From the Rotten Apple to the State of Empire: Neoliberalism, Hip Hop, and New York City’s Crisis

Articulated with and as representations of blackness, hip hop culture represents, promotes, and critically reflects upon the historical, material neoliberal processes that have shaped it. As representations of intercultural, dynamic, and heterogeneous communicative practices of local urban youth of the black Diaspora, hip hop demonstrates how neoliberal conditions are necessarily related to anti-black racism even when hip hop culture itself can promote the American Dream of socioeconomic success and mobility. Just over a decade after hip hop began in New York City, representations of hip hop culture within its space of inception simultaneously became the scapegoat of neoliberal racist practices epitomizing criminalized representations of the black expendable other. These criminalized representations of blackness are part of a historical repertoire of moral crises, rooted in the U.S. national consciousness and driven primarily through media representation and communication.[1] The historical context that this article details reveals a process of, and between, neoliberalization and racism in New York City that unfolds decades after the fiscal crisis. As the first model of applied neoliberal governance via crisis representation, the city’s response to its 1975 financial crisis sets the stage for a series of crises that mask how neoliberal governance reformed, privatized, corporatized, displaced, and dismantled public infrastructures for capital gain.[2] The article highlights how New York City hip hop in the 1990s accounts for its political, material conditions from which it arises and how hip hop simultaneously falls victim to neoliberal logic as its representations are used to justify the expendability of blackened bodies.[3] The focus on affective representations of 1990s hip hop in New York City as moral, racial, spatial, and class crises obscured heightened privatization and justified the rise in a more privatized and militarized policing. It reevaluates the effects of the New York City fiscal crisis through hip hop as a quintessential representation of criminality, blackness, and violence to illustrate how the “times-squaring” of space as neoliberal and anti-black catapulted throughout the United States.[4] This article focuses on the possibilities of hip hop culture and its limitations pushed forth by media representations to reexamine how hip hop is analyzed as a popular form and forum.

Crises, Hip Hop, and the Transformation of Gotham City

Academic reflections of 1980s hip hop culture mark it as the peak of a potential counterculture for change.[5] The context for hip hop’s counterculture arose through the 1970s New York City economic crisis, a consequence of conservative backlash that began decades earlier.[6] Port closures in New York City that were replaced by port functions in New Jersey alongside the growth of inexpensive suburban real estate paved the way for the loss of over half a million manufacturing jobs in the 1960s. These topographical transformations proliferated Black and Latino poverty through its instigation of “white flight,” which simultaneously concretized segregation in the city and greatly disrupted New York City’s tax base.[7] By 1975, New York City suffered a significant financial crisis and faced bankruptcy with an operating deficit at approximately $2.2 billion.[8] As the city was isolated from credit markets, New York State Governor Hugh Carey implemented the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), an independent corporation created to assist the city but transformed much of city sale and stock revenue to revenue for the state. MAC also enforced a wage freeze, lay-offs, and raises in public transportation fares and tuition at city universities.[9] N.Y. State further increased control over the city through the creation of an additional organization, the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB) that would oversee the city’s finance and force pension funds to buy $500 million of city debt.[10] These moves to rescue the city from its financial crisis resulted in both cutting and privatizing public sectors but also ensured that the remaining public sectors were intricately and necessarily tied to corporations invested in furthering capital gain as opposed to quality of life.

The financial budget and restrictions implemented by the state via MAC and EFCB newly centralized city governance into the mayoral seat while dispersing the control of local politics to federal and state governance as well as private businesses. Private corporations directly controlled all operations of the city through the hand of the mayor, a top-down managerial procedure—and often went against public need.[11]

Within three years of city governance, MAC and EFCB transformed how the city was governed and, on a larger scale, their creation displaced policies that would address financial crises throughout urban spaces in the United States.[12] This had set the stage for what Stuart Hall terms the neoliberal revolution albeit in the United States. Marked by new modes of regulation and governance, neoliberalization systematically depends on racist strategies of included exclusion, constituting spaces and processes of embodied coloniality, which are identified by signifiers of blackness and included in the national consciousness only by way of marginalization and expendability.[13] The neoliberal revolution pushes to the forefront an ideological, centripetal and centrifugal logic with the major tropes of capitalism in excess, or, on steroids, at its core: “‘Freedom,’ ‘equality’, ‘property’ and ‘Bentham’ (individualism),” what Hall, quoting Karl Marx, once identified as “the ruling ideological principles of the bourgeois lexicon.”[14] Hall argues reform and choice are foundational to neoliberal logic and its “over-arching theme is the shift of power and wealth back to the already rich and powerful.”[15] This master narrative of the neoliberal revolution depends upon racist strategies of social and actual death to regulate spaces, bodies, and life in general.[16] Tropes of safety and security are its mechanisms as it replaces state institutions and policies with privatization. With hip hop culture growing out of this context, the response to the New York City fiscal crisis catapulted urban neoliberalism as hip hop became emblematic of black criminality and urban moral crisis.

The repercussions of the response to the fiscal crisis consisted of over 60,000 city job losses (even though the unions were forced to sink pensions into MAC bonds); tuition introduction to city universities for the first time in New York history (as well as increases); limitations in sanitation, fire, and police services; cutting school days and drastically limiting daycare; along with raises in toll and transportation fares, as well as cancellations and deferments for the maintenance of bridges and roads, capital projects, and planning.[17] Fifty percent of the welfare grant was also cut, which affected approximately one million residents in the city.[18] These repercussions had a significant impact on black Diaspora communities and continued well into the decades that followed. They also exacerbated the city’s faltering population, employment decline, and the rise in its homeless population—the latter two were disproportionately represented by peoples of the black Diaspora. These repercussions also paved the way for a newly private, corporate city that, with the help of new technologies, redefined employment demands—as well as the role and power of the union that dominated the city’s local politics in the past. Rather than reinvigorate the manufacturing structure, post-industrial New York City economic strategies channeled economic and political energies into “employment within finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE).”[19] These processes of the new city furthered the racial divide through class and space.

For two decades after the 1975 crisis, top income earners experienced a steady increase and bottom income earners experienced a steady decline.[20] The newly distributed trickle down managerial power-relations empowered city mayors, post-fiscal crisis. It enabled mayors to heavily invest in corporation deals that would redistribute taxes from corporations to residents and lift prior zoning limits for business and real estate investors in return for favorable election contributions.[21] With the withdrawal of federal funding during the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, New York City continued to suffer budget crises that demanded severe cuts to its public sector. “Between 1970 and 1980, the number of poor people in New York City increased by 20% even as the population declined by 10%.”[22] Through a combination of private investor incentives and withdrawing federal funding, city mayors enabled much of the cuts to the health and social services.

After the direction of MAC and EFCB to the mid-1980s, Blacks and Latinos were disproportionately the bottom fifth of the widening income gap: “30 percent of New York’s [Latino] households (40 percent for Puerto Ricans) and 25 percent of black households lived at or below the poverty line.”[23] Through urban planning, Black and Latino communities within New York City were concentrated in particular areas: the neighboring boroughs and spaces outside of midtown Manhattan—the lower and upper east-side and west-side of the city, including Harlem—quite literally contained these populations. With the diminishing of public services impoverished Black and Latino communities were further victimized through poor housing conditions, inadequate and non-existent healthcare, high crime rates, garbage, and inadequate transportation.[24] Emptied and dilapidated buildings served as the backdrop for the garbage that overran the streets and illegal waste dumps of magnificent heights developed alongside of the Bronx River.[25] Landlords were often suspected of resolving poor housing conditions through arson for profit, which further displaced Black and Latino residents and added to the dystopian view of the city. The image of a burning Bronx captured audiences nationwide and represented the city in crisis, epitomizing the modern imagination of New York City as a wasteland, stricken with crime, poverty, and drugs.[26] This representation as crisis began to be articulated with urban crime that was both pathological and blackened; it also masked the active disinvestment in public and affordable housing that was (and continues to be) redistributed to private real estate investors, making the city’s housing unaffordable for its working-class and displaced residents.[27]

The specificity of a conjunctural moment most often possesses similarities and continuities of other moments but they are never the same moment, and it is the specific conditions of the moment that impure and often contradictory black forms of culture arise in specific conditions.[28] Hip hop culture was quite literally an unintentional bi-product of the neoliberal regime that hinged upon crisis representation. It formed culturally under these disinvestment conditions by peoples of the black Diaspora who restructured their social network in large part because of their economic, spatial, and social isolation. The social networking of youth—the way in which Black and Latino youth came together—would be identified as hip hop culture.[29] Through the new technologies that isolated their parents from gainful employment, Black and Latino youth created new sounds that derived from their experiences.[30] The creation was not articulated in normalized modes of belonging: culture, nation, family, sexuality, sex, class, and so on, though their experiences stem from the material historical conditions of these modes and of present subjective conditions of isolation brought on by the neoliberal revolution. All of which cast its roots in the relationship between modernity and coloniality to both signify the racist conditions and relations of blackness that produce creations of home-spaces embodied as Black and as Diaspora.

It was through these layered exchanges that hip hop culture represented performances of feelings of freedom through points of identification and belonging, and solidarity and love within alienation and confinement with sound, breakdancing, graffitti, and style. When these points of identifications were threatened beyond “play,”[31] representations from hip hop culture consciously addressed the threat (of often violence and death). The compilation of various artists, initiated by KRS-One, on “Self Destruction,” the single off of the Edutainment project, for instance, was generally a response to gun violence and black on black crime. The single was specifically in response to a teenager shot and killed after a fight during a KRS-One and Public Enemy concert as well as the murder of DJ Scott La Rock who was a founding member of Boogie Down Productions. Hip hop culture also, however, mirrored the violence, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and misogyny that saturated their lives as (non)-citizens—the very ideology touted by our nation-state.[32] Its neoliberal ideological base additionally reflects hip hop’s conceptual local roots and its macro-political roots within the nation-state.

In 1989, just as another fiscal crisis peaked, the first and only Black American mayor of New York City, David Dinkins was elected and served from 1990–1993. Mayor Dinkin’s election came immediately after the brutal shooting of Yusef Hawkins, a sixteen-year-old boy gunned down by Italian youth in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The death of Yusef Hawkins was followed by a number of protests led by now MSNBC political commentator and civil rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton. The protests were met by Bensonhurst residents, some of whom held up watermelons while shouting, “Niggers go home,” and other obscenities. This was a palpable reminder that racism still existed and any young black man could fall victim to its violence. Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” off their album Fear of a Black Planet and the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was released just two months prior to Hawkins’s death; however, its video mirrored the protest marches that took place in Brooklyn.

Alongside of Lee’s film and with its own video of what resembled a protest march, “Fight the Power” became an indicator of urban awareness of race-based relations and sociopolitical structures that stem from racism. Public Enemy was not alone. With the help of Biz Markie and Big Daddy Kane, Kool G. Rap and D.J. Polo, known primarily for introducing an east coast “gangsta rap” style to hip hop, created “Erase Racism,” a song that centered on the murder of Yusef Hawkins; its popular video did the same as it played repeatedly on Video Music Box.[33] Chubb Rock on “Treat Me Right,” a party-themed song, drops a line dedicated to the memory of Yusef Hawkins and Tupac Shakur wrote a poem entitled, “For Mrs. Hawkins (In Memory of Yusef Hawkins).”[34] The hip hop sentiment in New York City was clear, as Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest stated, “Mr. Dinkens, will you please be my Mayor? You’ll be doing us a very big favor.”[35] The success of the mayoral election rested upon affective investments of hope for both racial and social justice and the possibility for change during a time of racial and economic unrest.

The response to racial and economic crises in the city, however, continued to be the active discontinuation of public services and resources. Neither the mayor’s race, racial experiences, nor his political affiliations would allow him to transgress the systematic neoliberal relations of power that had already been established. Mayor Dinkens’s transition team consisted of corporate investors and bankers that sought to further disempower unions and cut public services as well as a comptroller to ensure the mayor would act accordingly, and, within his second week of office, Dinkins announced a severe city service cut that echoed responses to the 1975 crisis under the control of MAC.[36] Racial and class tension unremittingly polarized the city with growing conflict between Korean and Black residents, animosity over contradictory verdicts for the two defendants in Hawkins’s murder, a protest at City Hall against a $180 million dollar residential property tax inflation, and rival union workers literally fighting each other for employment at potential job sites.[37] Mayor Dinkins quickly became the focal point of blame from city residents and his legal troubles that occurred before he was elected as mayor exacerbated the resentment.[38]

Throughout his tenure as mayor, Dinkins significantly lowered the crime rate through a series of implementations that further privatized the city. This included a revitalization program with Disney in Times Square as well as the rehabilitation of abandoned and dilapidated buildings with private real estate investors in Northern Harlem, the South Bronx, and Brooklyn (the same impoverished and isolated spaces that enabled hip hop to be created). Mayor Dinkins provided health facility initiatives and increased the percentage of police officers. However, these initiatives were implemented to control the syndemic[39] of homicide, tuberculosis, and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), a direct effect of public service budget cuts from the 1975 fiscal crisis that engulfed the city from the 1980s throughout Dinken’s mayoral leadership. The spaces had the syndemic had mostly impacted were impoverished neighborhoods of the city whose residents were made up of the underand unemployed and were predominantly Black and Latino.

The newly privatized New York City infrastructure quite literally profited from death.[40] Though the city saved an estimate of $9.9 billion (in 2004 dollars) from the budget cuts, this syndemic accrued a total of approximately $160 billion throughout the decades as well as a total of approximately 13,622 preventable deaths (3,265 from homicide and 10,357 from Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome [AIDS]) and 20,000 to 52,000 of preventable tuberculosis (TB) cases, 8,325 of preventable AIDS cases, and 10,000 preventable HIV infections.[41] Moreover, because the financial responsibility of medical costs shifted from public to private, a majority of the cost was now the burden of those directly affected by the syndemic while the profit rested with private investors and corporations. Health disparities, however, did not end with the mayor’s initiatives but shifted toward other illnesses. From 1990 to 2000, the leading cause of death in the city was diabetes and cardiovascular disease, associated with diabetes, which disproportionately affected Black and Latino residents, and low-income households and neighborhoods.[42] These disparities were affected by the lack of access to health care, healthy food, and places to exercise.[43] The beautification of the city helped mask the insidious disparity of its political economics that centered on health, housing, employment, debt, policing, and incarceration; these disparities were both raced and classed and enabled the (sometimes slow) actual and socioeconomic death of many of the city’s black Diaspora residents. Through a theme of a culture of violence, representations of blackness both justify the high mortality rate of black and Latino youth and also push forth a crisis that centers on victims of shifting sociopolitical and economic infrastructures as their own perpetrators. Racial knowledge and discourses of pathological behavior that have been applied to urban blackness have replaced historical racist discourse, are symbolized through the (neo)colonial body, and are generalized articulations of the primitive/savage.[44] This justifies the active and often violent exclusion (arrest, death, terrorism) of black and Latino youth from normative processes of access. For young peoples of the black Diaspora in New York City, Yusef Hawkins and the repercussions of the city’s syndemic were constant reminders that the American Dream was not reserved for them. The heightening of police presence without access to public services worsened the conditions of life as one that was heavily contained, surveilled, terrorized, and threatened.

Though hip hop’s growing visibility popularized affective alliances and investments of feeling black and belonging, its growing popularity marked it as the quintessential signifier of blackness, a universal marker of fear that would be pitted against the safety of the refurbished city.[45] Mayor Dinkins’s enlistment of more police officers was demonstrated as a measure of safety as homicide was an integral component of the city’s syndemic and also the leading cause of death for Black American males in urban spaces within the age range of fifteen to nineteen.[46] However, the increased percentage of police officers did little to shift the excess death-rate of Black and Latino male youth (as proven by the persistence of this statistic well over a decade after Dinkins’s initiatives and the excess of death caused by health disparities proliferated by public service cuts and lack of access). The relationship of coloniality and modernity relies on tropes such as safety to justify racist-based extremities of policing (non-)citizen Other(ed) and defending humanity. Dinkins’s strategy of policing for a safer, improved New York City would also be the foundation of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s solidification of police policies, such as “broken windows” and “stop and frisk,”[47] both of which have proven to focus on heavily policing poor communities in general and Black and Latino residents in particular. The furthering of death through the solution of policing as saving the city ensured the continuous victimizing of the victims of New York City’s crises, who were now represented as victimizers and the crisis themselves.

Hip hop culture imagined how youth engaged with, embraced, and resisted the everyday perils of excluded inclusion in the space of what Achille Mbembe describes as a death world of the living dead brought upon primarily by infrastructural destruction and hyper-militarization.[48] The videos from Wu Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)” and “Method Man” visually depicted the spaces of containment and desolation through the graffiti-filled, empty, dilapidated, and semi-demolished buildings as its mis-en-scene; the hip hop group’s video for “Protect Ya Neck” reinforces this image as abandonment through the emptiness of urban space via building lots and ravines in the slums (Wu Tang Clan’s term) of New York City’s Staten Island. Containment is reified through the images of fences with members of the Clan behind the fence, all of whom are in hip hop’s baggy-wear style and some of whom are masked with scarves and hoods. The anonymity within the groups of men on-screen served to simultaneously singularize and generalize the young men as interchangeably black, masculine, and urban. It is also a visible, conscious performance of belonging to the black Diaspora, once described by Aimé Césaire as multiple singulars during the decolonization movement.[49]

In 1993, Mayor Dinkens was succeeded by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who remained mayor of New York City until 2001. Mayor Giuliani focused on the reduction of crime in the city and furthering its privatization as yet another financial crisis loomed over the city. Early into his first term, with the help of his developed relationships with financial groups such as Lehman Brothers and the Rockefeller Group, Mayor Giuliani strategized and executed the selling off of public sectors to private investors: a number of private contractors possessed contracts for street and park maintenance; a public TV station and AM and FM radio stations were sold to private corporations as well as The United Nations Plaza Hotel and city stock for housing recouped by the city from failure to pay taxes—the latter most likely accumulated from the effects of the 1975 fiscal crisis.[50] His approach of aggressive enforcement included another increase of thousands of police officers, while he also decreased the city’s budget for social and educational services specifically toward city universities.

The new mayor proposed to end open admissions, and stop funding for community colleges and remedial classes for senior colleges. However, no sector of education was exempt as he aimed to reduce employees from the Board of Education, whom he called “useless bureaucrats,” by 2,500 in his first term.[51] During his term, Mayor Giuliani also called for $429 million dollars in budget cuts that would be channeled into libraries and cultural organizations. With “stop and frisk” as a main functionary of disciplining petty crime, the state sanctioned racist discourse and practices that enabled officers to freely act against black and Latino youth. Under the “stop and frisk” policy, ten thousand more black male youth were stopped between the ages of 14 and 24 than there are in the city and ninety percent of these accosts did not lead to any arrests.[52] Though it has proven to be inefficient for lowering crime and has also proven to be racially motivated, “broken windows” and “stop and frisk” policing remains in place and has both spread and intensified significantly. Policing in this sense is an integral component of the neoliberal regime and the role coloniality plays within it. At best, it is used as a tool of terror, containment, and isolation while it provides a sense of safety for the citizen-subject through the (social) annihilation of the (non-)citizen Other(ed); at worst, it produces the space and the market for the growth of capital in the form of real estate, incarceration, death, and the military.

As policing was increasingly becoming part of everyday life in the city and public services were continuously cut, the 1990s marked a political turn in hip hop culture as hip hop no longer functioned on the margins. Radio shows began broadcasting hip hop as their primary sound as opposed to hip hop sets on Sunday night and weeknights. Nightclubs also began to feature hip hop nights in New York City—what was once a local forum, isolated within the boroughs, was beginning to become part of the tourist landscape of Manhattan. With a popularizing hip hop that played on privatized radio stations, themes of freedom, equality, property, and individualism, Hall’s aforementioned bourgeois ideology took center stage and particular hip hop sounds played in continuous rotation on the airwaves. The grime and grittiness of the slums as demonstrated by Wu Tang Clan, Nas, and Mobb Deep was slowly integrated and, at times, replaced with images of the American Dream transformed into reality. The Notorious B.I.G.’s success under the Bad Boy label exemplified this integration of the experiences of marginalization with familiar pop sounds of an American musical past (as opposed to the sounds of Wu Tang for instance) as popularly produced by Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs. The Juicy-styled hip hop hit illustrated crossover success while promoting the markers of the realized American Dream and would quickly be the standard of hip hop that frequented the radio stations.

Individualized representations of immediate satisfaction manifested through the symbolic commodity— cars, style, sex/women, and parties—made visibly evident through the lavish, high production music video (e.g., Hype Williams). These videos were a far cry from the home video styles of Wu Tang Clan’s “Protect Ya Neck” or Mobb Deep’s similarly themed mis-en-scène of Queens and youth in “Shook Ones,” and were sometimes met with resistance, such as The Lox’s refusal to wear “shiny suits,” a reference to Puff Daddy’s costuming trend, which in 1999 led to a “Free The Lox” movement to void their contract with Bad Boy. As talented as The Lox were their careers never recovered from their refusal to wear shiny suits; hip hop artists were not exempt from the corporatization of institutional space that had invaded the city, even those who utilized aesthetically liberating acts of expression felt the force of the neoliberal revolution. These aspects were the beginning of what Paul Gilroy describes as a two-fold simultaneous process: the hyper-commodification of blackness sold both to white and black consumers as well as a market niche of national belonging and mobility targeting black peoples as consumers.[53] Within one year, the transformed representation of hip hop culture as American success filled with bright lights and shiny suits paralleled New York City’s refurbished Times Square filled also with shiny store fronts, bright lights, and billboards.

The high profile representations of hip hop helped to support the new mayor’s policing strategy. The coverage of Tupac Shakur illustrated the racialized knowledge that permeated the city. From Shakur’s sexual abuse charges in Manhattan, in 1994, followed by an attempt on his life outside of a recording studio in East Harlem which resulted in Shakur’s hospitalization from five gun-shot wounds just days before he stood trial. Shakur’s shooting was also the impetus of the east-coast, west-coast hip hop rivalry, which was primarily New York City hip hop artists versus Death Row and additionally reinforced the representation of pathology. Subsequently, Tupac Shakur’s conviction marked his departure from New York City with his newly contracted Death Row label and served to reinforce black criminality as pathological and policing success in the city.

With the focus on safety coupled with a new visually stimulating New York City landscape, tourism and real estate solidified as the primary, privatized strategy for city revenue while access to public resources steadily remained difficult to nonexistent for the impoverished residents who were predominantly Black and Latino. The masking of these disparities pushed Black and Latino residents further into the margins while hip hop culture’s mainstream visibility promoted the fundamental principles of neoliberalism through the American success story—what will become the illustrative seeds of the post-racial just two decades later. The continuous masking through hyper-visibility also helped to maintain the new image of New York City as a space rejuvenated with equal opportunity, whose residents, who did not achieve at least a small part of the American Dream, are to blame for their own conditions of failure. The highlighting of the nationwide homicide rate for black urban male youth additionally reinforced this representation through calling upon the historical representations of blackness as savage and animalistic. This marks a shift from economically impoverished as in the immediate effects of the fiscal crisis to culturally impoverished as cultures of pathology become simplistic solutions and the primary representation for young Black and Latino residents in New York City, one that was easily made visible through representations of hip hop culture. Hip hop complexly becomes synonymous with neoliberal ideology for American success and equality as well as black failure via pathological discourse.

The lines between representation and reality quickly collapsed as the east-coast– west-coast rivalry garnered national media attention—much of which was based on rumors that quickly helped to shape the reality of Tupac Shakur’s death in 1996, which was followed by the death of the Notorious B.I.G. in 1997. Rumors as a mode of informal, localized knowledge can directly influence formalized knowledges; disseminated through the media, it can be used as a strategy to regulate, marginalize and police particular bodies.[54] Along these lines, the media coverage of the events that led to and included both artists’ deaths exacerbated the relationship between hip hop culture and violence. In August 1995, the coverage of Marion “Suge” Knight criticizing Puff Daddy and Bad Boy at the Source Awards spread the news of coastal rivalry even though Puff Daddy addressed east-coast–west-coast unity the same night after Knight took the stage. The next month, Suge Knight’s close friend was shot and killed at a club in Atlanta for Jermaine Dupri’s birthday; both members of Death Row and Bad Boy were in attendance and Puff Daddy was linked to the shooter/s through media coverage of “word of mouth.” Shortly thereafter, N.Y. Times magazine featured an article on its cover that centered on Puff Daddy’s failed attempt to resolve animosity between Suge Knight and himself. A couple of weeks later, Billboard reported that Puff Daddy did not attend hip hop’s conference, How Can I Be Down, in Miami, because of threats from Death Row.

“Diss” records and battles were not unique to hip hop culture; however, virtual performances of youth angst and bravado proved unequipped to surpass the realities shaped by the relationship between media representations and discourses of blackness. In December 1995, The Dogg Pound set to film their video of “New York, New York” in the city. The original intention, as told to Vibe by Snoop Dogg and to XXL by Kurrupt, was to pay tribute to the city for creating hip hop; however, the initial coverage of the Dogg Pound’s video informed city audiences that the group was filming a “diss” track.[55] This led to a shooting attack on the video set located in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The shooting experience influenced Dogg Pound to change the original song/video to a “diss” song, which then led to a retaliation song/video by C.N.N. (Capone and Noreaga) and Mobb Deep, entitled “L.A., L.A.”

Personal lives were also incorporated into the rumors as talk of a Death Row advertisement that featured Suge Knight holding Puff Daddy’s son with Misa Hylton, Puff Daddy’s son’s mother, circulated the popular hip hop radio shows.[56] Moreover, Shakur hinted to having sex with B.I.G.’s wife, Faith Evans, during interviews and directly stated it in his “diss” song to New York artists in “Hit Em Up,” which was a direct response to B.I.G.’s song, “Who Shot Ya?” Though Shakur publicly stated B.I.G.’s song was about him, B.I.G. claimed the song was made prior to Shakur’s shooting.[57] B.I.G. indirectly addressed the alleged affair in the song and video for Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money,” where his romantic interest, Charli Baltimore, performed his estranged wife in the video; B.I.G. also addressed the affair in his song with Jay-Z, “Brooklyn’s Finest” and in an interview in Vibe.[58] Lil’ Kim addressed both Shakur’s accusations of “Who Shot Ya?” and Faith Evans, alluding to Kim’s romantic link to B.I.G., in the original verse of “Big Momma Thang” (omitted in the version on her debut album, Hardcore, the original verse was only heard on mix-tapes and hip hop night clubs). Tupac Shakur’s death in September 1996 ended the bi-coastal rivalry that was performed through music; however, the representation of hip hop and its link to violence persisted and melded into the city’s youth of color whose style mirrored hip hop artists and vice versa. The image of black Diaspora urban youth was synonymous with hip hop, which was synonymous with violence.

The solution to visibly represented pathologies that could harm the city was more policing, surveillance, and containment. With the rampant and unapologetically race-based police brutality integrated within a rejuvenated city one might ask if Mayor Giuliani’s no tolerance police policy was no tolerance to whom as opposed to what? In December 1994, Anthony Baez was killed by asphyxiation from a police officer’s use of a choke-hold after the officer’s car was hit by a football thrown around by Baez and his brother. In 1997, Abner Luima was beaten and sodomized while held in a police station, where one police officer was reported to have stated, “It’s Giuliani time,” during the torture. In February 1999, Amadou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, was unarmed and, despite having committed no crime, was shot 41 times by police officers. In August 1999, Gideon Bush, a black mentally ill man, was shot at least 12 times by police in Borough Park, Brooklyn. In May 1999, sixteen-year-old Dante Johnson was unarmed and critically shot by police in the Bronx. Mayor Giuliani and the police department issued statements in defense of the shooting, which included an illegal release of Johnson’s sealed juvenile record to justify police action. The mayor and the police department were later criticized for publicly releasing Johnson’s record yet this tactic to justify state sanctioned murder of Black Diaspora peoples is commonly used today.

At the same time, the media coverage of Tupac Shakur’s death was followed by B. I.G.’s death on March 9, 1997, and then followed by Puff Daddy and Shine’s criminal cases, in December 1999, and Jay Z earlier that month. The representations of these incidents further demonstrated that a culture of violence and criminality would remain regardless of socioeconomic success and hip hop’s loss of lives. Specialized police surveillance, such as a federal hip hop task force, is depicted as evidence of pathological criminality and violence as opposed to the cause of evidence. Mayor Giuliani’s “crackdown” of the city’s nightclubs with an exponential rate of police presence and special attention to hip hop venues visually articulated further the link between hip hop, violence, and blackness. A few months later, on March 15, 2000, Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed, off duty security guard who was also of Haitian descent, was shot and killed by an undercover police officer. Death appears inescapable as those who are signified as (non-)citizen Other(ed) become what Richard Iton describes as the disposable and expendable nigger.[59] Mayor Giuliani’s militant policing, attacks on education, and disregard for (non)human life however did not go unnoticed as residents and youth from the five boroughs staged protests throughout the city against police brutality, city university admissions, and education budget cuts through the decade.

The mayor was publicly accused and criticized of directly attacking the city’s working-class and black Diaspora communities, while media coverage continued to depict young residents of color as brutal savages in need of active policing for the maintenance of city safety. In 2000, multiple women were sexually assaulted while police officers were present during the city’s Puerto Rican Day parade; however, the coverage featured a white foreign tourist assaulted by the young group of men. The men were described as “wilding” out, an image that echoed the false accusation and conviction of five black and Latino youth in the “Central Park Jogger” rape in 1989. The term, “wilding,” was a crucial component in both cases because the representation of the slang term linked hip hop culture to both depictions of urban black violence. The city responded by the furthering of policing and containment for young peoples and city events such as ethnic pride parades under the guise of city safety especially for its newly formed revenue: tourism. Throughout the boroughs, young people wore large flowing t-shirts and hooded sweaters popularly described as hip hop’s baggy-style that stated, “FUCK Giuliani,” a sentiment that lasted well into the beginning of the new millennium. Meanwhile, media representations of hip hop did not cease. In 2001, similar media coverage highlighted a shooting outside of the city’s popular radio station for hip hop, Hot 97, rumored to be caused by the rivalry between Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown and the cause of Lil’ Kim’s perjury conviction in 2005. Urban Black and Latino women are not exempt from pathologies of violence, policing, or incarceration (as statistics prove they are the fastest growing prison population).

On September, 11, 2001, the “FUCK Giuliani” perspective quickly vanished as the Twin Towers fell in Gotham. A new crisis diverted the sentiment in an opposing direction. Mayor Giuliani’s no tolerance policing and swift action was now demanded in New York City and throughout the nation as the United States geared up toward fighting enemies from outside of its borders. New York City’s mayor would now save the city as his no tolerance policing would quickly gain federal support to militarize itself against the threats both outside and within its borders. Terrorism of any kind faced zero tolerance, militant law, and policing order. Police officers armed with automatic weapons stationed throughout the city would be the post-9/11 norm; stop and frisk was a daily routine as digitally imaged posts throughout the metro-transit system informed passengers that their bags and personal items may be searched at any time. The signs still exist today and, on those special occasions of high tourist influx, police officers with military weaponry will occupy the same spaces as the Salvation Army’s Santa Claus and Macy’s holiday windows.

Mayor Giuliani’s no tolerance policing strategies remain active as his mayoral successor, Michael Bloomberg, was a staunch defender and supporter of “zero tolerance” policing strategies. And, although the city’s new mayor, Bill De Blasio, has been publicly against zero tolerance as well as “stop and frisk,” De Blasio has enlisted Bill Bratton as police commissioner, Giuliani’s police commissioner from 1994–1996 and Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) police chief from 2002–2009, whose career was founded upon “broken windows” policing and who, after a shooting occurred at a T.I. concert, recently stated that “the so-called rap artist who are basically thugs that are basically celebrating the violence they lived all their lives.”[60] Zero tolerance and broken windows policing strategies also continue to be actively contested by New York City residents (primarily of color) as police brutality lingers. On July 14, 2015, a black American man, Ronald Singleton, died while in police custody in Manhattan, and, just a few days later, another black American man, Eric Garner, died after a police officer used excessive force on him on Staten Island—an illegal choke hold that chillingly echoed Anthony Baez’s death. Both deaths were determined by medical examiners to be homicides, and no officers have been indicted for these murders. From the crisis of 9/11, militarization spread quickly throughout the nation in general and in urban spaces in particular with examples visually depicted in Baltimore; Chicago; and Ferguson, Missouri among others. It is a significant part of what we experience today: the model of neoliberalism as applied to the world.

Conclusion

Prior to the implementation of “broken windows” policing in New York City, Fulton Street, Brooklyn, housed a number of gambling men who displayed various versions of the nutshell game and enticed passing pedestrians to play. The nutshell game appeared simplistic in its nature: there were three nutshells, sometimes substituted with cards or bottle caps, and the object of the game was to guess which shell possessed the red ball, which was typically the size of a cherry-pit—if the game had cards instead of nutshells or caps you had to pick the card that was marked. As the crowd surrounded the nutshell game a person or two in the crowd would bet money; sometimes s/he would lose but would never quit and, ultimately, would win. The nutshell man would pull out a stack of cash and pay the person; this would happen until others would play.

Unbeknown to the participant, people in the crowd are partnered with the nutshell man and the game itself was a confidence con in the guise of a gambling game, rigged to trick the unknowing participant that s/he can win. The participant builds confidence from the perception of other people’s winnings until s/he believed enough to bet money resulting in a loss. Depending on the skill of the nutshell con, the “gambler” would continue to bet until s/he had nothing of importance to bet. (I once witnessed a young lady, clearly not accustomed to the neighborhood, bet all of her money and, when that was lost, she bet her necklace). In theory, the nutshell man was so quick that he would hide the ball and it was no longer under any of the shells, so, regardless of which shell the participant pointed to, the ball would be absent; the ball disappeared only when the participant played as the nutshell man’s hand was always quicker than the participant’s perception—in all other instances players would easily pick the shell the ball was under.

Much like the assistance of the crowd in the nutshell game, the neoliberal revolution began as the representation of the 1975 fiscal crisis helped to mask the power relations that transformed New York City’s infrastructure from that which relied heavily on the consent of union and city workers as well as public services to a privatized, corporate city run primarily in the interest of capital. With the swiftness of the nutshell man’s hand, neoliberalism continued to develop as investors, backed by the federal and state mandates a well as the mayoral seat, created policies that actively discontinued public services and proliferated social death through illness, disease, incarceration, the military, and debt while audiences perceived these real crises as caused by hip hop culture and other representations of blackness. The representation of hip hop culture helped to convince the city’s audience of individual empowerment and responsibility through the realized American Dream while it simultaneously served as the scapegoat for the death of young peoples of the black Diaspora. Hip hop culture, however, remains, especially in the midst of the neoliberal revolution, one of the only spaces where those same youth of the black Diaspora express empathetic feelings of being black and expressions of belonging to blackness are realized on social love; it remains one of the only spaces where young urban peoples will ever feel a sense of belonging in a world that is engulfed by death, disposability, and despair.

Hip hop will continue to be the primary scapegoat conflated into discourses and embodiments of racialized (non)citizen Other(ed). Professional football players will be fined for using the “n” word—a policing strategy scrutinized for targeting players of color, youth under these racialized constructs will continue to be arrested and fined for sagging their pants (as mandated in Evanston, Illinois), and urban youth of color will continue to be harassed, terrorized, and victimized toward death by disease, debt, incarceration, and police brutality while those who act against racist, state sanctioned murder, are depicted as a-political criminals. As a store owner in Ferguson had stated in the midst of the riots and marches protesting the death of Michael Brown, “Guys on drugs, the rapper attitude, nothing political about it for them.”[61] As hip hop plays on, we will all suffer under the con of the neoliberal revolution, which demands that we all pay.