Many of the most successful producers and musicians of today give name-drop credit to mentors for having remarkably significant impacts of their lives. This is especially true in hip-hop, from Dr. Dre and Eminem to Birdman and Lil Wayne to Smokepurpp and Lil Pump, but these kind of relationships have been around for centuries. Why do they work? And why the prominence in hip hop culture?
Before we begin, let's take a moment to imagine what the Harry Potter films could have been like if Dumbledore had been played by Dr. Dre. Are you imagining it? I am, and it's pretty awesome. It also would have conveniently solved the minor continuity issue regarding the death of Richard Harris, who played Dumbledore in the first two films before the role was passed down to Irish-born actor Michael Gambon. Harry Potter himself would, of course, be Eminem, and I can't help but wonder who Voldemort would be.
Okay, now that we've got that out of our system, let's get to the topic at hand. Mentors, like the alter egos we discussed last week, are prevalent in American literature and music culture, and are especially common in hip-hop. But first, what is a mentor? And where did the concept originate?
TV Tropes defines the mentor in a story as
“A more experienced advisor or confidante to a young, inexperienced character, particularly to a hero. Even though this character is better skilled, faster and more experienced than The Protagonist, they aren't the hero or main protagonist, either because they are not The Chosen One, because they have already grown too old for the task or have their own job to do.
Their role is to introduce a new skill or sharpen the current skills of the protagonist, often hoping to pass the torch because they know their career is coming to an end. This character may die, so that the protagonist can learn to stand on their own two feet.”
Back in Ancient Greece, we find the origin of the actual concept of mentoring, at least officially. When Odysseus began his journey, he left his son in the care of a companion named Mentor. It was their relationship that came to define mentoring as a process where an older person counsels a younger person.
Since then, the concept of mentors and what forms they take has gone in a number of directions, both in literature and in real-life application of these principles.
Life Coach Mike Burks breaks down the use of modern mentors into three categories:
The Direct Mentor, which is someone in front of you to show you how they did it.
The Indirect Mentor, which includes books, movies, audio, and other media consumed by the individual with the intent of inspiring oneself and seeking guidance from the art form.
The third category is simply labeled Everything, which Burks argues is applicable only to people who can find focus on positivity and find motivation in just about anything.
While mentors in literature are clearly most often Direct Mentors, and this is the category most appropriate for a classic narrative, Burk's diversification within the concept of mentoring is more relevant in terms of applicability to modern real-life scenarios. We have mentoring programs, sure, and many people have direct mentors in their life, but we most definitely find inspiration from other sources as well. For example, I listen to the Freakonomics Radio podcast often, and though this is partially for entertainment value, it's also because I'm always learning something, and I feel as though I'm being mentored by the knowledge and principles presented to me. Under Burks' description, this works, and counts as a form of legitimate mentoring, as does the collective hour I've probably spent listening to Better by Lil Yachty for inspiration so far.
Artists, or rather their discographies and personas, often DO have a narrative though. So, at least when it comes to what an artist would choose to emphasize on and give credit to, it makes sense that they would look at their career thus far and recognize a what Burks describes as a Direct Mentor, because it's the form most common among characters in literature.
Furthermore, the American music scene is often portrayed as an exclusive club, and as much as decentralized platforms across the Internet have done to disrupt this, this is still the accepted mindset among the titans of each popular genre, and starving artists across the country and around the world dream still of being discovered by an elite.
On top of that, a significant ideology in the American hip-hop scene is a lack of trust for one's peers, one's romantic partners, and at times even one's own family. Hip-hop culture places so much value on loyalty that trust can't logically be given to everyone without refuting that value. So, gaining someone's trust in hip-hop is significant, and once a relationship between two artists is formed, ideally they'll help each other out to the best of their ability. When this kind of relationship begins to bloom, and one artist is significantly more skilled or has a notably higher number of advantages than the other, a mentorship may begin. This is especially true if the disadvantaged artist has high levels of potential or if the proposed mentor sees some traits of his own in the emerging musician.
So, we see how these mentorship relationships blossom in hip-hop, and in the American music industry at large. We also see why acknowledgement of Direct Mentors among artists is more commonplace than in perhaps the life of the average modern American, who seeks Indirect Mentorship in various forms of entertainment, study, and activity.
Hollywood economics and cultural anthropology aside, why hip-hop?
As Matthew Linder puts it in his Music Matters article for Patheos,
"Reading the biographies of many of hip-hop artists unfolds a common theme, fatherlessness. Growing up in the Marcy Houses project, Jay-Z was raised by his mother because his father abandoned him at age eleven. Lil’ Wayne’s father left his mother when he was two years old…Eminem’s father left him at eighteen months old and no relationship exists between the two. Kayne West was raised in a single mother household after his father divorced his mother when he was three years old."
Having no father to look to for guidance, it's not difficult to understand why these artists would gravitate toward relationships with mentors, many of whom would become father figures for the emcees.Birdman, Lil Wayne's mentor, gained custody of Wayne during his teenage years. They would go on to work together for fifteen years, and in 2006 released a collaborative LP titled Like Father, Like Son. According to the online entertainment news outlet HipHopDX,
"Birdman has been credited with giving Dwayne Carter a future from the cutthroat New Orleans streets, as Wayne brought Cash Money into the ’00s, as its biggest star after B.G., Juvenile, Mannie Fresh and a host of other acts left the label on bad terms. The business acumen of Cash Money has carried into Wayne’s Young Money empire, delivering Drake and Nicki Minaj as two of Rap’s biggest stars in the last two years."
Although not every mentor relationship in hip-hop is as father-son oriented as that of Wayne and Birdman, there is definitely an underlying theme among these kinds of duos, including that of Dr. Dre and Eminem. On a handful of tracks throughout Em's discography, in which he dons his Slim Shady alter-ego, Dre is presented as the voice of reason, trying to calm Slim down and keep him from saying things he doesn't mean that might jeopardize his reputation or his record sales.
Tupac received mentorship from Digital Underground early on in his career, while Suge Knight would go on to become his father figure later on in life. Jay-Z's relationship with his mentor, Jaz O, would eventually crumble when Jaz declined a contract to Roc-A-Fella records, though Jay still often takes the time to acknowledge Jaz's role in his career and in his life. Though little is known about the details of Lil Pump's background still, Smokepurpp discovered him at age 13, and has since said Pump was "smoking like a grown-ass man," and that they hit it off from there.
These mentors are so important, and so prominent, because they're able to offer something to these emerging artists that their biological fathers never could, or never bothered to.
Many of the artists I've mentioned thus far have spit bar-after-bar venting frustration with their upbringings and with their biological dads. Some examples are Eminem's Cleaning Out My Closet, in which Em compares his father's ethics to his own.
“My f****** father must have had his panties up in a bunch
Cause he split, I wonder if he even kissed me goodbye
No I don’t on second thought I just f****** wished he would die
I look at Hailie, and I couldn’t picture leaving her side
Even if I hated Kim, I grit my teeth and I’d try
To make it work with her at least for Hailie’s sake”
Jay-Z, in Where Have You Been explodes in anger at the promises his father once made to him.
"wanted to drink Miller nips
and smoke Newports just like you
but you left me, now I’m goin to court just like you
I would say ‘my daddy loves me and he’ll never go away’
bull, do you even remember December’s my birthday?…
F you! Very much you showed me the worst kind of pain
But I’m stronger and trust me I will never hurt again
Will never ask Mommy why Daddy don’t love me
‘Why is we poor? Why is life so ugly?
Mommy, why is your eyes puffy?”
The aforementioned Matther Linder from Patheos uses lyrics like these to explain certain aspects of hip-hops popularity, claiming
“Hip hop’s exploration of fatherlessness is one of the multi-faceted reasons why an urban, primarily African-American art form was embraced by suburbanite white kids. According to Harvard magazine, “Now 57 percent of women with high-school degrees or less education are unmarried when they bear their first child.” Ultimately and sadly, without the covenantal bonds of marriage ma ny of these children will not know their fathers. Additionally, the overall divorce rate is hovering around 30% with African-American women exceeding that national average by 20%. Whites and African-Americans then can both easily identify their struggle in hip hop music, since it communicates the anguish, resentment and grief of life without a father.”
Regardless of how you feel about the opinions he expresses here, the statistics were accurate at the time of his article's publishing, January 2013.
In 2017, however, numbers like these still ring in our ears. According to the most recent U.S. Census, only 45% of African-American households have a married couple, while Hispanic households tout a healthy 70% and White families maintain a boastful 80%. African-Americans are less likely to marry than other ethnic groups in America, more likely to separate and divorce.
This is incredibly concerning, but these statistics help explain the prominence of fatherlessness as a theme in hip-hop. Hip-hop is still a predominantly African-American art form, and these are significant problems in a number of African-American communities.
But why is this problem so huge? What effect does fatherlessness have on a child, emotionally and psychologically?
M Farouk Radwan, MSc, in an article titled Psychology of Fatherless Children, delves into the psychological problems that may arise from growing up fatherless. The major complications he touches on are insecurity, a potential lack of life skills, the inability to comply with laws or authorities, and a sense of inferiority.
Sean Grover L.C.S.W, in his 2016 article for Psychology Today, he attempts to debunk myths surrounding fatherless children, such as a proposed increased likelihood to suffer delinquent tendencies, the development of anger issues or depression, and the idea that fatherless men don't know how to be good fathers themselves, by arguing (with validity, in my opinion) that there are many other factors at play, including socioeconomic status and the stability of the mother of the child.
It's a fairly universally accepted opinion that children benefit most from having two parents, and that young boys raised with a father figure, on average, grow up to be different people than those who had none, for better or worse. It's certainly easier for the parent(s) in question as well.
Given the fact that many hip-hop artists who developed meaningful relationships with their mentors also lacked a father figure growing up, and taking into account the socioeconomic status these artists were often born into, we can conclude with confidence that there is a connection here, and that meaningful mentors can easily become father figures to these kinds of artists. That is why they're so prominent in hip-hop, a genre ripe with similar scenarios of broken homes and absent fathers.
Note that we've yet to mention a single woman in hip-hop so far, and try not to punch me in the face if this bothers you. Indeed, the problem of fatherlessness is not limited to the male gender. Nicki Minaj's father was so abusive that her mother moved Nicki and her siblings to New York from Trinidad when Nicki was just five years old. Ke$ha, meanwhile, has never met her father, who left her mother before she was born.
In Western culture, the primary focus when dealing with fatherlessness is on young boys, because father-son relationships are usually defined differently than father-daughter ones, but children of both genders are bound to suffer significantly from such an impactful family issue, perhaps in a strikingly similar fashion.
Despite this reality, the attention given to female mentorship in hip-hop is miniscule compared to that of male artists. When mentorship among women in hip-hop is discussed, it seems to take an entirely different form, and the idea of legendary mentor/mentee duos is pretty much unheard of, despite the gender-transcendent theme of fatherlessness that plagues the hip-hop world.
In the book Mentoring Demystified, published by the Mentoring Works Website, contemporary mentoring is broken down into nine categories, described as such:
Informal – conversations that happen by chance or by arrangement
Formal – relationships in a structured program
Peer mentoring – two colleagues mentor each other
Reverse-mentoring – executives mentored by non-executives
Cascading mentoring – each level of an organization mentor those below
Group mentoring – one mentor meets with several mentorees
Mentoring round-tables – peers interact in a group mentoring conversation
Mentoring circles – facilitated group, each person mentors one person and is mentored by another
Mastermind mentoring and business coaching- experts coach a novices
While the relationship between emerging male hip-hop artists and their mentors is often described and presented as standard Informal, Formal, or, most often, Mastermind Mentoring, mentoring amongst women of hip-hop more often fits into the Peer Mentoring, Mentoring Round-Tables, and Mentoring Circles, in which no one person's success is attributed to another, and no one gets to become legendary in the way Dr. Dre has.
To a degree, this could be seen as a good thing; this sense of unity and equality among women of hip-hop. The problem is, this is the only place we really see this collective, unifying attitude of positivity amongst women in hip-hop. I attribute this not to the fault of artists themselves, but to the way they are represented by their labels and by the media. While most male elites of hip-hop are seen in a light of brotherhood and torch-passing, the focus for women is instead on violent competition, leaving women of hip-hop with the feverish mentality that there can only be one queen of the genre at a time.
How did it get this way? How do we move forward?