Now I'm not saying: "My taste is above what is offered in hip-hop now. The classics will do."
What I'm saying is that Hip-hop has drastically changed from its raw state that it's extremely hard to listen to all the tried-true-topics used in all the "radio-friendly" tracks. Commercialized and commodified, Hip-Hop has been formulated and repackaged. The raw and real qualities once present on the stage with the likes of Rakim, De La Soul, Warren G have given way to the 'bling' and glitz of Yin Yang Twins, Lil' Jon, etc. A type of music once accessible to the people it served and represented for has been acquired by big business.
What really pisses me off is that the typified hip-hop listener is now being sold out to record companies, and unfortunately most listeners are too unaware of their status as commodities to fully comprehend that the shit they are eagerly gobbling up is simply "off the hook" because its been effectively marketed to them. MTV and 'The Source' have told them so and they listen without question.
It is turning the listeners into mere consumers, rather than participants. Escalades and platinum dental fixtures? No problem!
Far from what it was in its early days – a voice of the streets, a newly found urban consciousness – hip-hop has gone from telling tales of having too little money to giving us first hand cautionary accounts of having too much.
What started it?
What disturbs me most is this continous yet stagnant hole of hip-hop. NWA's Straight-Outta-Compton was a brilliant album of pure street lyrics. Nowadays, Hip-hop has turned from a social voice to a senseless and incoherent garbage obsessed with violence, money and misogyny, which is now used as an excuse for "a medium of expression". NWA's originality in gangsta rap took the record companies by suprise. How? When MC Hammer traded his parachute jeans for army fits, that's when we knew. Now some of these newly established big boys of Hip-Hop has the ability to produce so much more yet it falls short almost everytime. This music still has the potential to get some heads thinking without forfeiting its ability to move some asses. Forget about the iced out wrists and chains. Forget about pushing a Lex and moving kilos.
Claiming to listen to hip-hop and listing Keak Da Sneak and Bow Wow as your favorites is like claiming to collect fine art and buying a knock-off. It might look real, but the real heads will look at it with disgust and embarrassment.
What happened to artists such as Public Enemy and KRS-One speaking through their music to convey the sense of urgency faced by inner-city minorities? Why has Q-Tip stopped discussing the classic examples of date rape in return for discourse on vivrant things? Damn, whatever happened to the supa emcees? Has the Native Tongue become a dead language?
It seems that all anybody is concerned with these days is album sales and money. Granted, hip-hop artists must make a living off of their music, but at what cost to their status as an artist?
Why has hip-hop fallen from such glorious and potentially enlightening foundations? There are too many reasons to list. For one, hip-hop has proven itself a self destructive medium. What other musical genre can you name that has had a number of its leading characters fall to gunshots in the past few years alone? Tupac, Biggie, Big L, etc. The list goes on and on.
There is no denying that it’s kinda dangerous to be an emcee. What other musical genre can you name that has sparked a feud between the coasts of an entire nation? There was never any great rift between the East Side and West Side of Middle America when Garth Brooks rocked the mic.
No other music has been so readily embraced by such a variety of people, from manicured lawns to project bricks, from the Gs of South Central LA to the Suburbs of Long Island, to the hoobangers of Little Rock. Perhaps it is this acceptance by so many, this need by all who grab hold of it to personalize it and reform it to fit their own needs, that has lead to its impending destruction.
As The Roots argue in the liner notes of Things Fall Apart, it has been an American tradition over the past century for musical styles that are generally considered to be of African American origin to be gradually accepted by the white population. Whether it be jazz, rock and roll or now hip-hop, as whites adopt the music more and more it becomes watered down and more palatable, but lacks many of its original qualities. Can Eminem be considered the new Dave Brubek, an artist competent in every way but devoid of soul? And if this is the case, where is my place in hip-hop as an upper middle class, well-educated, white male? Am I a part of its destruction?
I can’t place my finger on the exact moment when it began, but hip-hop has continually disappointed me for some time now. Maybe it was when Biggie was murdered. Maybe it was when Puffy hit the scene. Maybe it was when A Tribe Called Quest officially called it quits or perhaps when I saw that Q-Tip collaborated with Korn on his new album. Quite possibly it was when I heard that Mos Def, the man I thought was sent to keep hip-hop alive and well, was on "The Lyricists Lounge" hip-hop sketch comedy show on MTV the other night. I don’t know.
I still have some hope left and it goes by the names of Kanye West, Common, Punch and Words, J-Live and Talib Kweli, just to name a few. These are some of the smartest and most talented emcees in the games today and all have managed to balance integrity and success. Maybe the entire hip-hop community needs to listen to Kweli’s "Manifesto," in which he plots a 10-Point Program to save hip-hop from its fate. Until then, I used to love h.e.r.