[75
years ago this week, Billboard magazine
released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ll
AmericanStudy five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. Share your
thoughts on these and any other pop hits, classic or contemporary, for a
chart-topping crowd-sourced post!]
On the #1 hit
that changed, portrayed, and perhaps exploited the game.
Popular culture often lags behind
cultural trends: rap really exploded onto the national scene with two
prominent 1988 albums (if not before), but Coolio’s 1995 hit “Gangsta’s Paradise” (off
the soundtrack of the Michelle
Pfeiffer film Dangerous Minds)
was the first rap song to reach end-of-year #1 status on the Billboard charts. The Pfeiffer film,
about a teacher who takes a class of students on whom everyone else has given
up and helps them believe in themselves, was anything but new by 1995; indeed,
one of the first such films, The Blackboard Jungle
(1955), celebrated its 40th anniversary that same year. But despite
that sense of cultural familiarity, Coolio’s hit took the film, artist, and
popular music to new places, dominating the charts as no prior rap song had,
making his accompanying
album of the same title a mega-bestseller, and leaving a lasting legacy
that would influence many other soundtracks and hitmakers in the years to come.
The necessary combination of
timing, cultural zeitgeist, and just plain luck that goes into making a
mega-hit is likely impossible to pin down (or music producers would have long
ago done so), but there’s no question that the authenticity which Coolio
brought to “Gangsta’s” played a role in its success. A product of the same Compton
streets immortalized by
N.W.A. and in the film
Boyz in the Hood (1991), by the
time he released his debut album It Takes a Thief (1994)
Coolio had done time in prison for larceny (as part of his membership in the youthful
Baby Crips gang) and had suffered from and defeated a crack addiction, among
other setbacks and struggles. Which is to say, when Pfeiffer (in character)
approaches Coolio at the start of the song’s famous video
and asks, “You wanna tell me what this is all about?,” she’s asking someone who
knows. And when Coolio’s speaker raps lines such as “I’m 23 now, but will I
live to see 24?/The way things are going I don’t know,” the then-32 year old
rapper was certainly summoning up the doubts and fears in and with which he had
lived for so long.
At the same time that Coolio
brought the authenticity of his childhood neighborhood and experiences to “Gangta’s
Paradise,” though, it’d be possible to argue that he also—like the film with
which he shared his song—exploited them for commercial, cultural success. The
song itself has a little of that “have your cake and eat it too” hypocrisy,
particularly in lines that boast of (even while the song as a whole seems to bemoan
the need for) the speaker’s toughness, his ever-present guns, his street cred. That
dynamic was a part of gangsta rap
throughout its existence, and not just in the more overtly celebratory songs;
even those songs and artists
that offered a critical lens on the culture of the streets could at the
same time give in to its allure and mythos. Moreover, it’s fair to ask whether
a song like “Gangsta’s Paradise” led more audience members to give Coolio’s
speaker the understanding and empathy for which he asks in the powerful concluding
verse, or whether it led instead to more cultural embraces and appropriations
of gangsta
culture. Yet whatever its effects—and they were undoubtedly multiple and
are not either-or—Coolio’s song was a watershed moment for the Billboard charts, and for American pop
music more broadly.
Last #1 hit
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other hits you’d highlight?
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