Almost 25 years after Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel's "White Lines," cocaine continues to split hiphop like a razor through powder. The past two years especially have seen the rise of coke rap and trap rap, delinquent cousins to the more party-oriented crunk movement of the Southeast. There's an air of upstart rebellion to the champions of these styles, rappers with names like Yung Joc, Young Jeezy, Lil' Wayne, and Lil Jon, street-hustling MCs and beatmakers who are the self-appointed heirs to a kingdom that's becoming fatally dualistic.
Set apart from the pack—a position assumed not by album sales or body count but by actual music cred—are Clipse, a pair of brothers born in the Bronx and raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Their third full-length album, Hell Hath No Fury, was released last year after much delay due to label mismanagement and subsequent litigation. The brothers, Pusha T and Malice, backed by production from the Neptunes, eventually released the album on their own, years after its contents had been hinted at through leaks and mix tapes.
When it finally hit shelves in late November, Hell Hath No Fury was received with mild interest from hiphop fans in general but with as much hoopla in the indie-rock community as it usually affords its veteran heroes. Music scribes—mostly on indie-rock websites and blogs—trumpeted that Fury was the culmination of several years' work, a masterpiece of street-level reportage from two of the most brutally honest lyricists in hiphop.
Throughout the album, Malice and Pusha T are mired in ambivalence about pushing cocaine, rapping about the financial rewards and moral anxiety that come with the trade. "Momma I'm so sorry I'm so obnoxious/Got two hot rocks in my pocket," they rap, followed a few songs later by Malice's justification of his lifestyle to his girlfriend: "I don't mind keeping you up on the must-haves/Peep-toe pumps, Gucci slouch bag/Now tell me is that dirty money really that bad?"
However well conveyed, Clipse's self-conscious gangsta image is nothing new. Starting in the early '90s, OutKast, the original Dirty South breakout act, perfected the persona as backdoor weed slingers through three albums and eventually transcended it.
So what made Hell Hath No Fury such a phenomenon in the mostly white, middle-class indie-rock world? The album is good; despite the years in limbo, the Neptunes' production is woozy and minimal, way more forward thinking than anything they've done since. Clipse have a way with a metaphor, too, and their tĂŞte-Ă -tĂŞte rhyming can be gripping.
But more than the music, it's the drugs, and coke is it. With hiphop, weed was truly a gateway drug—as the music turns the millennium and infiltrates the Vice magazine set, the stakes go up. If Clipse were hustling ounces of herb they wouldn't resonate as strongly with the new hiphop audience. And the reality of a cocaine binge, even musically, is once you're riding the buzz, it's easy to defend and hard to see beyond.
To that end, certain websites, alt-weeklies, and blogs heralded an unspectacular album by ATL "Snowman" Young Jeezy, while Miami don-wannabe Rick Ross rode cocaine's coattails to a hugely popular single. According to sideline-dwelling, authenticity-seeking critics, MCs repping such vivid street-level day-to-day offer the most valid insight into the modern African-American experience.
The truth is, trap rappers express a perspective that's hard to deny, but also hard to verify or even, for most listeners, relate to. White appreciation for the black struggle is a form of musical slumming that goes back to the gangsta rap of N.W.A. and E-40 and even the murder ballads of Skip James. Which in itself isn't a bad thing.
The trend is only damaging when other vital (and maybe superior) music gets lost in the shadow of what's deemed, without any proof, authentic. It's damaging when popular opinion dismisses MCs who strive for a view grander than the one from the street corner.
Two thousand six saw releases by longstanding hiphop innovators the Roots and brilliant rookie Lupe Fiasco. Both were among the best albums of the year; neither was talked about much. The Roots and Lupe are "progressive," which cancels any chance of being "authentic." Too much irony or intellect from black rappers renders them out of touch.
Two thousand six was meant to be the year of hyphy, but it never made the impact it should've. It's not much of a stretch to say that, again, it's the drugs. Hyphy's ecstasy-dropping, dumb-getting, thizz-faced bounce couldn't match up to the aggro swagger of coke-fueled crunk.
Only Wu-Tang griot Ghostface Killah stood above it all, combining the intellectual, the comical, and the visceral on his gold-selling Fishscale. The album's paranoid, crime-ridden storytelling and funky, blaxploitation soundtrack combined with Ghost's veteran status to promote him to capo di tutti capi of coke rap. Clipse can only aspire to such enduring relevance.
There's no doubt the current cocaine obsession will slide. Again, the trend mirrors the high, neither of which is sustainable or even desirable after a while. For better or worse, weed and booze will always have their place in hiphop, but not as the premium-grade, big-money status symbol they are now. Like everything else, these things go in cycles, and the comedown is just as real as the high. 
