We recently linked to an essay claiming hip-hop dead as an art form - writer Pierre Bennu didn't mince any words:
- I know you've been thinking it. And if you haven't, you probably haven't been paying attention. The art we once called hip hop has been dead for some time now. But because its rotting carcass has been draped in platinum and propped against a Gucci print car, many of us have missed its demise.
I think the time has come to bid a farewell to the last black arts movement. It's had a good run but it no longer serves the community that spawned it. Innovation has been replaced with mediocrity and originality replaced with recycled nostalgia for the ghost of hip hop past, leaving nothing to look forward to. Honestly when was the last time you heard something (mainstream) that made you want to run around in circles and write down every word. When was the last time you didn't feel guilty nodding your head to a song that had a 'hot beat' after realizing the lyrical content made you cringe.
While my concerns are primarily artistic, the violence and thuggery endemic in so many rap songs have far too many real life analogues, as exemplified by the recent investigation into "murder, money-laundering, gun charges and a variety of strong-arm tactics" at rap label Murder, Inc: the business seems to be as sordid as many of the lyrics.
Jeff Chang will have none of this - he thinks everything is peachy in a lengthy piece in the Nation:
- Fifteen years ago, rappers like Public Enemy, KRS-One and Queen Latifah were received as heralds of a new movement. Musicians--who, like all artists, always tend to handle the question "What's going on?" much better than "What is to be done?"--had never been called upon to do so much for their generation; Thelonious Monk, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder were never asked to stand in for Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer or Stokely Carmichael. But the gains of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s were being rolled back. Youths were as fed up with black leadership as they were with white supremacy. Politics had failed. Culture was to become the hip-hop generation's battlefield, and "political rap" was to be its weapon.
Article comments
1 - Cal Ulmann
It's funny you link to Talib Kweli's Quality because in interview Kweli has insisted that he is not trying to make concious rap. He is just a rapper with a conscience.
2 - Eric Olsen
Yet that is a very fine thing to be.