Nov 5, 2014
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab.
JAD: And today, two big stories. Both have to do with questions about, well, who gets to call the shots? Who makes the decisions? Who sets the rules?
ROBERT: Okay.
JAD: That would be me, most of the time.
ROBERT: Yeah, that's the problem. I don't—I always wonder a little bit, like, why you get to decide?
JAD: Well, the way I like it is this is my jurisdiction. Have you heard that phrase? Jurisdiction.
ROBERT: Oh, fancy words! Many syllables doesn't necessarily solve the problem.
JAD: That's what we're gonna call this show: Jurisdiction.
ROBERT: Well, is it jurisdiction over whom? Or what?
JAD: Well, over hip hop.
ROBERT: Oh.
JAD: That's coming up.
ROBERT: Okay. That'll be interesting.
JAD: But we're gonna start on the opposite end of the spectrum with constitutional law, federalism and—and the intricacies of international treaty practice. Ho ho!
ROBERT: Oh, God! No, no, no, no. Don't do that. No.
JAD: You ready? No, it's gonna be good! It's gonna be good! It's gonna be good. Because I have help.
KELSEY PADGETT: Hey guys.
ROBERT: Hi Kelsey.
KELSEY: Hello.
JAD: Kelsey Padgett has reported this segment. And just listen to how it starts.
KELSEY: So this story starts with a betrayed spouse.
JAD: Oh, you see?
ROBERT: Oh, it's much better! I'm coming back to my seat. Get some popcorn! [laughs]
DUNCAN HOLLIS: My name's Duncan Hollis.
KELSEY: He's not the betrayed spouse.
DUNCAN HOLLIS: Nope. I'm a professor of international law here at Temple University in Philadelphia.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: And I'm Nick Rosenkranz.
KELSEY: And not him either.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: I'm a professor of law at Georgetown. I'm also a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. So Mrs. Bond ...
KELSEY: That's her! That's our betrayed spouse!
DUNCAN HOLLIS: Carol Anne Bond.
KELSEY: 36. Lives in a suburb of Philly.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Discovered that her husband was having an affair with her neighbor.
KELSEY: Actually, it was worse than that. This woman was her best friend! And not only that ...
DUNCAN HOLLIS: She finds out that her friend is pregnant via her husband.
KELSEY: ... he got her pregnant.
ROBERT: Oh my God!
KELSEY: Yeah. And this is her best friend and her husband of 14 years.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: You know, she was quite upset, distraught.
JAD: Enraged, I would imagine?
KELSEY: Yeah. Carol made threats, there were confrontations. The other woman is named Myrlinda Haynes, by the way. And eventually, Carol Anne Bond ...
NICK ROSENKRANZ: She did what anyone would do, she got a bunch of toxic chemicals, and ...
ROBERT: [laughs] I do it all the time!
KELSEY: ... and she tried to poison her best friend. Repeatedly.
ROBERT: Oh!
JAD: Back up for a second. Where would she have gotten the chemicals from?
DUNCAN HOLLIS: She worked, I believe, at a lab.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: She works for a chemical company, I think it's Rohm and Haas.
KELSEY: She's actually a microbiologist. But she grabs some chemicals from her office.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: I think she also orders some off the internet. But they're pretty serious chemicals.
JAD: Like what?
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Well, one was arsenic-based, and in large enough doses—and when I say large doses, I'm talking teaspoons, not gallons—it can, you know, cause serious injury and can be fatal.
KELSEY: So anyway, she took these chemicals, she went over to her best friend's—or well, her former best friend's house.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: And she spread them on the doorknob and on the mailbox.
DUNCAN HOLLIS: The door to her car.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: And they're visible, I guess. I guess you can see them.
JAD: So the best friend isn't fooled.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Nope. She calls actually the local police. The local police tell her to take her car to a car wash.
DUNCAN HOLLIS: They said, "Oh, you know, it could be drugs. Get the car washed off."
KELSEY: They kind of just blow her off, but it keeps happening. Over the course of, like, half a year, this happens 24 times.
ROBERT: 24 powder attacks.
KELSEY: Mm-hmm. According to the court briefs, you know, the police were just not being very responsive. She called them over a dozen times, and they tested it to see if it was cocaine, but once they figured out it wasn't, they didn't really do anything. So finally, she tells the post office.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: And it was the post office that actually sent out postal inspectors, and they set up a hidden camera.
KELSEY: And they videotaped Carol Ann Bond in the act.
ROBERT: They get it on tape?
KELSEY: Mm-hmm.
DUNCAN HOLLIS: That's how they identify her as the person putting the chemicals, you know, on the mailbox.
JAD: I didn't know the post office did stuff like that!
DUNCAN HOLLIS: To be honest, I didn't either. [laughs]
JAD: That's so—I think of them so differently now.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Yes, and I think if there's a moral to the story, it is: do not mess with the mail.
JAD: [laughs]
NICK ROSENKRANZ: They take that—they take that very seriously.
KELSEY: Actually, there's a whole lot more going on than just messing with the mail, because of what happens next.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Um ...
KELSEY: So according to Nick Rosenkranz, generally things like assault or attempted murder ...
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Those are state crimes.
KELSEY: ... in most circumstances, the federal government can't charge you with murder. The post office, that's a federal institution. So when they caught Carol Anne Bond, they kicked this up to the federal attorney, who then ...
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Went ahead and brought a federal case.
KELSEY: And here's the thing: they ended up charging Carol Anne Bond with violating the International Chemical Weapons Treaty.
ROBERT: What?
DUNCAN HOLLIS: We should be clear, the victim got a tiny thumb burn and ran cold water on it and was fine. So this is not murder, this is ...
ROBERT: Well then, that makes this all the more odd.
DUNCAN HOLLIS: Very odd.
ROBERT: No, really. Why would they charge her with that? I don't understand.
KELSEY: Well, if you actually read the treaty ...
JOHN BELLINGER: The statute simply says that it's a crime to use a toxic chemical for other than a peaceful purpose.
KELSEY: That's the exact language. And that guy, that's John Bellinger.
JOHN BELLINGER: I served as the legal advisor for the Department of State under Secretary Condoleezza Rice.
KELSEY: And John says that even though it sounds a little weird, this is exactly what this treaty was meant for, for people using chemicals ...
JOHN BELLINGER: Highly toxic chemicals.
KELSEY: ... for non-peaceful purposes.
JOHN BELLINGER: Exactly right.
JAD: And that's what happened here.
KELSEY: Imagine if she had killed a bunch of postal workers. Then ...
JOHN BELLINGER: I don't think anybody would complain.
ROBERT: But to charge her with an international treaty violation? It just seems—it seems too big for the little lady.
KELSEY: It was really odd to her lawyers, too.
ROBERT: I bet.
KELSEY: They're like, "Look, in the Constitution, you have laid out what the federal government can do. This is not one of those things. You can't just take a treaty and use it to reach into the very local life of a normal person. That's a huge overreach."
ROBERT: Sneaky, frankly.
KELSEY: And now this case is before the Supreme Court.
ROBERT: Oh!
KELSEY: And it's become an ideological battle that goes way beyond Carol Anne Bond, her cheating husband or her adulterous best friend.
JAD: And I would argue that this case, as weird as it is ...
ROBERT: Mm-hmm.
JAD: ... raises some really important issues about how the world is changing, and about one of the most fundamental questions that is at the heart of America. I—I really believe that.
ROBERT: Well, you'll have to defend that position. What do you mean?
JAD: [laughs] Let me take you back to the beginning, okay?
ROBERT: Sure.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: My name is Joseph J. Ellis. I am a historian. I've written the book called Founding Brothers, and my most recent book is called—what's it called?
ROBERT: [laughs]
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: Revolutionary Summer.
ROBERT: You are a modest man!
KELSEY: [laughs]
JAD: So Joseph Ellis has written a—he's a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He's written a bunch of books about the founding of our country, the Revolutionary War. And there is a scene in one of his books ...
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: A book called American Creation. Didn't sell as many as Founding Brothers, but ...
JAD: Doesn't matter to me, because it has this one passage that when I read it I was like, "Wow! I've never thought of this country that way." To set the scene ...
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: You want to be real specific, it's September.
JAD: September, 1787. Philadelphia.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: You know, it's abominably hot.
JAD: You had all these great men crammed into a state house. I mean, George Washington.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: This guy is a stud!
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: 6'3". War hero.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: This guy is overwhelming!
JAD: Alexander Hamilton was there.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: Hamilton, he would've got the highest grades on the LSATs. I'm telling you, this guy was really smart.
JAD: Even Ben Franklin.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: Yeah.
JAD: Who's pushing 81 at this point.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: Franklin's there.
ROBERT: Oh!
JAD: They all came together to try and figure out, like, how do we do this? Like, if you think about it, it was a puzzle because you've got these 13 colonies which were really like sovereign nations. And they were loosely organized into a federation that was about to go bankrupt, so they had to do something. So they were like, okay, let's bring them together into a union, but how do we do that without a king? It was a crazy experiment.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: Well, I mean one thing you've got to realize is that at that time in American history, the average person was born, lived out his or her life, and died within a 30-mile radius.
JAD: Wow.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: They don't have cell phones, and they don't think about themselves as Americans.
JAD: They thought of themselves as Pennsylvanians, South Carolinians, Bostonians.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: There is no real national ethos.
JAD: So that's one problem. Second problem? The Founding Fathers could not agree, could not agree on the most basic question: if there's not a king, who's in charge, right? The so-called sovereignty question. And on the one hand, you had a guy like Alexander Hamilton who got up there and was like, "Well, why do we even need states? What's a state, right? What we need is a federal government that is big and strong and powerful."
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: That's Hamilton, baby!
ROBERT: [laughs]
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: Hamilton wants a president elected for life. Hamilton wants a senator elected for life.
JAD: On the other hand, you had the Thomas Jefferson school of thought, which was like ...
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: No! No!
JAD: We just got out of a monarchy, for Chrissake! And the only way we're not gonna get back in one is if we keep the government small, restricted, and ...
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: All domestic policy belongs in the hands of the states.
JAD: Sound familiar?
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: Jefferson likes anything in which the government's not gonna be doing much.
JAD: So you had these two very different philosophies, and the way Joe sees it ...
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: If you let Jefferson have total power, we end up at anarchy. If you let Hamilton have total power, you're gonna end up with a totalitarian state.
JAD: At the convention, the two sides went back and forth. And any time a Hamiltonian-type proposal hit the floor, some of the states would say, "No." And they'd shoot it down because they did not want some big government telling them what to do, especially when the 800-pound gorilla in the room was slavery. So they couldn't agree at all. And into this mess walks our hero, James Madison!
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: Madison. Yeah, like, Madison's 5'2", 120.
JAD: [sings] Madison!
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: He's the kind of guy that, you know, stands in the corners during a dance.
ROBERT: [laughs]
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: He's—you would call him a nerd.
JAD: [sings] Madison! Or you might call him a pragmatist.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: Madison wants a clear decision about sovereignty.
JAD: Yeah, like for example on local matters. Who gets the final say: the states or the federal government? Just give me some clarity.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: And he's not gonna get it. And he comes to that realization at the very end.
JAD: Because at the end of the convention they have this document, and he wrote the original blueprint. Now there's this new document that's so riddled with compromises that, according to Joe, the basic question he wanted answered wasn't. The "Who's in charge?" question was left kind of vague on all sorts of matters. I mean, who regulates money and banks? Who gets to tax what? Who decides whether new states will be slave states or free states? It was vague. And initially, according to Joe, in a letter that Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, he's like, "Come on!"
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: He's very disappointed.
JAD: He thinks the document's gonna fail and the country's gonna fail.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: He doesn't think this is going to last.
JAD: But then, Joe says, in his writings you start to see a shift.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: He starts to think differently. He starts to say, "Oh yeah."
JAD: "Wait a second."
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: "This—this could work precisely because it's unclear." And we found what he calls a "middle station."
JAD: Where everyone can see what they want to see.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: I mean, people come out of the convention, go back to their states, and the guy in South Carolina says, "Don't worry about slavery. The Tenth Amendment's gonna tell us that they can't do that." And the guy in Pennsylvania says, "It's just a matter of time before we end slavery." The Constitution becomes successful because the people don't agree on what it means.
JAD: That, according to Joe, was Madison's epiphany.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS: That the Constitution isn't a set of answers, it's a framework for argument. This is a document which allows us to continue to discuss and debate the core issues that we face: the powers of the presidency, the sovereignty question. The real resolution of the sovereignty question is never—is never achieved. And—and it eventually leads to the Civil War.
JAD: What I find kind of neat about this is that, like, that argument that happens in modern politics all the time about states' rights or the size of the government, which can feel like a random argument for me at times, suddenly to know this—I mean, if you buy what Joe's saying—it's not random at all. This is an argument that was actually literally written into our founding document. In some sense, we as a country are the product of that argument.
ROBERT: Of course, not everybody agrees with Joseph Ellis. There are people who think that the founding fathers had a very specific thing in mind, and if you just go back to their debates and to what they said to each other that you can find the real only deep logic for the Constitution.
JAD: But the fact that they disagree with Joe, in some sense doesn't that kind of make Joe's point? That you can read this document in 10 different ways?
ROBERT: Yes. Everyone always argues always.
JAD: Now just to pick up the thread, I mean, after the Civil War the argument changes, it gets centered.
ROBERT: But the union is still an experiment. And the jostling between the federal government and the state government doesn't end, it just gets a little quieter. Thank heavens. Because you don't want ...
KELSEY: Unless you're a duck.
ROBERT: [laughs]
KELSEY: And our next stop is ...
JAD: And this one has everything to do with our poisoner.
KELSEY: So it's spring of 1919, rural Missouri. You've got Frank McAllister, the attorney general of Missouri. He's out there with a bunch of friends, and they're pointing their guns at the sky and shooting ducks, one after another after another. And they end up shooting all in all 76. He knows he can do this because, you know, he's the attorney general of the state. He knows all the laws of the state, and he knows it's his right to shoot whatever duck is flying in the sky of Missouri.
JAD: That's the state law that you ...
KELSEY: That's the state law. You can shoot the ducks. So they're out there, they're having this great time. They're having this great haul, they've gotten all these ducks. And then out of nowhere, Ray Holland, the federal game warden shows up and he says, "No, you can't do this. You can't shoot these birds. They're not your property." McAllister says, "You? You're wrong."
ROBERT: [laughs]
NICK ROSENKRANZ: "This is a matter for the state. You know, it's our sovereignty. We never gave this over to the federal government."
ROBERT: So he must've been like, "I don't think the federal government has anything to say to me about a duck that was born here. At least I found it in the sky here, I shot it here, it died here, and I'm gonna eat it here. So this is my duck."
KELSEY: But the game warden says, "No, it's not your duck." And he arrests them all, setting up a landmark confrontation. Because here's what had happened: two years earlier, the administration of Woodrow Wilson was sitting there wringing their hands thinking all these people are killing birds at, like, a nonstop pace. And if this didn't stop ...
NICK ROSENKRANZ: You know, there was some concern at this period that we were gonna—you know, we were gonna hunt these things to extinction. You know, we might not have any migratory birds at all.
KELSEY: Problem is, the courts had already told the federal government this is purely a local matter. You can't make federal hunting laws. But then somebody in the administration has this really great idea—or a really evil idea, depending on how you look at it.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Maybe if we can get Canada to cooperate with us we can do this by a treaty.
KELSEY: Because there's this clause in the Constitution that says treaties are the supreme law of the land, so maybe if we make an international treaty then the states will have to go along. Frank McAllister, he sues, and this goes all the way up to the Supreme Court.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: It lands before Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the more famous justices of the Supreme Court. And he basically says the treaty power is something that was given to the federal government. Don't limit this. This treaty is good. And the treaty and the legislation are upheld.
JAD: So score one for the federal government.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Score one for the federal government. And in there, you actually have Holmes talking about what the Constitution is. You know, he was this—what, thrice-wounded Civil War veteran, and he actually invokes the language of the Civil War saying, you know, we spent all this sweat and blood to figure out what kind of nation we were gonna become—for birds. He invokes this language and basically says whatever we had debated in the past, you know, could the states regulate slavery without federal interference? And Holmes says no, you know, the side who fought that argument? They lost.
KELSEY: All this talk about birds and, you know, state versus federal has everything to do with our poisoner Carol Anne Bond. This case is the precedent upon which the federal government says that they can prosecute Carol Anne Bond, because Oliver Wendell Holmes said that treaties are the supreme law of the land.
ROBERT: I don't know. I'm still—I'm still of the mind that this is a sneaky bit of business by the federal government.
JAD: It's not sneaky if you're a duck. I—I feel I must speak on behalf of the ducks here.
ROBERT: [laughs] But no, forget your ducks. This is a Pennsylvania lady doing a Pennsylvania adultery in a Pennsylvania mailbox with a Pennsylvania mood. I mean, there's nothing—there's no birds flying overhead. This is an all-Pennsylvania crime.
KELSEY: But you know who wasn't doing a damned thing about that? Pennsylvania.
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: Oh! Oh!
KELSEY: But just to take your side for a second, Robert.
ROBERT: Please. Do that.
KELSEY: [laughs] If you really think about it, you know, in the way that Nick Rosenkranz thinks about it, this is really troubling. This decision seems to say that theoretically, the federal government's power ...
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Is potentially infinite.
KELSEY: Because, like, say John Kerry, who's our Secretary of State right now, he goes and makes treaties.
ROBERT: Right.
KELSEY: Say he's talking to Zimbabwe, and we agree that we want to have a treaty about educational standards for children. So we come home and we write a law that says all children must go to public schools. But then that would outlaw homeschooling for children, which is a clear local state matter. But now suddenly the federal government has the power to do that.
NICK ROSENKRANZ: It just seems odd the idea that the President, the Senate and Zimbabwe can increase Congress's legislative powers.
KELSEY: Here's how John Bellinger responds.
JOHN BELLINGER: Is it a theoretical possibility that the federal government might try to go and do that? I suppose it's theoretically possible, but there's no evidence that that happened here, there's no evidence that that has happened in the hundred years since Missouri versus Holland.
KELSEY: He would say, "Look, consider the ..."
JOHN BELLINGER: ... practical impact that a decision might have that would cut back on the President's treaty power. Other countries are already highly suspicious of the United States' ability to deliver on its treaty commitments anyway.
KELSEY: John would say, "Why would any other country want to make a treaty with us if Kansas could back out at any time?"
JAD: And, like, how do you deal with a question like global warming if everybody is allowed to be left to their own devices, you know?
ROBERT: Well, that's a tough one.
DUNCAN HOLLIS: I mean, the reality is ...
KELSEY: That's Duncan Hollis again.
DUNCAN HOLLIS: ... we live in a globalized world, whether it's, you know, dealing with things like climate change, terrorism, shipwrecks, cybercrime, increasingly these are things we can no longer regulate just within a particular local community or a local society.
JAD: And, like, on some level, if we now find ourselves in this world where, like, I can get on the internet and spend hours and hours playing World of Warcraft with people in Yugoslavia and yet I've never really talked to my neighbor that's just down the street, like, why wouldn't we all have the same laws?
NICK ROSENKRANZ: But, you know, I think the flip side of your question is: fine, the world is very interconnected, but are there still some things that are local? Are there some things left where we could say the federal government doesn't need to be able to reach this?
KELSEY: And more than that, Nick says that having a bunch of different communities that are governed by different rules all under the same nation actually ...
NICK ROSENKRANZ: Has a bunch of benefits: competition, the idea of laboratories of democracy, that the 50 states will all try different things as to regulating guns near schools, as to regulating whatever it is. And maybe some state will hit on something brilliant, and if they do, then it will spread and be replicated. And, you know, that theory has been borne out in a lot of different areas. When the feds decide that they're gonna come up with a one-size-fits-all national solution, that's the end of the experiments.
ROBERT: So by the way, what happened to Carol Anne Bond?
KELSEY: Well, she went to jail.
ROBERT: She's in jail. She's still in jail.
KELSEY: No.
ROBERT: No?
KELSEY: She's out now.
ROBERT: So she's—she could go to court and find out whether this thing was ...?
KELSEY: [laughs] Yeah.
ROBERT: That's cool.
KELSEY: She can show up.
JAD: What about the poisonee? What happened to her?
KELSEY: The poisonee? She changed her name, she moved away. She's unsearchable now.
JAD: Good. Good.
KELSEY: It's for the best.
JAD: I hope she moved to Zimbabwe.
ROBERT: Is she still living with the guy that gave her the baby? Or ...
KELSEY: No. No, no, no. You see, Carol, even though she went to jail for six years, she stayed with her husband.
JAD: [gasps] No way!
ROBERT: Oh, really?
KELSEY: Yeah.
ROBERT: She stayed with the man who had a baby with the other lady?
KELSEY: Yeah, that she tried to poison that lady about? She stayed with that guy.
ROBERT: See, that's the thing: law is interesting, but love? That's complicated. Love is wages and treaties.
KELSEY: [laughs]
JAD: Thank you, Kelsey.
KELSEY: Thank you!
JAD: Kelsey Padgett.
ROBERT: And here's a—one last quick update: since we first aired this story, the Supreme Court had decided the Bond case. It's a little complicated but here's the finding: Carol Ann Bond was not in violation of the Chemical Weapons Implementation Act. The full court, all nine justices agreed on that. But the court did not decide on the central issue: whether or not the federal government was abusing its treaty-making power. That's the basic issue, and we're really at this point no closer to knowing how treaties may or may not be used in the future. If you want to read into this a little bit more, we have a blog post that explains the court's decision in more detail, and you can find it on our website, Radiolab.org. So we will be back. I don't know when, though. Is it a long time? Or ...
JAD: Uh, in a bit.
ROBERT: In a bit.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: Okay. In a bit.
[LISTENER: This is Bonnie calling from Boston, Massachusetts. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. And today?
ROBERT: Jurisdiction.
JAD: Okay, so Robert, here's a question that I've been puzzling over for a long time.
ROBERT: Okay.
JAD: What is the fruitiest fruit that you know?
ROBERT: My fruitiest fruit?
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: Is a plum.
JAD: Well, no. I mean, that's—well, that's yours. I don't want to take that away from you.
ROBERT: No, you shouldn't.
JAD: But when you ask most people that question, they say "apple" or "orange."
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: No. I mean, it's true. Scientists have figured out that when you make a category in your mind, you're not doing it based on, like, a set list of traits, you're like—what you do is you call to mind the prototypical example of that category and then you measure this new thing against it. And for fruits, prototype is the Gala apple if you ask me. The red, shiny, waxy apple.
ROBERT: You say that somebody has decided that an apple is the fruity fruit?
JAD: They've—they've done experiments!
ROBERT: Oh, they've done experiments.
JAD: They've done experiments.
ROBERT: I bet you bananas outpoll apples for consumption.
JAD: Maybe, but that's not what makes a fruitiest fruit a fruity fruit. It's more about, like, how well it represents the category.
ROBERT: Okay.
JAD: That's what it's about.
ROBERT: Why are we talking about this, though?
JAD: Well, because I've been wanting to explore this in story form ...
ROBERT: Forever.
JAD: ... forever.
ROBERT: But you never have a story, so it's like a—you never find a story.
JAD: But I got one now.
ROBERT: You do?
JAD: It's not about fruit, though.
ROBERT: What is it about?
JAD: It's about this.
[hip hop sample]
ROBERT: [laughs] What is it? What are you talking about?
JAD: Let me explain.
JAD: Hey!
ANDREW MARANTZ: Hey.
JAD: So I met this guy, Andrew Marantz.
ANDREW MARANTZ: I work at the New Yorker as an editor, and I write stuff occasionally.
ROBERT: Wandered in here one day by mistake, I think.
JAD: Super interesting guy, great reporter. And he ended up talking with us about this story he was reporting for the New Yorker about hip hop.
ANDREW MARANTZ: There are all kinds of rappers who are trying to sing, or ...
JAD: And how hip hop might be changing. Because as we all know, this was a genre of music that began in a really specific time and place: Bronx, '70s, Black and Latino kids. But it's since expanded so much that these inevitable questions pop up.
ANDREW MARANTZ: You know, to really simplify it, the more white people come to the party, the more you kind of start going okay, at what point is it—it's clearly okay if everyone in the room is Black, and it's okay if everyone in the room is Black except for one guy, but at what point—okay, if it's 50 percent white, if it's 75 percent white, if all the people who own the record labels are white, if a majority of the popular rappers are white. And that's just the racial thing.
JAD: Yeah.
ANDREW MARANTZ: Then there's also sonically the way it sounds, there's the way the production is kind of merged with other forms of music. So then all of sudden you're at a point where you get the sense that there's something being replaced or taken over.
JAD: Mm-hmm.
ANDREW MARANTZ: You start to have this dilemma.
JAD: Which is, you know, who owns the music now?
ANDREW MARANTZ: And the dilemma is obviously heightened by the fact that everyone knew this was coming. Like, there's never been a form of American popular music as far as I know that wasn't invented by Black people and co-opted by white people.
JAD: And Andrew in his piece, and in this story, focuses on a guy who sits right at the heart of that dilemma, one of the most influential DJs in hip hop today.
JAD: Peter Rosenberg is his name?
ANDREW MARANTZ: Yeah, yeah.
JAD: So tell me how you came to him.
ANDREW MARANTZ: I mean, the first thing was ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Hot 97, the most important hip hop radio station in the world.]
ANDREW MARANTZ: ... listening to Hot 97 because I like rap and I want to know what is popular.
JAD: Mm-hmm.
ANDREW MARANTZ: And I was listening and I heard this guy who they kept calling "Rosenberg." And I was like, "Is that Rosenberg, is that like 'Whoopi Goldberg' Rosenberg?" Like, what does that mean?
JAD: Yeah.
ANDREW MARANTZ: And then I looked him up and I was like "No, it's just a guy named Peter Rosenberg."
PETER ROSENBERG: One-two one-two one-two one-two. I mean listen, doing NPR is already pretty soft, you know what I'm saying?
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: He actually works just down the block from us.
JAD: Is this gonna hurt your cred in some way?
PETER ROSENBERG: I know! Possibly.
ANDREW MARANTZ: So he's a guy, born in 1979. He grew up in ...
PETER ROSENBERG: I grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
JAD: Is that 'Chevy' with a CH?
PETER ROSENBERG: Yes, it is.
JAD: And Peter says when he was about nine, his brother ...
PETER ROSENBERG: My brother's name is Nick Rosenberg.
JAD: ... his brother started staying up late and making tapes.
PETER ROSENBERG: DJ Red Alert, Marley Marl. He would start taping those guys on the radio.
JAD: At that point, 1987, '88, here in New York they were the only two people playing hip hop, and it was late at night.
PETER ROSENBERG: And at the time, I didn't consider myself a music person. I was only eight, but I really was like, "Yeah, music's okay but I'm really in—" I was just obsessed with sports. And then at some point, I was like, "Oh, no, no. I love this!"
ANDREW MARANTZ: It was punk, it was rebellious, it was interesting. It was just cool.
PETER ROSENBERG: You know, now to be honest, it's almost clichéd when people say that, like, "Who would ever guess you'd be into hip hop?" I'm like, "I don't know. I would, 'cause I know a million white kids who are into hip hop." At that time though, it was not common. It was very much something that was a badge of honor for both of us that we really, really loved it. And I was extra cool because I was super young. And then at some point, my dad went out. He was coming home from work one day, and he said he stopped at Nobody Beats the Wiz. He asked the guy behind the counter what, like, the good rap albums were. And the kid actually gave him a pretty good recommendation, and he bought me a tape called "Girls I Got 'Em Locked" by Super Lover Cee and Casanova Rud.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: What a father you have!
PETER ROSENBERG: I know! So my knowledge base was always very high very early. I had some friends in elementary school and we would talk about rap a little bit, but quickly I exceeded them. And then I got to high school and I ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Fight the Power" - Public Enemy]
PETER ROSENBERG: ... really took seriously being the rap guy. When I heard the passion in Public Enemy, like, that resonated with me. Like, N.W.A. scared me ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Straight Outta Compton" - N.W.A.]
PETER ROSENBERG: ... but made me interested. I just thought this is—I was like, "Yo, these guys are killing people! Like, this is really happening!"
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: Was it really happening, or were you going to the movies in song form?
PETER ROSENBERG: I was going to the movies, but to me I didn't know the line.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Straight Outta Compton" - N.W.A.]
JAD: Okay, so Peter goes off to college, mid-'90s.
PETER ROSENBERG: Did college radio.
JAD: Hip hop show. And then as he gets out, decides he wants to do this for real.
ANDREW MARANTZ: He secretly, you know, wanted to be a hip hop DJ, but people were not taking him seriously.
JAD: You know, white kid from the suburbs. Didn't compute.
ANDREW MARANTZ: He couldn't get on what was then called "urban radio."
PETER ROSENBERG: So I ended up doing a year on the Howard Stern station.
ANDREW MARANTZ: He was doing, like, talk radio, you know, whatever kind of radio. So he kept calling Hot 97, and the program director then was a white guy from Utah.
PETER ROSENBERG: You know, I gave him my spiel. I was like, "I'm super passionate about hip hop. I don't think there's ever been someone who looks like me and is from my background who has as honest and loud a voice as me. I really think I'll be something different." And he basically said, "I don't doubt you."
ANDREW MARANTZ: "But no. What are you talking about?" I mean, they had token white people on various shows, but it was either you're super white like Lisa G, she was on the morning show for a little while.
JAD: I remember that.
ANDREW MARANTZ: She was super white.
JAD: And that was kind of the joke.
ANDREW MARANTZ: Or you were Bobby Konders, who does the Sunday night reggae show, who you would never know he's white.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bobby Konders]
ANDREW MARANTZ: Because he just talks like he's Jamaican and he only plays Jamaican music, he only hangs out with Jamaican people. So you had to be one of those two things.
JAD: Where you denied your whiteness or you just were like, "I'm gonna ..."
ANDREW MARANTZ: "I'm gonna be the butt of the joke."
PETER ROSENBERG: White bosses have often been like, "You're really talented, but why would our audience relate to you?" Because they assume their audience is so different than them.
JAD: Which might have been true—for a while. And then 2007 ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: Ebro Darden took over.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ebro Darden: Ebro Darden in the building. What's up, man?]
JAD: This is him on air, Ebro.
ANDREW MARANTZ: A half-Black, half-Jewish guy from Oakland. And he got it.
JAD: That hip hop had changed.
ANDREW MARANTZ: It's no longer so small and simple and provincial that we can go on pretending this is only a Black and Latino thing.
JAD: So when Peter came to the station and gave him the pitch ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: "Hey, I'm PMD."
PETER ROSENBERG: Which was my old name back then.
ANDREW MARANTZ: "'Cause I'm P—P for Peter, MD for Maryland. You can call me PMD." And Ebro was like, "No, you're Rosenberg." [laughs]
PETER ROSENBERG: Ebro gave me my parents' name, more or less.
ROBERT: [laughs]
PETER ROSENBERG: The hook is like, "That's your name."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Hot 97, Peter Rosenberg. Summer Jam 2007 ...]
PETER ROSENBERG: There's a video on YouTube of—it's called, I think, "Peter Rosenberg does Summer Jam 2007." And it was my first day on the job.
ANDREW MARANTZ: Summer Jam is the biggest event of the year at Hot 97. It's this big show at Giants Stadium.
JAD: All the top acts.
PETER ROSENBERG: I showed up there, and so my first day was just walking into Giants Stadium, parking my car by myself, getting a backstage pass, and being given a mic flag that says "Hot 97," the place I've always wanted to work, and being told, "Go up to all the famous artists who are here and just get interviews." And if you go back and watch that video and see how much of an ass I make of myself ...
JAD: [laughs]
PETER ROSENBERG: ... I say to T.I., I think I go, "Is this your first Summer Jam?"
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: First, T.I., have you done a Summer Jam before?]
PETER ROSENBERG: And he looks at whoever he's with and they both start laughing.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: I'm asking. Have you done many Summer Jams?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, T.I.: Today is your first day on the job.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: It's my first day on the job!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, T.I.: I can tell!]
PETER ROSENBERG: And I cannot believe in retrospect I survived this day.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio announcer: The Cipha Sounds and Rosenberg Show with K Foxx on Hot 97.]
JAD: Not only survived, he became the host of two shows on Hot 97, a late night underground show and also the big weekday morning show.
ANDREW MARANTZ: And Rosenberg's brand is all about realness.
PETER ROSENBERG: The Realness.
ANDREW MARANTZ: His segment in the morning is called "The Realness." His late night show, Sunday night to Monday morning, is called "Real Late with Peter Rosenberg." It's all real, real, real.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: It's gonna be real.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Is it real?]
ANDREW MARANTZ: Because that's the central question: can I be a real hip hop guy even though I'm Peter Rosenberg from suburban Maryland?
PETER ROSENBERG: Well, I think you're raising an interesting point. Most outsiders rarely become insiders.
JAD: But Peter says the key to understanding him is that he's kind of both. Like, on the one hand, he is this suburban white kid from Maryland—he doesn't pretend to be anything but. But on the other hand ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: I mean, a big part of Rosenberg's job is to go to shows and blogs and get tapes from people and find the new thing. So he has a stable of, like 20 or 30 underground artists who are making tapes and, you know, trying to pass around beats.
JAD: And what's more insider-y than that? Plus ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: He is like a purist.
PETER ROSENBERG: I've always liked—there's a certain pure form of hip hop, and because of that ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: You know, in the kind of rap nerd community, they talk about certain things that are like, lyrics and listening for the metaphors and the intricacies of the music. They talk about boom bap beats.
PETER ROSENBERG: Big sounding, drum-wise.
ANDREW MARANTZ: Boom bap! Like a ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "We Can Get Down" - A Tribe Called Quest]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Return of the Boom Bap" - KRS-One]
ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD: It's just a feeling of sound, of energy.
JAD: This is Ali.
ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD: Ali Shaheed Muhammad. A Tribe Called Quest.
JAD: We called him up because he is the DJ and producer for A Tribe Called Quest. And for Peter, Tribe? They're the prototype.
PETER ROSENBERG: I was obsessed with them.
JAD: They were—they are—like that shiny red apple. They define the category. And in fact ...
PETER ROSENBERG: I guess up until my wedding weekend ...
JAD: ... the best weekend of his life, he says, or I guess now it would be his second best, was when he was ...
PETER ROSENBERG: I was 14.
JAD: And he went to a Tribe show.
PETER ROSENBERG: It was everything I ever dreamed a hip hop concert experience would be.
JAD: This was a weird moment for hip hop, not just for Peter but for hip hop in general. Like, the early '90s, this was a moment when you had stations like Hot 97 converting to all hip hop formats, playing, you know, N.W.A., Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest. Groups, you know, that were suddenly attracting loads of white suburban fans. Yet if you listen to their lyrics ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, A Tribe Called Quest: Listen up, everybody. The bottom line ...]
JAD: ... some of them, at least, they were about stuff those fans could've never experienced.
ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD: Struggle, oppression, lack of opportunities in the ghettos. The fact that you have young Black teenagers who are living in a society where they're told that they will never amount to anything, and that their lives have no value, no worth. That, to me, becomes the angst and the frustration and the rage which is the embodiment of the music.
PETER ROSENBERG: I wanted to be a part of this—of Black culture. Like, I felt—I've always been very interested in loving things that required defense.
JAD: And hip hop is definitely that. From the beginning, it was initially shunned by Black radio because it was thought to be indecent. Then you had the whole Tipper Gore thing.
PETER ROSENBERG: I love things like that. I don't know why. And I think I do always see hip hop in that sort of light—in the way that it needs defense.
ROBERT: But Mr. Rosenberg, defender of hip hop, was about to face an onslaught that he was probably completely unprepared for. And we'll hear that story when we return.
JAD: Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...
ROBERT: Jurisdiction.
JAD: And so the story we're in the middle of right now has to do with a guy named Peter Rosenberg and his attempt to defend hip hop from all the polluting influences that abound. And in a way, the reason we did this story is it really revolves around something that happened in 2012, and we'll just start—we'll pick up the story there.
ANDREW MARANTZ: Can we talk about your fracas with Nicki Minaj?
PETER ROSENBERG: Of course! That's my paragraph two. If, God forbid, I drop dead tomorrow, it's "Peter Rosenberg of Hot 97, blah blah blah." Next paragraph, "In 2012 ..." [laughs].
ANDREW MARANTZ: Nicki Minaj is this rapper from Queens. Hugely talented rapper.
JAD: Oh, wait. She's not the one on American Idol, is she?
ANDREW MARANTZ: Yeah.
JAD: Oh, okay. Now I have a face for the name.
ANDREW MARANTZ: Uh-huh.
JAD: Okay.
ANDREW MARANTZ: And she kind of blew everyone away on this Kanye song called "Monster." You know, she was with all these big rappers—and Jay Z was on the song—and she blew everyone out of the water.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Monster" - Kanye West]
PETER ROSENBERG: I thought she was really good. I thought she was a natural. And beautiful. Like, I thought she was the total package. In fact, the year before it all happened ...
JAD: 2011.
PETER ROSENBERG: ... I pulled her aside at Summer Jam and I said, "Hey, I think you could be the greatest female artist of all time, the greatest female rap artist of all time."
ANDREW MARANTZ: Right.
PETER ROSENBERG: "And I just want you to know that in thinking that, I'm gonna hold you to a high standard. So I probably will say things about you."
ANDREW MARANTZ: You said all of that?
PETER ROSENBERG: Yeah. In a really quick moment too. It was really brief. She probably wouldn't remember it, but it happened.
ANDREW MARANTZ: I would remember that if someone said that.
PETER ROSENBERG: And I said, "I think you could be the greatest."
ANDREW MARANTZ: She had all this underground cred, right? And then how did she spend that cred? Well, she started making poppier and poppier records.
JAD: Culminating in the following song which, if you are me, you've not been able to get out of your head for a week.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Starships" - Nicki Minaj]
ANDREW MARANTZ: She made this song called "Starships."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Starships" - Nicki Minaj]
PETER ROSENBERG: "Starships" was a blatant pop song.
ANDREW MARANTZ: Lowest common denominator.
PETER ROSENBERG: So I didn't—I didn't like the song.
ANDREW MARANTZ: You listen to that song, and you cannot tell that it's not a song by Katy Perry or P!nk or it could be anyone.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Starships" - Nicki Minaj]
ANDREW MARANTZ: So all of a sudden, who is the underground cred cop ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio announcer: The Cipha Sounds and Rosenberg Show with K Foxx.]
ANDREW MARANTZ: ... but Peter Rosenberg?
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Sometimes I gotta keep it real. Can I, though? For a second?]
ANDREW MARANTZ: Several mornings for his segment called "The Realness," he would get on there and play a clip of "Starships."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Check out this "hip hop!"]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Starships" - Nicki Minaj]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: If that's hardcore hip hop, then would this song be considered another hardcore hip hop song?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Dynamite" - Taio Cruz]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Oh, no! No, stop it. That's not fair. That's not fair. Maybe she's just ...]
ANDREW MARANTZ: There is a real question being asked at the center of this, which is: what is this music, where the boundaries are? And also, is this where hip hop is going? Is it just "Let me cash in and just follow the trends of what white music is doing?"
JAD: Would it be too strong to call it, like, you felt betrayed as a—as a music fan?
PETER ROSENBERG: Yeah, it felt like come on! In the moment it felt like you're a hip hop star, why would you—why would you do this? This is a—this is not for us. When core hip hop artists make pop songs it upsets me because it can be a moment that blurs and messes up hip hop.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: To be frank, this song right here, "Starships" is literally one of the most sell-out songs in hip hop history.]
JAD: Just to put that comment in a little tiny bit more context for just a second, now we mentioned of course the history, right? That so many forms of popular music had been invented by Black people, co-opted by white people—jazz, blues, rock, we all know the story. Now according to Frannie Kelley ...
FRANNIE KELLEY: One of the hosts of a podcast called Microphone Check.
JAD: ... which is a hip hop podcast.
FRANNIE KELLEY: From NPR Music.
JAD: According to her ...
FRANNIE KELLEY: 2013 was the first year that no Black artist had a number one song. And ...
JAD: ... since 1958, since they started the Hot 100 charts, this is the first year where no Black artist has made it to number one. Now this may be a blip, may not be, but what's clear is that there is a new force in town, a style of music called EDM.
ANDREW MARANTZ: EDM is—is a meaningless acronym that stands for "Electronic Dance Music." And it's like, you know ...
PETER ROSENBERG: It's more like a "oomph oomph oomph."
ANDREW MARANTZ: ... than a boom bap.
JAD: It's sort of an amalgam of synth-y, dance-y, techno-y, Euro-poppy stuff, and it has taken over.
FRANNIE KELLEY: What happened was EDM was just so glaring and fast, and then to see that sort of start to creep into hip hop was scary for people.
JAD: Because according to Frannie Kelley, what's scary is that EDM is a style of music that's meant to work on any dancefloor with any crowd. So in a way, it's like a music without history—on purpose!
FRANNIE KELLEY: A lot of the criticism of, like, EDM is that it is all about money, it is the corporatization of a genre with a long history. So in some ways I think the root of the protest is: don't sell our stuff to the highest bidder.
JAD: That's a little context. Anyhow, after ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: ... one of the most sellout songs in hip hop history. Listen to it!]
JAD: ... after Peter trash talks Nicki Minaj's "Starships," we arrive at that year's Summer Jam.
PETER ROSENBERG: 2012.
ANDREW MARANTZ: And that year, Nicki Minaj was gonna be one of the big headliners.
JAD: Plan was for her to perform on the main stage inside Giants Stadium.
ANDREW MARANTZ: But outside the stadium in the parking lot ...
JAD: Earlier in the day ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: ... there's the Festival Stage, which is where the underground backpack kids hang out, and that's Rosenberg's zone. So he's introducing the acts on that stage.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Now hold on, before I get to the real hip hop [bleep] of the day, 'cause I see the real hip hop heads sprinkled in here. I see 'em!]
PETER ROSENBERG: I said, in trying to hype up this crowd ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: I know there's some chicks here waiting to sing "Starships" later. I'm not talking to you all right now. [bleep] that bull[bleep]!]
PETER ROSENBERG: ... the crowd kinda goes "Ooh!" And a little—but, like, there's a cheer. Nothing crazy, though. Just a regular cheer. It's not like—I didn't realize a bomb was dropped. I—I forgot that not only was the Festival Stage livestreaming, but it was livestreaming on her website.
ROBERT: [gasps]
ANDREW MARANTZ: And her core fans ...
PETER ROSENBERG: Her Barbz, as they're known ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: ... are 13-year-old girls.
JAD: And when they see Peter say that ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: They go wild. And they go out on the internet and say, "Who is this Rosenberg guy? What is his deal?"
JAD: And he says within minutes ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: It got back to Nicki and her people.
JAD: Before she went on stage?
ANDREW MARANTZ: Before she went on stage.
JAD: Oh, interesting!
ROBERT: Ooh!
ANDREW MARANTZ: So then there's this backstage conversation. Rosenberg basically as soon as he gets offstage, his boss ...
PETER ROSENBERG: My boss comes out, pokes his head around the curtain and goes, "Did you say something about Nicki Minaj?" I was like, "Uh." And I legit didn't remember. I'm like, "Uh, oh yeah, yeah. I did." And he's like, "Yeah, well she just canceled the show. So she's not coming."
JAD: What?
PETER ROSENBERG: And I was like—I was like, "Oh!" And I looked at my phone and I go to Twitter. Sitting on the stage, the crowd's all out there. I'm at Giants Stadium. And I look on Twitter, and I go to Trends, and on the main Trend page it just says, "Peter Rosenberg." And I was like, "Oh, wow! This is nuts!" This is a Sunday afternoon at, like, five o'clock, and I was, like, the third-most trending thing in the world. I was just watching my name get bigger in a moment.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio host: Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio host: One of the big dramas to happen in New York ...]
PETER ROSENBERG: I was reading just my name over and over and over again.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: The dude Rosenberg is the dude from Hot 97.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio host: Peter Rosenberg.]
ANDREW MARANTZ: All these people saying, "I don't know who this guy is, but he's dissing my favorite artist."
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'm just really disappointed, and I don't understand how ...]
PETER ROSENBERG: I was reading, "Who is this guy?"
[ARCHIVE CLIP: What he said that "Starships" song is not hip hop.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio host: Peter Rosenberg.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Man, that's not real hip hop.]
JAD: He must've gotten some serious cred from this.
ANDREW MARANTZ: He—yes. Not only was his name getting out there, but it was getting out there as "I'm the gatekeeper."
JAD: "I'm the defender."
ANDREW MARANTZ: "I'm a defender of the real—the realness."
PETER ROSENBERG: I couldn't appreciate it at first because I didn't know if I was maybe gonna get fired for messing up Summer Jam.
ANDREW MARANTZ: Because Nicki is beefing with the station.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: I wouldn't dare come on your stage or even say something to my fans ...]
ANDREW MARANTZ: She's calling in, you know, mad at the station.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Busta Rhymes: You better apologize to Nicki Minaj.]
ANDREW MARANTZ: Busta Rhymes gets involved. He's trying to broker a deal. Funkmaster Flex gets involved.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Funkmaster Flex: We exchanged some emails.]
ANDREW MARANTZ: They're trying to reach a detente.
JAD: Wow.
ANDREW MARANTZ: It becomes a months-long process.
PETER ROSENBERG: Nuts!
ROBERT: If they say unanimously, "No, you were wrong about that song. This is our song. We include it in our map of what's going on. Stop trying to draw the map." What do you say to that in your—inside of you?
PETER ROSENBERG: I think my gut reaction is: you know nothing, you don't draw the map. You need people like us to draw the map or there's nothing—or what is there? If we don't get to determine certain things, who does? We should leave that to the crazed 13 year olds who may not even like this artist in two years?
FRANNIE KELLEY: As a woman hearing that ...
JAD: This is Frannie Kelley again.
FRANNIE KELLEY: ... this idea that young girls will hear "Starships" and say, "Oh, that's hip hop. That's what I want to hear, so I'm gonna judge everything against" is wildly unfair to the intelligence of young girls.
JAD: Frannie says they can figure out the difference between hip hop and pop. They don't need help.
FRANNIE KELLEY: It's insulting.
JAD: And furthermore ...
FRANNIE KELLEY: When he chose "Starships" to single out, it felt revealing of another layer to this debate that people weren't saying out loud.
JAD: Which is that when people refer to things as quote ...
FRANNIE KELLEY: "Real hip hop."
JAD: ... that's usually code for "aggressive, street, masculine."
FRANNIE KELLEY: "Authentic."
JAD: Whereas when they say "Pop?" That's usually code for ...
FRANNIE KELLEY: "Feminine." Which is a perversion of the music. Period. And so there is this idea that, you know, people make songs for the ladies, which implies that all the rest of them are songs that we can't hear or, God forbid, understand.
JAD: Okay, so all of this was swirling around. Months go by ...
ANDREW MARANTZ: And then ...
JAD: Fast forward ...
PETER ROSENBERG: ... to the week before the next Summer Jam.
ROBERT: This is 2014? 2013, I mean?
ANDREW MARANTZ: 2013, yeah.
JAD: The feud is still going.
PETER ROSENBERG: At this point it's a year later.
JAD: But, according to Andrew, Nicki decides it's time to settle, maybe because she wanted to perform at that year's Summer Jam.
ANDREW MARANTZ: So ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio announcer: Nicki Minaj sits down with radio station Hot 97 to clear the air with DJ Peter Rosenberg.]
ANDREW MARANTZ: ... she comes to the station before Summer Jam to make her peace. And they do this whole interview with Rosenberg and Nicki Minaj. And Ebro, the boss, is moderating.
JAD: Really? On the air?
ANDREW MARANTZ: On the air.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ebro Darden: Rosenberg. So this is on you, sir. Where would you like this interview to go?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: I don't know. I'm excited—I'm excited to see Nicki, because it's very odd to have someone that you don't know very well who's become like such a fixture in your life. Like, I've always wondered—I was always like, "I wonder if Nicki knows that she's come up every day in my life for 350 days?" Like, point that where "Starships" got played at my wedding, and it was like the biggest deal at my wedding was "Starships" playing at my wedding.]
JAD: After some opening remarks, Peter basically apologizes.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: I am sorry that things went as left as they did. I never had ill feelings about you as a human being. Ever.]
JAD: Basically, he says, "I have nothing against you as a person."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Beyond my sort of distaste for that song.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: That's cool. It's water under the bridge.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Do you mean that?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: Yeah.]
JAD: She then goes out of her way to apologize to her fans for skipping out on the gig.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: But ...]
JAD: Then the gloves come off.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: You know what? Like, I get it. Like, that's what you do. I guess to me, I just don't know your resume. You know what I'm saying? So I never found you funny. I never found you entertaining. I never found you smart. I just found you annoying because, you know, I grew up in New York. I've grown up on Hot 97. Like, I know Angie and I know Flex and Mister Cee and all these people. Whether they like me or whether or not we get along, I just know their resume. But like with you, I was just like, "Who are you?"]
ANDREW MARANTZ: "I don't recognize you as an authority on what's authentic."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: To me, you don't have enough of a resume to make those comments.]
ANDREW MARANTZ: "Who are you to tell me what to do?"
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: What people don't understand is that when I came—when I was doing this, I took a lot of [bleep] from people, from men.]
PETER ROSENBERG: She was like, "My whole career, there have just been random men who have, like, been in no position to stop me and tell me why I'm not good enough."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: I just—I just dealt with a lot of stuff from guys.]
PETER ROSENBERG: "And here you are, I don't know you. You're just some random man." And then Ebro jumps in and kind of jokingly trying to lighten the mood goes ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ebro Darden: And you're white!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: I didn't even say that.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ebro Darden: White boy!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: I never—she never implied anything about white. She implied ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ebro Darden: I did.]
PETER ROSENBERG: And then she jumps in and goes, "No, no, no. That too."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: Being white also struck a chord with me if I'm being honest, because I was like, "Yo, he's on a Black station dissing Black people." Like, I don't—I just didn't like the feel of it.]
JAD: And here you get back to that idea, that category idea that, like, when you don't have that, like, set list of criteria to help you figure out who's in and who's out, it's all about a gut feeling. And to Nicki Minaj at that moment, to have a white guy from the suburbs tell her, a Black woman from Queens, that she's not hip hop enough, it just felt wrong. But then Ali Shaheed Muhammad from Tribe Called Quest put it this way: maybe it feels wrong, but maybe this is actually evolution.
ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD: 40 years into it, that's what it's supposed to be. At some point we're all gonna be so far removed from the origin that no one would then qualify, really. But if you're going to be the person to carry the torch I guess, to be the gatekeeper, then at some point what qualifies you? It's your heart, and it's that feeling. You could be Bill Gates' kid and still understand the struggle enough to be like, "Yo, I'm riding with that."
JAD: Yeah.
ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD: "And I want to fight for that."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nicki Minaj: I was like, "Yo, he's on a Black station dissing Black people." Like, I don't—I just didn't like the feel of it.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: Who am I gonna diss if not Black people? I'm on a hip hop station. I have to diss Black people sometimes. If I diss white rappers ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ebro Darden: Absolutely not. You watch your mouth, sir.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: You only want me to go at Mac Miller? I mean, who am I gonna ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ebro Darden: And Macklemore.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: And Macklemore.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ebro Darden: You have plenty of artists now.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Rosenberg: I used to only diss white rappers, but as I've gotten further along I felt I earned the right to diss all things I didn't like.]
ANDREW MARANTZ: Rosenberg to this day takes credit for her saying, "My next project is gonna a—a hardcore hip hop album."
PETER ROSENBERG: When her album's awesome, you will see me take lots of credit for it. Absolutely.
ROBERT: [laughs]
PETER ROSENBERG: She called me the other day, and I was half asleep. And she was like, "Hello? I know you're thinking 'Why is this bitch calling me?'" [laughs]
JAD: [laughs]
PETER ROSENBERG: And I was like, "Not at all. What's going on?" And she wanted to ask me about her new song. And the amazing thing was she wanted to ask me an opinion on something. And it makes me feel ultimately super special.
JAD: So we asked Peter, like, so what does that mean? Like, if you are now a gatekeeper, you white guy from suburban Maryland on a very commercial radio station, what does that mean for hip hop? Does that mean that hip hop has by default been co-opted? Because, like, here you are.
PETER ROSENBERG: I don't know. I mean, I feel like hip hop is in a better place now than before I started doing this. I would break it down on paper and go, "Let me tell you where we were when I started my underground show in 2007. And let me tell you where I think we are in 2014. And let me show you how many of those artists I broke and supported and worked hard with and talked to the label about and pushed, and how many I had an involvement with, I think you'd see a really high percentage."
JAD: So that was part of his answer. We asked Andrew the same question.
ANDREW MARANTZ: It's complicated. I mean, look, I don't think that hip hop is dead. There was some quote, Frank Zappa, I think, said, "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny."
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: [laughs]
ANDREW MARANTZ: Like, I don't think hip hop is ...
ROBERT: That's wonderful!
ANDREW MARANTZ: Yeah.
ROBERT: That should be our title.
JAD: "Hip Hop Isn't Dead, It Just Smells Funny!"
ANDREW MARANTZ: But I do think—I think hip hop isn't dead, it just smells funny.
PETER ROSENBERG: Well, it always smells a little funky.
JAD: Huge thanks to Andrew Marantz and the New Yorker magazine for letting us borrow Andrew for a beat. Definitely check out his story in the New Yorker magazine. It's called "Old School." It's a great story. It goes into way more detail than we could get into here. Also, big thanks to Frannie Kelley and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, who together they cohost the NPR podcast Microphone Check.
JAD: And before we go, just one last thing. So lest you think that, like, hip hop has arrived at this new, like, quote "post-racial" situation, you know, for a second we were like, "Maybe?" We were just thinking out loud with Peter. And he was like ...
PETER ROSENBERG: No way! No. God, if there's one thing I could demand that air during this piece, it would be this statement right here: nothing has driven me more crazy over the course of my time in hip hop than white people who come up to me and go, "You know—" and it used to be really bad when he first came out. "You know, Eminem is just so talented. I don't even listen to hip hop, but Eminem? I mean, now he's good!"
ROBERT: [laughs]
PETER ROSENBERG: Well, if you don't listen to hip hop, why the hell should I care what your thoughts on Eminem are? And how do you know that he's good? No, you know that he's white. You know that he's white. And is Eminem good? Yes, it just so happens that he's as good as you—as you're guessing he is. But that's random. You don't even know that. Eminem could be any—could have been one of the dudes from Milli Vanilli and you would've thought it was great.
ROBERT: [laughs]
PETER ROSENBERG: And that drives me nuts. And so anytime I think about, "Oh, we're post-racial," just look at what Eminem concerts look like and what the sales look like, and you can be instantly reminded that even though Eminem has no experience that average suburban white America could ever identify with—I mean, culturally, the experience he went through is much more common with someone who went with—went through a Black struggle than any sort of regular white suburban life. And this is a guy who came up in a rough situation in a million ways, was the odd man out all the time, never had anything. And then makes it, and all of a sudden, the fact that people are like, "Oh, I so identify with him! What is it? Why do I identify with a guy who's from a trailer park, from a history of drug abuse, who raps about things that I'd be terrified of if a Black man was saying it? But I identify with him so much!"
PETER ROSENBERG: And then Eminem, because he's amazing, raps about this same thing. He does a song called "Dear White America" where he tells them you're an idiot. You let your kids listen to me but you wouldn't let them listen to anyone else just because I'm white? You're an idiot! And they love it.
JAD: [laughs]
PETER ROSENBERG: It's unbelievable!
JAD: Okay, so that is our show for today. You can go to Radiolab.org for all kinds of stuff. Sign up for our newsletter.
ROBERT: Or subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. And while you are there, you should maybe write us a review?
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: As they do over there.
JAD: You know, if inspiration strikes. And you can download our app in the iTunes store and Android store. Just search for "Radiolab."
ROBERT: All one word.
JAD: Yes, sir. I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: Thanks for listening.
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