"TO LIVE AND DEFY IN LA: An Interview with Felicia Angeja Viator" by Gracie Bialecki
One of the best parts about going to college in Los Angeles was KDAY, the radio station my friends and I listened to whenever we were in a car. Their DJs played mostly hip-hop, a mix of West Coast classics and newer rappers. Each track was so good that even when they went to commercials, we stayed tuned. Switching to the sugary Top 40 was like going from a crisp, sun-ripened slice of watermelon to an artificially flavored Jolly Rancher—shocking to the taste buds. It’s been almost a decade since I lived in LA and I can’t forget that station, 93.5, cruising through the city, listening to the music that defined it.
Earlier this spring I heard about Felicia Angeja Viator’s book, To Live and Defy in LA, a history of LA hip-hop in the 1980s, and immediately added it to my reading list. The first chapter opens in 1985 with “Greg Mack” Macmillan of KDAY redefining the station by playing “freestyle” and rap. I could barely believe that someone was writing about my beloved radio station, much less weaving its influence into a larger part of history.
Viator’s book is more than a history of hip-hop, it’s a meticulously researched cultural and political portrait of Los Angeles at a pivotal time. Or as she puts it:
My book explains why things happened as they did, how these things are connected to legacies of black migration, changes in policing, changes in radio programing, the rise of cable TV, and the real struggles that hip-hop as a genre faced in the late 1980s.
As I read Live and Defy in LA, I was struck not only by hip-hop’s chaotic emergence but also by how little had changed—the book feels as much about our time as it is about thirty years prior.
Gracie Bialecki: So many of To Live and Defy in LA’s themes—white men in power, racial profiling, police violence caught on camera, and protests against injustice—felt all too prescient for our current social and political climates. Were there any specific albums or artists who inspired you to write about the birth of hip-hop in 1980s Los Angeles? When you started the project, did you anticipate it being so timely?
Felicia Angeja Viator: Twenty years ago, long before I started the research for this book, I had a history professor in college who covered the 1992 LA Riots by talking about Ice Cube. This was the late 1990s, when it was still unheard-of to discuss hip-hop, let alone gangster rap, in a university classroom. I had listened to a lot of Ice Cube in high school; The Predator was one of my favorite albums at the time. But that class helped me think about that record more pointedly in the context of a long history of police oppression and injustice in Los Angeles. When I started thinking about this larger project years later, I began by revisiting The Predator, along with Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. Both came out in the wake of the LA Riots. That’s where I started, and ultimately where the book ends.
I could never have imagined that within weeks of this book hitting shelves, we’d see the most widespread, most stunning nationwide protests against systemic racism in our history. And I couldn’t have foreseen that demonstrators would incorporate new and old rap lyrics in their cries, including “Fuck tha Police.” I couldn’t have imagined that the book would be so timely in that way. But I will say that I always felt that the history I was writing helped explain both contemporary popular culture and contemporary policing in America. And I also always had the sense that Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s held lessons for us about the dangers of militarized policing and about various kinds of responses to racial injustice.
GB: Through the mid-80s, LA’s hip-hop was largely excluded from the national scene, partially because of Def Jam and The Source not acknowledging the West Coast artists. How big of a role did hip-hop journalism play in creating the hip-hop we know today?
FAV: The book focuses quite a bit on the role of the media in the rise of rap. Music journalists did, in fact, cover Eazy-E and NWA in their early years, largely because they were so scandalous compared to the most popular hip-hop artists who had preceded them. The controversies NWA crafted made for good copy. The more vulgar they were or the more they leaned into the gun-toting “gangbanger” imagery, for instance, the more attention they could ensure from the press. That’s what made music journalism distinct from radio at the time. Controversy ensured that you would NOT get radio spins; it hurt your brand. But at the same time, controversy might secure you an opinion piece, or even a cover feature—as was the case in 1989 when NWA appeared on the cover of both LA Weekly and New York’s The Village Voice at a time when virtually no radio outlets played the group’s music. Early LA rap artists understood that they couldn’t depend on the gatekeepers in radio, or at MTV for that matter, to give them a platform. So, they figured out how to create one for themselves by tapping into the media’s fascination with drama and obscenity and violence.
NWA was deeply interested in the popular press and its power to captivate, and the press was equally as interested in NWA for the same reason. But that was cutting-edge for hip-hop at that time. That symbiotic relationship between rap artists and journalists was brand-new. And it was ultimately a game-changer. I don’t argue this in the book, but I do think that, in that way, NWA laid the groundwork for the flowering of hip-hop journalism in the 1990s.
GB: Throughout the narrative, MTV oscillates between being a force for diversity and refusing to play NWA’s Straight Outta Compton video, which features police violence. NWA is one of the few artists who reached the Billboard charts despite this. Do different versions of this type of censorship exist today? Has the internet democratized what we see?
FAV: By the 1990s, MTV had learned how much currency controversy really had both for artists and for the channel. But more broadly, the rise of the 24-hour cable news cycle and tabloid television, and the backlash to the anti-obscenity crusades has crushed the logic of the sort of censorship we saw in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Plus, to the point of your question, the internet has decentralized the distribution of music and the visual arts, including music videos. There are endless ways to access music and images, and so there are far, far fewer ways to censor those things. When word gets out that something is controversial—take Tyler, the Creator’s album Goblin, or YG’s “FTP,” or Cardi B’s new video for “WAP,” for instance—everyone can now access it and then offer up a hot take. So, yes, new forms of media have democratized what we hear and see, and that has limited the power of the censors. That makes this moment very different from the moment in which LA rap first made waves.
GB: When MTV did embrace hip-hop they produced a show called Yo! MTV Raps and its host Fab 5 Freddy asserted, “If you are seventeen years old and living in Des Moines, you’re not going to pick up the New York Times” but by watching his show “you’re going to learn a little more about race in America.” Would you say access to hip-hop created inter-racial understanding and empathy? Is that still true of the genre today?
FAV: I think hip-hop helped, yes. By the 1990s, hip-hop sort of reverse-colonized pop music, and pervaded everything from fashion to film. The work of Black activists and scholars and artists prior to hip-hop had done a great deal to expose the public to Black perspectives. But hip-hop helped younger generations—of all races, not just white kids—see Black perspectives as integral to American culture. When political pundits in 2008 talked about the “hip-hop generation” ushering Barack Obama into office, I think they were really referring to how differently that generation of voters thought about America because they had grown up with hip-hop.
GB: Much of the book frames NWA’s music, as well as other rap coming out of LA, as a form of protest. Yet in 2020, most commercial hip-hop falls back on the tropes of money, drugs, and women. Do you see the current music scene as a means of political action? Do we need music less, now that we have the internet as an outlet for self-expression?
FAV: I think the biggest misconception people have about hip-hop is that it was once protest music but then lost its way. That’s mythology. It’s never been purely activist or purely political, and the themes of money, drugs, and sex are classic tropes—not just in hip-hop but in blues music, rock, and virtually all forms of American popular culture. If we try to define hip-hop, at any point in its history, as protest music, then we lose sight of the fact that rap music is bigger than that. It’s art, which means it is, more than anything else, a platform for people to express themselves however they want. Artists can challenge structural racism, or celebrate wealth, or fantasize about power or violence or sex, or self-reflect, or all of these things or none of these things. What’s so important about the story of early LA rap is not that these guys started out deciding that they would create “Fuck tha Police,” or, for that matter, “Findum, Fuckum, and Flee.” The point is that they worked to create a platform for themselves—for Black youths—to say whatever they wanted to say. That’s their most powerful legacy. And it’s the way we should understand rap music now—as a platform for Black expression of every kind.
GB: We’re finally seeing female artists like Cardi B and Nicki Minaj make it onto the national stage. Could you tell us a bit more about women in the 80s LA hip-hop scene? There were a few female hip-hop groups like HWA (Hoes with Attitude) and BWP (Bitches With Problems). Is there a reason why we so rarely hear about them?
FAV: Women rappers are some of the unsung heroes in my book. JJ Fad (MC JB and Baby D), for instance, was the all-woman rap group that Eazy-E and Ruthless Records prioritized, initially. It was JJ Fad and not NWA who first defined the label. In fact, when Eazy-E began dreaming about his own group’s potential for success, he looked to JJ Fad as his model. By 1989, JJ Fad had songs on a movie soundtrack. They had a gold single and a gold album. They were one of the first rap groups ever nominated for a Grammy!
I actually think that we have heard about women rappers when those artists made music with impact. Maybe not HWA or BWP, which were both flops conceptually and musically. But we certainly heard about Salt-N-Pepa and JJ Fad in the 1980s. In the Bay Area, we had Oaktown 3-5-7, Suga T, and Conscious Daughters. There are so many women since then who became household names, long before Nicki and Cardi. Off the top of my head: Rah Digga, Lady of Rage, Yo-Yo, Trina, Khia, Gangsta Boo, Latifah, Lyte, Lil’ Kim, Da Brat, Foxy Brown, Missy, Lauryn Hill.
No doubt, representation of women in rap is still disproportionately low. But that’s a reflection of bigger problems with representation in lots of traditionally male-dominated fields—like politics or big tech, for instance. We’ve been curious about women rappers because they seemed like the exception to the rule. They seemed unique as women for breaking through. So, yes, we have talked about them, but we’ve framed their talent and their music as mere novelty tied to their gender. That means we’ve celebrated them in March, and we’ve only compared them to other women, and we’ve assessed their significance by compiling “the best female rappers” lists, treating them as if they existed in a vacuum. (Can you imagine compiling a “best female elected officials” list or assessing the work of female legislators only by comparing them to other female legislators?) What’s exciting to me about this moment is that artists like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are, without question, some of the most commercially significant rappers out right now. Period. Their dominance means that other rappers making good music, like Kamaiyah and Leikeli47 and Noname, fit more seamlessly into the landscape of rap, and it’s less acceptable to just pigeonhole them as “female artists.” We are more likely now to see them as artists. Yes, they’re still women with distinct perspectives on the world, but it just seems ignorant now to fixate on their gender when judging their talent. The same sort of changes have been happening in politics.
GB: Thanks for the segue into the political—Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kanye West all make an appearance in Live and Defy in LA. Trump performs one of his first political acts in response to the Central Park Seven—who were later acquitted—by putting an ad in the New York press calling for politicians to support the police and “bring back the death penalty.” Biden is demanding for Los Angeles’ Police Chief Daryl Gates’s resignation after the Rodney King beating, while West is speaking as a rapper about artists who influenced him. Far more than a musician, West is now an artist and designer who is also running for president (as of this interview). The book was published before any official candidates were announced so their inclusion is purely coincidental. Do you see a connection between politicians and hip-hop artists? Does hip-hop have the same power as politics to create social change?
FAV: Yes, the final draft of the book was completed before the 2020 election cycle began. But I didn’t decide to include these three men in the story because they’re influential public figures now. I included them because they were influential public figures then, and because they each did consequential things that revealed, back then, how they fit into this story about race and American culture. You could make the case that, in the context of violent policing and racial profiling, Biden and Trump acted then as they are now: Biden is allying himself with those seeking justice for Black victims of police abuse; Trump is telegraphing messages about civil society collapsing to drum up white fears. These are echoes of the past.
Kanye is a different case. On the one hand, he seems to have changed a great deal from when he was the hungry, young producer I quote in the book—that artist who idolized Dr. Dre. Kanye’s personal struggles with mental health and his own celebrity have definitely transformed how he fits into the world of rap today. But the thing that hasn’t changed over the years is how the political Right continues to misunderstand rap music and its fans. The fact that Trump’s campaign is actively supporting Kanye’s candidacy with the expectation that rap fans will vote for him instead of Biden because he’s a big famous rapper is only the most recent example of the willful ignorance conservatives have when it comes to hip-hop culture.
The one thing that conservatives have gotten right, though, is that they’ve seen how uniquely influential hip-hop has become. The drive to prop up Kanye’s presidential campaign is an attempt to harness the tremendous popularity of the genre. It’s an acknowledgment that hip-hop is powerful. That power, though, tends to be conducive to movements in support of Black lives. And, clearly, the campaign to reelect Trump is not that.
My book doesn’t argue that hip-hop is always explicitly activist. It isn’t. LA rap in its early years—just like contemporary rap—didn’t always spout specific political ideals, but it was defiant, it was Black, and it was captivating. When hip-hop crosses over and young Black artists pervade American culture, that lays the cultural groundwork for Black activists. They make it so the public can’t help but pay attention.
Felicia Angeja Viator is Assistant Professor of History at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Washington Post. Prior to writing about music, she was one of the first and only women to work as a mobile and club DJ in the Bay Area hip-hop scene. Born and raised near Oakland, she currently lives in San Francisco.
Gracie Bialecki is an author, performance poet, and co-founder of New York City's Thirst storytelling series. She lives and writes in Paris, France.
