544 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
The East Coast counterpart to Death Row Records was Big Boy, founded in
1993 by rapper Puff Daddy (later Diddy). Big Boy’s most profi table act was a son of
Jamaican immigrants, the Notorious B.I.G., also known as Biggie Smalls, whose
Ready to Die (1995) played the familiar gangsta tropes, which were by no means
confi ned to West Coast rap. A rivalry between the East and West Coast factions
came to a climax when Tupac Shakur was the victim of a drive-by shooting in- Although his feud with Biggie was well known, the latter’s connection to
the shooting was never substantiated, and six months later Biggie himself was
fatally wounded by a drive-by assassin.
But gangsta rap was far from dead as a genre. From Detroit came Dr. Dre’s sec-
ond important protégé, Eminem, the fi rst white artist to sustain a career in hip-
hop. Eminem’s fi rst big success, 1999’s The Slim Shady LP, introduced his alter ego,
Slim Shady, a fi gure who could verbalize hostility and aggression too extreme for
the unmasked Eminem (who already is the stage persona of Marshall Mathers).
Like minstrelsy’s Jim Crow and Zip Coon, Slim Shady allowed a white performer
to use the vocabulary of black music to express thoughts that transgress social
mores. And transgress them he did, to the consternation of many listeners. On
The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), which dropped the Slim Shady persona, Eminem
turned to more-personal subject matter, especially his mother and his former
wife, whom he excoriated with the same misogynist venom on display in his ear-
lier work. Characteristic of the inverted logic of turn-of-the-century mass media,
the public uproar against Eminem only furthered his career, which continued
to move forward until 2005, when he entered a drug rehabilitation program.
When he began to release new material in 2009, the albums sold reasonably well
but critical reception was lukewarm.
While gangsta rap garnered media attention, other artists were pursuing a
more family-friendly sound. MC Hammer built on his late-1980s success with a
string of early 1990s hits that, apart from dissing other rappers in a wholesome
version of the dozens, had nothing that moral watchdogs would fi nd objection-
able; indeed, by the late 1990s Hammer had become a Pentecostal television
minister. Also popular with young listeners and their parents was Fresh Prince, a
cheerful rapper who showed acting talent in his television series Fresh Prince of Bel
Air and went on to a major fi lm career under his real name, Will Smith. Hammer
and Smith demonstrated that there was cultural space for styles of rap that could
have more mainstream appeal. Later rappers like Jay-Z and 50 Cent emerged
from the East Coast gangsta scene but were able to modify their messages to
reach that mainstream audience. The New York–based collective Wu Tang Clan
proved infl uential for later artists like Kanye West. The midwestern and south-
ern hip-hop scenes produced Nelly and the duo Outkast, as well as such regional
styles as crunk and snap.
Like rock and country, hip-hop also has a contrarian branch: alternative
hip-hop. The term arose as a way to distinguish artists that fi t neither the gang-
sta nor mainstream categories. As an umbrella term, it embraces such diverse
acts as De La Soul, Arrested Development, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Roots.
As with their rock and country counterparts, however, the crossover success
of such one-time alternative acts as Outkast, the Gorillaz, and Gnarls Barkley
indicates just how porous a boundary separates the alternative from the main-
stream. Likewise, the commercial success of female rappers such as Salt-n-Pepa,
Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill, and Missy Elliott has not yet dispelled the common
perception that strong women in hip-hop remain somehow “alternative.”
Tupac and BiggieEminemmainstream hip-hopregional scenesalternative hip-hop172028_22_531-558_r3_sd.indd 544 23/01/13 11:20 AM