Imaga via Caroline Rubinstein-Willis / Office of the New York Mayor
Nitish Pahwa knows that you’re talkin’ spicy hella easy but still hide behind the computer.
Last month, on an episode of their It Is What It Is podcast, Cam’ron revealed to his co-host Mase that he’d recently turned down the key to the city in light of the numerous federal charges that New York City Mayor Eric Adams is dealing with. “Last month, they called me to see if I wanted the key to the city. I said, ‘I don’t want to be involved with nothin’,” Killa Cam laughed. “I don’t want nothin’ to do with the keys to the city and the n***as giving ’em out, the n***as who previously had ’em.” That latter shot was, of course, directed at former key-recipient Diddy.
The one thing that everyone in the country knows about Eric Adams is that his administration is disintegrating faster than an antihistamine. But not long ago it would’ve been unusual for a rapper as prominent as Cam’ron to spurn the mayor so publicly. It was only in May when Adams had appeared on Drink Champs with N.O.R.E., DJ EFN, and guest co-host Mysonne, kicking off the interview by proclaiming that “people say” he’s the “hip-hop mayor.”
“We need to really connect where I am and the role that cats like you played,” Adams began. “I am the most important mayor on the globe and so you guys should be celebrating. All of this leadership you see right now, it’s what you guys made.” Not even five minutes into the video, the camera zoomed in on Adams, and you could hear the hosts clapping off screen.
This was far more typical of the treatment Adams tended to receive from rap elders before the feds came swarming. But even then, it should have seemed odd that any rappers would admire him. The Drink Champs segment was recorded about two-and-a-half years into Mayor Adams’ term as NYC mayor, and at that point, he was disliked by the overwhelming majority of the city. A running list of what he was best known for:
Consistently running interference for his former employer, the New York Police Department, by allowing the fuzz to harass more New Yorkers, evade any form of accountability, and get paid overtime for twiddling their thumbs on the subway;
Slashing funding for schools, libraries, parks, shelters, and mental health services while directing more money to the cops, naturally;
Exaggerating the crime statistics in post-COVID New York City, then walking some of that back when he realized he was overdoing it and scaring the hoes/tourists;
Calling for social media companies to remove drill music videos from their platforms and tacitly approving the NYPD’s removal of at least three drill artists from the 2022 Rolling Loud lineup;
Getting heckled at a bunch of his public events, because, you know, no one likes him.
Is that really the leadership the N.O.R.E., Mysonne, and their peers in the industry made, a defining legacy of their music? Is this the same tradition of rappers who constantly told the police to get bent, asked that their cities build more schools instead of prisons, and railed against the Tipper Gores of the world for censoring their music?
Not that the Drink Champs were alone in their adulation. Ja Rule and Bobby Shmurda attended Adams’ election victory party. He stopped by a French Montana album release. He hosted several events to celebrate hip-hop’s 50th birthday, and was showered with praise by the likes of DJ Kool Herc, KRS-One (who performed a live pro-Adams freestyle) and Ice-T—you know, the “Cop Killer” rapper. In fact, Ice-T, who lives in L.A., once honored Hizzoner in 2023 with a ceremonial designation as “the hip-hop mayor.” The most absurd scene occurred after that very coronation, when Adams declared: “I am mayor of this New York City because I’m the hip-hop mayor. There’s never been a hip-hop mayor before. I am the hip-hop mayor. Thank you hip-hop.” Cue the opening scratches to “Fight the Power.”
In the most narrow, superficial sense, one could admire a New York politician who so openly embraces the art form, hangs out with so many of its legends, and gets the entire city to celebrate this world-changing musical genre. Theoretically, he’s consecrating its cultural impact, and not demonizing its history. And he can certainly make a claim for having been around the scene for a while, considering an old headshot from his transit-police days just so happens to appear in the video for “Juicy.” “Not Beame, not Koch, not Bloomberg, not Giuliani, not de Blasio. There’s only one hip-hop Mayor, Eric Adams,” he’s said on NY1. (Man, give some respect to Abe Beame’s pen.)
By those standards, I mean, sure. Ed Koch was the villain in Style Wars. Countless rappers loathed Rudy Giuliani long before the rest of the country realized what a demagogue he was. Michael Bloomberg loved stop-and-frisk (as does Adams, but anyway). Bill de Blasio was perhaps the least deserving of that stray—at least, again, in superficial terms—considering that he designated 1520 Sedgwick Ave. as “Hip Hop Boulevard,” got to rock Slick Rick’s chain, and presided over the groundbreaking of the Bronx’s hip-hop museum. But if de Blasio had his heart in the right place, he remained, as ever, a tall white dweeb who put on the most swagless press conferences of all time. It’s the lowest standard Adams holds himself to there, and by god he meets it. (Also to his credit, he probably left out David Dinkins from that list after remembering how Phife Dawg once gave NYC’s first Black mayor that famous shoutout.)
But again, this is the most surface-level, generous excuse one could make for Adams. The fact remains that, while he celebrates the genre whose development he could witness firsthand as a lifelong New Yorker, he is doing to the vibrant Brooklyn drill genre what hip-hop’s detractors have done to the music throughout its reign: single it out as a uniquely malevolent force, while insisting that they’re not just playing into the moral panics of yesteryear.
Having been introduced to the genre by his own failed rapper and drill enthusiast of a son, Adams thinks he has the authority to offer sweeping moral judgment.
“When you looked at the music of the early rappers, what you saw was that they were rapping about the realities of their lives. What you’re seeing here, which is extremely dangerous in some of the drill music, you are now calling out others to retaliate,” he told New York magazine in 2022. “Black music has always come under scrutiny—I don’t care if it was jazz, gospel, the blues. And then during the mid-’80s, early ’90s, hip-hop artists, they had the hip-hop police.” But then? “This is something totally different.”
As such, he desired to ban drill music from social media platforms by comparing the genre to … Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 insurrection.
Let’s get this argument straight: Rebellious Black music has always been targeted by the powers that be, but it’s actually different this time, and he’s not replicating that cycle? is he implying that drill rappers don’t actually talk about the realities of their lives? And old-school rappers never themselves engaged in beefs that, occasionally and notoriously, ended fatally?
Adams has also become the first sitting mayor in the city’s history to ever be indicted. Accordingly, it’s worth reflecting on how a former cop brought his law-and-order worldview to bear on a city that has long suffered at the hands of the NYPD. But unlike his predecessors who were criticizing for over-policing, Adams somehow gets celebrated by many of the city’s rappers for it. The mere act of signposting is a powerful one, and Adams recognizes that. But hip-hop was always about what was going on under the surface – what the public wasn’t being told about the public housing projects and parks where the DJs set it off.
There was always something potent and resonant to hip-hop as anti-establishment force, something that today’s Brooklyn drill kids understand too well. Allowing this type of huckster and opportunist to proclaim himself the “hip-hop mayor” reveals exactly how the genre continues to be easily exploited by those who realize that just a mere cursory nod to the genre’s impact can get them instant props.
Of course, it’s truly great that hip-hop has been honored in the place of its birth. The history deserves to be enshrined and memorialized properly for future generations. But Eric Adams plays right into the generational conflicts and stereotypes that lead older rap veterans to condescend to the younger creatives. He fosters a city system that only increases the rates of disparate police brutality, incarceration, and racial profiling that so many of the very rappers he stands with now raged against. He guts the very public services that would actually benefit the communities the rappers came from.
Adams disparages the current generation of rappers in the same way that the rappers that he now celebrates were dismissed in their time. But in his eyes, he wouldn’t be a hip-hop mayor if he actually learned anything from the music he claims to love. Just staging some press conferences and repeating platitudes into a mic will suffice – even as the feds come knocking at his door at 6 in the morning.
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