Review: Who Got the Camera?: A History of Rap and Reality, by Eric Harvey

Abstract

Eric Harvey’s Who Got the Camera?: A History of Rap and Reality is a welcome work of hip-hop history. The field has long been dominated, on one end, with work written as listicle — with best-ofs, top-100s, timelines, pop-out boxes, and hagiography standard fare. On the other end, the literature has tended toward cultural theory and been too pedantic to be accessible enough to help readers understand the music’s relationship to past events. This means that, despite the fact that rap music is now half a century old and wildly influential, most hip-hop scholarship remains only anecdotally interested in making sense of the genre in history. Only rare scholars (Robin D.G. Kelley, Mark Anthony Neal, Todd Boyd, Eithne Quinn, among them) engage with the complexities of these stories and their historical contexts; few analyze rap enough to tease out the economic, political, social, cultural, technological, and ideological landscapes that both transformed the music and were transformed by the music.With his absorbing new book, we can add Harvey to this short list. Who Got the Camera? uses captivating narratives, carefully reasoned arguments, and a touch of humor to help readers fit rap music and rap artists with historical trends and tensions.This is a history of hip-hop that goes far beyond origin story. Harvey’s focus is popular media and tabloid culture in America, which he reveals is inextricably bound to the story of hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, Harvey convinces us that without explorations of popular journalism and the phenomenon of “trash TV,” it is certain that our understandings of, for instance, Run-DMC’s first hit single, the rise of Afrocentrism in early ‘90s hip-hop, and the popular canonization of 2Pac, are entirely inadequate. In this way, Who Got the Camera? enlightens — even surprises — its readers. Even the truest of true school hip-hop fans may not know (or remember), for instance, that it was Run-DMC and not N.W.A. who became the first rap group to be scapegoated by the popular press for inciting violence, or that Ice-T once appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” alongside Jello Biafra, Nelson George, and Tipper Gore. Harvey reminds us again and again of the spectacular messiness of this era of American popular culture.The book, which grew from Harvey’s Pitchfork Review piece about an N.W.A. appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1990, treats media—and, most pointedly, “reality” media such as daytime talk and sensationalistic crime reporting—as a central character in the story of rap’s influence on American culture. Harvey demonstrates that the lifespan of tabloid TV (think America’s Most Wanted, Geraldo, Cops, Donahue, and Hard Copy), which peaked in the late ‘80s and “collapsed under its own weight in 1996,” is interwoven with the commercial rise and fall of reality rappers, such as Ice T, Ice Cube, and Public Enemy (260). Harvey shows that rap artists were savvy connoisseurs of the new news—that is, news told from those on the margins and in defiance of the old conventions of nightly news reporting. Tabloid culture, and its exhibitions of everything from Louis Farrakhan’s Black nationalism to the Amy Fischer story, provided rap artists with inspiration and with clear evidence that “the more salacious the content, the more profitable the product” (4).As a work of history, the book sometimes reads as synthesis, with the author nodding to canonical culture writers and hip-hop theorists, including Jeff Chang and Tricia Rose, and relying sometimes on secondary literature to detail the back histories of, for instance, Black westward migration and Los Angeles policing. But the topics critical to Harvey’s analysis, like moral panics, sensationalized court dramas, and rap’s crossover moments, are carefully examined and documented. Harvey is not a trained historian, but he writes like one.More importantly, for both specialists and non-specialists alike, Harvey’s storytelling is solidly persuasive — never abstruse and always breezy. Frankly, Who Got the Camera? makes this reviewer wish for more academic books written by trained journalists.Put another way, Who Got the Camera? is a book crafted with great respect for both its subjects and for us, its readers. Harvey cares as much about revealing the meaning of the cultural phenomena so easily dismissed by most scholars as he does about good, clear prose. With both, Harvey succeeds at demonstrating that, as he writes, “what we know as reality is comprehensible only after being forged in the crucible of mass-mediated popular culture” (22).