Cover Story: Hip-hop goes glucose

Throw your hands in the air, and wave ‘em like you just don’t care. And if you likes amino acids and high fructose corn syrup, everybody let me hear you say, “Yeah!”

In 2003, hip-hop energy drinks were off the chain, mang! To think, it wasn’t long ago that energy drinks were strictly for rollerbladers and cokeheads. But this year, edgy “rap music” personalities like Nelly took energy drinks to the mean streets of the ghetto.

Nothing says hip-hop like a crippling, lock-jawed sugar high, and Nelly’s controversial Pimp Juice energy drink kept it street all year long. Plus, it has the word “pimp” in its name, so it’s automatically dope — like turntables and street basketball games and other hard-knock urban stuff you might see in a Toyota Prius commercial.

Pimp Juice is great and all, but some of you older heads might prefer a more refined, mature hip-hop energy drink, which is why rapper Ice-T launched his own Liquid Ice brand earlier this year. Liquid Ice comes in two remarkable flavors: Electric Blue and Frosted Chrome. And if two gay robot butlers from a post-apocalyptic future were serving you these drinks, they might very well go by those same names.

Speaking of the apocalypse, Russell Simmons also took a shot at the hip-hop energy drink market this past year. Simmons’ new urban-oriented beverage is called Defcon 3. You might remember DEFCON as the Cold War rating system that indicated our proximity to nuclear winter and the wholesale destruction of mankind. Kind of like hip-hop energy drinks.

So, to summarize: The coolest thing about hip-hop energy drinks is that they are the worst idea anyone has ever had — ever.

And yet they are a deliciously sublime symbol of the bizarre, vaudevillian mutations of hip-hop celebrity in the year 2003. Remember the Ja Rule/50 Cent “peace talks” earlier this year, mediated by Louis Farrakhan? Or P. Diddy’s marathon run “for the children” that conveniently landed him a feature-length promotional puff piece on MTV? Like energy drinks, these hip-hop pseudo-events had a lot to do with image and commerce, and very little to do with music or creativity. The once-subversive entrepreneurial spirit of hip-hop has devolved into stale, familiar exercises in self-aggrandizement and specious hucksterism.