DanjLovesThe90s!

I don’t care what niggas say… MC Hammer was NOT a sellout.

There was a point in time when Hammer was known (along with Vanilla Ice) as a threat to hip-hop’s integrity. He was dissed by everyone from Ice Cube to Q-Tip. He was called everything but a black man by others who thought his music was damaging the credibility of the genre. He was clowned for his commercial endorsements and sampling popular records, even by rappers who went on to do the exact same shit later in their careers. He had extravagant, dance-oriented stage shows that were considered “wack” by artists who were more content to walk back and forth on stage for 45 minutes. And for all this, he was labeled a “sellout”.

Now… was I a fan of Hammer? Nah! Even as a kid, I wasn’t exactly enthralled by most of his big hits. I mighta liked a couple of his videos, but I wasn’t rockin’ with most of ‘em. I wasn’t watching Hammerman, and I thought “2 Legit 2 Quit” was awful. I also laughed my ass off when Paul Mooney joked about  that fateful KFC commercial, which is still one of the most unintentional/intentional racial innuendo advertisements ever. All that considered, I still can’t agree with the accusation that Hammer sold out- he simply got popular doing what he’d always done. It wasn’t his fault that MTV and mainstream media hopped on his dick, just like it wouldn’t have been Q-Tip’s if they hopped on his.

If Hammer had ever professed to be some kind of supreme lyricist who made “real hip-hop”, and then he switched gears… maybe. If Hammer went out and told people “don’t listen to Ice Cube or KRS-One because that’s not what hip-hop is- I’M hip-hop”… maybe. Taking it past music, if Hammer had gotten rich and disassociated himself from the people who supported him on the way up… surely he could’ve been construed as someone who turned their back. But he never did any of that. He came in making a particular brand of music, and he continued to do that as he became more successful. Actually, there’s a lot of “real” rappers from back then that the same can’t be said about.

I was just recently having this debate on the SOHH.com message board, and my stance was that the LAST thing anyone should call Hammer is a sellout. Sure, he wasn’t hardly street-level (at least not music-wise) but it’s not ANY rapper’s dream to get a deal, make an album, and still be in the projects. Hammer gave back to the community he grew up in, and also gave jobs to his friends and many others who were otherwise struggling. He actually ended up takin’ a loss from doing that, because in his own words, all of those people turned their backs once he wasn’t “megastar MC Hammer” anymore.

If anything, he sold out AFTER all the criticism. After he got dissed for his “hip-pop” music and his not-real-enough image, he decided it was a good idea to come back hard in ’94. So he put on his skullie and boots, and came back looking like he was on some type of gangsta shit. That made him MORE of a punchline because now, it was “look at Hammer tryna be hard now, nigga please!”. He couldn’t win for losing- the same people who didn’t like him before weren’t gonna switch up and start likin’ him then, no matter how many times he shouted out Tha Dogg Pound or mugged for the camera. And if that wasn’t enough, the “Pumps N A Bump” video certainly did it- nigga went from “we gotta pray to make it today” to postin’ up with Speedos on.

Today, Hammer generally gets respect from his peers. I think they realized that he wasn’t tryin’ to bastardize hip-hop as a genre, or even tryin’ to steer people away from those other artists. In fact, I’d even say his music opened a lot of people up to other rappers. I recall knowing white kids at my school who loved Hammer in ’90, but by ’92 were listening to Cypress Hill and Das EFX (who were about as far away from Hammer’s music as it got). At least a part of that came from them developing a sudden interest in rap music thru Hammer n’nem, and then tuning into the hip-hop video shows and seeing other stuff that they also found appealing.

Wack? Possibly so. Great MC? Maybe not. Sellout? Definitely not.