Hip-hop history is Big Payback for the fans

Hip hop started out as a celebration and a hustle for black culture, and turned out to be the dominant original musical esthetic worldwide of the last 30-plus years. Similarly, the record and concert business has always been a hustler's game. The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip- Hop, a sprawling, 660-page tome by Dan Charnas, chronicles the nuts-and-bolts of an industry that went from the ghetto to the boardroom.

The book is a fascinating page-turner that should interest all music fans, even those professing little interest in rap; it may well inform business majors with a little grit, salt and vinegar to inspire them. The book does for the hip-hop industry what Frederic Dannen's hard-boiled Hit Men (1989) did in chronicling the explosion of the record industry at large from the 1960s on.

If hip hop is the cultural dividing line between baby boomers and their progeny, rap met similar resistance among radio and TV execs, retailers, the press, the police. Time and again, Charnas chronicles missed opportunities, and disdain toward the very esthetics of rappers and DJs; spoken word with a beat was simply not considered legit.

You'd think the moguls and powers-that-be -- the self-professed "geniuses" of the record industry -- would have learned from the mistakes of their elders from the '50s and '60s doing their damnedest to homogenize and sanitize (and control) the explosion of rock 'n' roll. But no. History repeats itself and, to quote the Beastie Boys, the white Jewish group that helped rap go big time in the wake of Run DMC's initial success, hip hop had to fight for its right to party.

In fact, it took Yo!, a show produced in Paris by MTV Europe, to convince the parent company -- saddled with its self-imposed colour bar -- to finally air a show devoted to hip hop ( Yo! MTV Raps with host Fab Five Freddy), which became the network's most popular offering. Above all, the role of relatively small radio stations (R&B and college or community outlets) was crucial in breaking many stars.

Indeed, the role of renegade white entrepreneurs in a music that hooked them -- the 20th-century white man's fascination with (and fear of) the "other" -- was vital to hip hop's ultimate victory. The key to the huge success of rap and beat-box culture, says Charnas, was to sell the music not solely as black music from the ghetto but as teen music; thus, 70 per cent of hip-hop sales were to white fans. Stereotypes are both confirmed and confounded in The Big Payback (the title comes from a James Brown song from the '70s).

All of hip hop's luminaries are covered, from such early breakthrough such as Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow to high-society types such as Sean (Puffy) Combs and Jay-Z.

Charnas tells tales of the myriad players who turn adversity, external or self-induced (drugs, prison time), into strengths, through obsessive hustle, with simple twists of fate added to the mix. It's the how-they-did-it -- instinctual ingenuity, often given an edge of threat (almost like a chess game), thinking on their feet and sometimes falling flat on their ass -- that makes this book so compelling.

These are stories of dreamers, schemers, hypesters, con artists, crooks, thugs (watch out for Suge Knight); some are geniuses, others are accidents waiting to happen (including the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.). If there were a movie made from The Big Payback, Quentin Tarantino would seem like a cinch to direct.

The Big Payback is the book that hip hop -- which turned the recording industry from corporate complacency back to its street roots -- deserves.