Two Turntables and a Social Movement: Writing Hip-Hop at Century's End

Abstract

In eighties, when I was growing up in Los Angeles, Cal Worthington was most famous car salesman in all of Southern California. His television commercials for his Long Beach car lot always presented him in same way: dressed in a two-piece suit, cowboy hat on his head, and twanging—in a dusty drawl that sounded imported direct from Dallas—This is Cal Worthington and my dog Spot while he wrestled with tigers on hoods of Mustangs and promised slashed prices and bad credit sympathies. White, Southern, country, and goofy, Worthington was local TV's reigning pop icon of working-class white suburbia. After disappearing from airwaves for most of nineties, Worthington has finally returned. Now, though, his spots are run- ning on radio, on Beat, one of LA's leading hip-hop and R&B stations. In between Nelly and Snoop is Worthington 2001 style. It's same voice, same country accent, same banjo plucking away behind him, same white car dealer in same white cowboy hat on same lot off 405 freeway, but now Worthington calls Long Beach The LBC and talks about car prices that are the bomb. We all have our ways of registering just how significant hip-hop's impact on mainstream US culture has been and for me this was it: something is definitely up when even Cal Worthington of Worthington Ford has gone hip-hop. hip-hopification of Worthington is, of course, about little more than chasing market trends and profit margins (if polka was dominating Billboard charts, Worthington would be play- ing an accordion on top of a beer barrel). Nevertheless, that it is hip-hop that has been internationally recognized as a dominant commercial force, commercial idiom with which one must be- come fluent in order to sell products, is point here. It could be anything else, but it's not: at turn of twentieth century, US popular culture has become nearly synonymous with hip-hop cul- ture, or at least a commercialized and commodity-ready version