these rappers have been boasting
about drug-dealing day-jobs.

Veteran Wu-Tang Clan member Ghostface named last spring's critically
acclaimed solo CD Fishscale -- slang for pure-strain cocaine -- and
sprinkled stories of drug lords and street-sellers amongst his '70s
soul samples. Meanwhile, oversized newcomer Rick Ross -- a former
dealer whose nom-de-rap was borrowed from imprisoned L.A. crack
kingpin "Freeway" Rick Ross -- blew up with his Miami anthem Hustlin',
on which he brags about being into "distribution" and knowing Pablo
Escobar and Manuel Noriega. The song sold a million ringtones before
he dropped his chart-topping debut album, Port of Miami, and was
re-released as a remix with Jay-Z and Young Jeezy.

In fact, Young Jeezy, a raspy-voiced Atlanta MC who goes by the
less-than-subtle alias "The Snowman," just debuted at the top of the
U.S. Billboard charts with his second coke-obsessed LP, The
Inspiration, a swaggering follow-up to last year's smash Thug
Motivation 101 that brought crack-rap into the mainstream by making
dope-dealing seem like an aspirational vocation.

Now it would be much easier to dismiss the entire movement as just
more amoral fantasies for the suburban set if it didn't also include
Clipse, a sibling duo from Virginia Beach whose recently released Hell
Hath No Fury was hailed by many not only as the year's best rap
record, but as one of the year's overall best: review compiler
Metacritic.com rated it 2006's third most-acclaimed album, nestled
between Tom Waits and Bob Dylan.

The cover features Malice and Pusha-T perched on a gas-fired oven,
presumably for cooking their product, wearing lopsided crowns. But
their kingdom never extends beyond the street corner and they belie
their crack-slinging braggadocio with starkly experimental but deeply
funky beats from popular producers The Neptunes that use wheezing
accordions, metallic clanks and minimalist drums to reinforce their
lyrics' paranoid and fatalistic subtext.

Clipse may see the drug trade as a necessary escape from ghetto life,
but even they ignore the irony of how it makes the buyer's
metaphorical prison ever more secured. One of the first "conscious"
rap records was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's White Lines
(Don't Do It), but that was 1983 and concerned the upscale coca leaf
derivative, seen as a symbol of decadence but not destruction.

The rise of crack in the inner city was a bigger-than-Katrina
disaster. Hard living became impossibly harder as streets filled with
amped-up addicts looking for a fix.

When hip-hop first emerged in late-'70s New York, it was block party
music, fuelled by breakdancing b-boys, record-scratching DJs and
upbeat MCs. But the optimism surrounding this new cultural outlet was
battered by crack.

In the late '80s, Public Enemy railed against crack's devastation with
Night of the Living Baseheads. The startling video depicted zombified
addicts while Chuck D cursed brothers who "sell to their own, rob a
home/ while some shrivel to bone."

P.E.'s puritanical raps were somewhat discredited by member Flavor
Flav's own crack habit, while more light-hearted rappers of the day,
like De La Soul, started to seem hopelessly out of touch.

Enter gangsta rap.

Crack provided employment to discouraged youth who saw selling rocks
as the best means to make money. This often created urban war zones
that groups such as Compton's N.W.A. depicted in their controversial
lyrics.

On the other coast, the biggest New York stars were also
dealers-turned-rappers, including drive-by victim Notorious B.I.G.

This freebased capitalism was a dark twist on the American dream, but
at least the '90s-era rappers were rhyming about the crack-embattled
environment they grew up in. By 2000, the epidemic had somewhat
abated, but crack has not only become a more popular subject in rap
than ever, it's being rhymed about by young men who may not even
remember the original plague. These aren't just vicarious fantasies
for rap fans, but for the rappers themselves. They rarely discuss the
deadly effects, instead concentrating on how to cook it, bag it, sell
it and buy bling with the profits.

Considering how many metaphors crack-rappers use to discuss their
alleged activities -- at least partly to avoid potential legal
implications -- crack itself has become a metaphor for power, money,
and respect.

Nobody does this better than Clipse, whose words are so clever,
efficient and dark they artfully describe the horror-show toll cocaine
has taken without having to condemn it. But if the Clipse brothers are
full-fledged street poets, most of their peers are selling simple
escapist fodder, music with a visceral kick that loses it's rush all
too quickly. Gangsta rap was about the side-effects of crack, but this
is just about the sale of it. There are only so many ways to talk
commerce, even if it is illicit, and Clipse just used up most them.