Home Box Office introduced me to Heather Hunter.



Sassy, sexy and confident, Heather Hunter, the mainstream face of African American pornography for over a decade, first appeared before my puberty-glazed brown eyes sometime in the mid-Nineties, during the affirmative action segment of an early episode of HBO's Real Sex. In bed with Akineyele to film a sex show, in a meeting to write an adults only comic book, and in a studio to promote a radio show, Heather Hunter emerged as a prostitute for all seasons, an idyllic muse for art if Norman Rockwell ever caught jungle fever. Her gaudy sexuality aside, Double H developed into the only African American female performer of recent memory to display the business savvy found in sex starlets such as Jenna Jameson and Danni Ashe. The first and only African American female inductee into the Adult Film Hall of Fame, Heather Hunter enjoyed constant referencing and name-dropping by hip-hop artists throughout her career, including Lil' Kim, LL Cool J, and Snoop Dogg. Given today's pop culture climate, one shouldn't be surprised that, eventually, Heather Hunter would record a hip hop album.

Heather Hunter personifies race and sex oppression's demise through individual agency; this B-list Bronx feminist does not possess Jennifer Lopez's fame or fortune, yet operates similarly on-screen to provide brazen, sleazy sexual arousal to male film viewers willing to pay-per-erection. The point? Whenever men watch Heather Hunter on film, she offers the fantasy of sexual possession; to view Double H ramrodded by Lexington Steele or Sean Michaels or Peter North is to indulge in a taboo phantasmagoria of Black female possession by virile, turgid, unstoppable masculine power, Sally Hemings cowed and timid and spread eagle for the man in her life.

Heather Hunter, a street-level capitalist in every respect, lies sore and sweaty and spent on plasma television screens the world over, drips lewdly from used, raw, reddened orifices slimy with the mother-of-pearl ejaculate her clients' concrete pillars spray without concern. Radio playable Jazze Pha Southern crunk stripper bass pounds incessantly in the background; pussy-popping, booty-shaking, low-budget audio lechery provides the appropriate soundtrack. Without a moment's respite, another arrogant anonymous member invades whatever remains of Heather Hunter's inner sanctum, her God-given temple of life's promise, without remorse or pity or sorrow for the unholy perversion her worn, loose, malleable genitals allow for profit. Meanwhile, many men's furious palms frenzy about tired, sweaty, barely lubricated phalluses, hoping in worried vain for momentary bliss; their warped minds absorb devalued femininity and wanton whorishness as the divine, natural state of all women. The numerous men's glossy fixed stares - green, hazel, blue, brown - drink Heather's defiant submission, relish Hunter's easy physicality. This isn't love, this is ownership. Not sex, control. Without warning, the pitiful anonymous watch Heather Hunter's chiseled brown back arch violently, her immaculate Revlon lashes squeeze with oncoming delight. A grimace. A gasp. A scream. Double H's mascara runs. Panasonics the world over require immediate Windex attention. Big Tigger, longtime host of Black Entertainment Television's Rap City, cuts to commercial.

Heather Hunter is hip hop. I used to lust H.E.R.

Lust, not love. Hip hop's syncopated streetwalker never presents wholesome Americana; Snoop Dogg, darling of Long Beach and Park Avenue, translated the apathetic delinquency of inner-city killers not yet old enough to shave to the mainstream Music Television audience, including one perennially uncool African American thirteen-year-old lover of astronomy, Jeopardy, and ancient Greece. "Gin & Juice" began my lifelong trysts with hip hop; she was already hollow and morose and licentious before she bothered to arouse my pubescent sensibilities. The archetypal video vixen, hip hop transformed a straight-laced, stalwart, Clark Kent squarejaw into a down brother in a reverse Pygmalion straight-to-video featuring Beyonce Knowles and scored by The RZA. Notice the economic genius of hip hop: with cable television, incessant Clear Channel radio airplay and foolishly expensive compact discs, international record conglomerates could produce scientifically quantified urban culture to middle-class and upper middle-class multicultural America for virtually nonexistent startup cost, through the promise of lavish rockstar hedonism to the few poor African American rap musicians who could stir today's colored proletariat masses with rhyming couplets in the revolutionary manner of last generation's Eldridge Cleaver and Fred Hampton and Huey Newton. Incidentally, that was the marketing blueprint for intellectual thug scion Tupac Shakur, and the reason he's still a platinum artist today, years after his death. In reality, hip hop quenches the unceasing demand by mainstream soccer mom, red state, fair and balanced Fox News Channel Americana for easily attainable, personal immersion in underclass chic, drenches the majority in the counterculture cool of the minority. Double H was always a whore, above empathy or affection, beyond good and evil. Absent any paltry moralistic concerns, hip hop fertilizes street creditability with corporate greed to birth global profit, unites the entire industrialized world population with the infectious self-interest of attainable Negro style. Hip hop is prepackaged, shipped, distributed. Hip hop, is Blackness commodified.

Blackness. Not just Black culture, or Black people, but the very indefinable essence of what it means to be Black, from the macro to the micro, for the many and the few, or the one. Hip hop unmasks to reveal commercialized melanin. This natural pigment prophecies danger, allure, exotica, erotic fear and uncivilized fury for all non-Blacks in the American sociopolitical sphere of influence. All humans possess some quantity of melanin, yet those members of the African Diaspora have melanin more abundantly. Americans craft long standing traditional and new age skin color prejudices around melanin content; we shape our conceptions of safety, beauty, intelligence, virility, and power around our proximity to and possession of melanin. The color controls our lives.

Color has certainly laid claim to my brief existence so far. Recent online discussions over the indefensible antics of Jeremy Parker, a.k.a. Tha Pumpsta, led me to a brief inventory of the voluminous attempts non-Blacks make publicly to don neo-blackface, to attempt transracial immersion into African American youth culture and history without absorbing racial stigmatization. It's a basic question: if Blackness can be commodified, who's buying? In my generation, in my opinion, everyone's a broker, and African Americans resemble Ferengi. Case in point: Tony Rome and Maven Strategies. The Washington Post, recently breaking more news on the social and economic ramifications of hip hop than the entrie print runs of The Source and XXL Magazine, informed the public this past Monday of a little known marketing company that pairs materialistic, flossy, gaudy, shiny Jacob-the-Jeweler imprinted, platinum record selling hip hop artists with major corporations to promote corporate products' brand names through the omnipresent advertising Mecca that is hip hop. Think of all the Adidas and Air Force Ones and Hennessy and Courvoisier and Armadale Vodka and Vitamin Water and Phat Farm and DKNY and Sean John and Rocawear people buy thanks to some unwashed rapper's recommendation. The entire mid-Nineties explosion of New York City Big Willie rap, pioneered by the late Notorious B.I.G., morphed our syncopated streetwalker from nihilistic nefariousness to Fifth Avenue formality. One day "Life's a Bitch", the next we're "Poppin' Tags". "Natural Born Killers" now spend the majority of their time "In Da Club". If nothing else, the George W. Bush-style public transformation of Ice Cube from Amerikkka's Most Wanted weapon of mass destruction to family friendly Hollywood action star should legitimize for all critics hip hop's capitalist original sin. Double H 'paid the cost to be the boss', and we all sold our souls.

Today, we are the Devil of our own details. In methods too numerous to mention, hip hop allows the general public to purchase Blackness at their leisure. The problem begins when a fickle, demanding body politic realizes that keyboard-heavy Dr. Dre sonic production can not bestow melanin. The Marshall Mathers LP hammers this truth into all mainstream White Americans: no matter how poor you were growing up, how dysfunctional your parents, how painstakingly you study rap history and narrative flow, how many throwback jerseys and Akademic jeans and Timberland boots you wear, how many 2Pac verses you quote from memory, how often you renew your subscription to Rap Pages, how much street slang you spit, how polished your pimp cup, how crunk you get in the club, or how many Black friends you have, you will never be Black. Never ever. Never ever? Never ever. And, ironically, it's your fault.

Our Founding Fathers forged a social, economic and legal system upon their arrival in North America that depended on extreme racial stratification to preserve the unfree labor early American society required, from their perspective. Anti-miscegenation laws, prohibitions again slave education, the Three-Fifths Compromise - all these early American statutes forged the beginnings of American legal history. And just as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas sparked a social revolution that forever altered American mores on race separation and unequal treatment, early slave codes congealed prevailing ideologies about displaced Africans in America that exist today - including the myth of the randy, hypersexual, muscular, obnoxiously virile African American Supermasculine Menial. Remember this excerpt from last week's Washington Post?

"It's about being nasty, people come to grind on each other," said Bianca Casady, 23. "It's like friends being sexual with each other." Casady was raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., but quickly notes her worldliness by listing the cities where she has lived along the trail to Brooklyn. A regular Kill Whitie partygoer, she tried the conventional (that is, non-hipster) hip-hop clubs but found the men "really hardcore." In this vastly whiter scene, Casady said that "it's a safe environment to be freaky."

Safe environment? What, are the brothers at most NYC hip hop clubs so hard-up for shaven hipster White girl booty that they skee-skee-skeet on the girls as soon as "Get Low" comes on? No. White America creates and maintains racial stereotypes about African Americans, then blames Black people for their fears, and justifies the rape of Black creative expression with those same self-serving ideologies of hate. This is why hip hop, try as it might, can never be a perfect melanin conduit for wealthy non-Blacks: Whiteness gets in the way. Whiteness impedes transracialization, as it bestows upon the few and the proud and the mainstream anonymous apolitical success expectations, better known as white privilege. Mind you, that's not very much. White privilege does not provide happiness or wealth or safety; white privilege can not create strong bones or healthy teeth. White privilege won't stop dangers foreign or domestic, can't stop disasters natural or terrorist. However, whiteness bestows individuality, to a degree impossible for persons of color in identity politic America. Whiteness grants closer proximity to mainstream beauty than Halle Berry or Jennifer Lopez or Lucy Liu will ever know. Whiteness confers true innocence until proven guilty. Plus, Whiteness appropriates every non-White creative force or cultural innovation like cold, vampire Borg clamoring for new technology. Resistance is futile; any exultation by an American White people to 'kill the Whiteness inside" is not shouted in good faith.

People always need more. It's not enough to get one's freak on to old-school Miami bass, some people need an all-White environment in order to feel 'safe'. It's not enough that suburban Whites encompass the majority of domestic hip hop album sales(roughly seventy percent, by some estimates), Music Television and nationwide concert promoters didn't really feel comfortable with hip hop until the entire Black rapper community supported the great White hope, Eminem. It's not enough that a non-Black hip hop fan can enjoy and produce any element of hip hop he wishes without any Black influences whatsoever, some non-Blacks wish to assert original ownership over the spoken word and graffiti hip hop periphery. Blame the information age. In a world where most teenagers have no problems with government-sponsored propaganda masquerading as impartial, objective news coverage, and where young people have never heard the original songs Kanye West and Jessica Simpson sample and remake with impunity, American youth's pop culture short-term memory erases more than it retains. Who needs Africa Bambaataa or Public Enemy in present-day hip hop? Unless they've done a collaboration with 50 Cent, they're no longer relevant.

So where does that leave Double H? Her concrete jungle's shades of grey digitized into cacophonous white noise, but her pixelated pussy now accepts Visa donations via Pay-Pal. Hip hop is modern Blackness' ghost in the machine. Morally primitive yet infinitely adaptable, Double H is the indispensable American cultural economic force, and tenders neo-Blackness to any member of the global village without concern for physical, racial, or cultural location. Hip hop proves that the old notions of Blackness and Whiteness, once rigid and static, now acquiesce to electronic fluidity and wireless instantaneous communication. What is race against a broadband connection? Remember, today's technologically advanced age promises innovation in practically every facet of daily living, from communication to national defense, from medicine to personal entertainment. We sell blue diamond pills for erectile dysfunction, perform delicate heart surgery on newborn infants, repair high-powered telescopes in outer space and contact relatives separated by vast distances with push-button sequences. Live in a G-8 nation today, and chances are, your possibilities for personal advancement through mechanical ease are endless. Imagination, infinite human wonder, remains the only real obstacle to human creation, and imagination's intangible. Everyone's technoorganic.

Therefore, a reasonable, and profitable invention would be technology that could imbue an individual with all the cultural markers, personal savoir-faire, interpersonal empathy, and pop culture cool of the most trendy, strong, hypersexual Will Smith Black man, regardless of the biochemical shell he was both with. Think of a barcode Hitch ghetto pass that never changed physical outward appearance or epidermal eumelanin polymer concentration (to preserve original privilege), yet allowed total line-item freedom to appropriate any culture imaginable, including African American youth culture, without any interpersonal side-effects around any group of people. I'd call it the Melanin Machine. Sure, it seems like science fiction, but consider the possibilities, outside of international espionage. Impervious transracial camouflage not even Rev. Jesse Jackson could detect would be the Da Vinci Code of current mainstream transracial appropriation; every person who sees a little bit of themselves in know-nothing hip hop fans like Tha Pumpsta would pay everything they could to buy and maintain such technology. Think of it: the utter and complete devolution of race and sex and class to technological innovation, Double H orgasmic. Be forewarned: you've just glimpsed the future of hip hop.


Update: Dan Charnas, reporter, screenwriter, and record producer, penned a introspective post entitled The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, that offers a reasoned glimpse into the motivations of some White Americans who indulge the inexplicable urge to appropriate distinct minority cultural traits like hip hop. Mind you: I disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed here, but I respect not only Charnas' candor and eloquence, but more importantly his authentic handling of a touchy subject for many White people - the personal motivations of cultural appropriation. But we can expect no less - this is the man who executive produced the most lyrically complex rap album ever made, Chino XL's masterpiece Here to Save You All.