It's easy to hate what hiphop has become. It's difficult to hate hiphop music. For me, the question is whether or not what pumps out of trucks these days can be called music. It's as if the wheel has turned and now experienced blackfolks are saying the same things inexeperienced whitefolks were saying 20 years ago. That's not music!
It is music of course, and you can't even really say that it's bad music. There is so much hiphop out there today that even the garbage they play on the radio evidences talent of a recognizable sort. The product has been refined and purified. Commercial hiphop is musical crack. Producing it is not rocket science but it is chemistry.
But people with memories of the hiphop of the 80s and early 90s remember is when hiphop was social, political and musical manna. When Miles Davis made a hiphop album, it was a different world. This won't be the first, nor will it be the last time I comment on hiphop, but until it changes substantially, I think I know categorically what is wrong with it, and that wrongness is unlikely to change. It is the impoverished emotional range of hiphop today that makes it alien to those who once loved and lived it.
As usual at Cobb, I think of taxonomies. And because it was my generation that was responsible for investing so much into hiphop, these taxonomies are deeply intertwined with black identity. So I must speak of these in terms of black people and all of black music. Black music is Hiphop, Gospel, Blues, Funk, Reggae, Jazz and R&B. Seven nice round categories. Each of those expresses a different set of values best. The tragedy of hiphop is that while it has the potential to sample expressions of all because of its open structure, that it has been reduced to the narrow emotional spectrum of lust, greed, anger and frustration. Now one can split hairs and say that is really the fault of rap lyrics; that hiphop music can express a broad range of emotion instrumentally. My response is that jazz musicians and R&B artists have appropriated all that. I would allow one other exception to the completeness of this taxonomy and it is an important one, and that is the emotions of dance music. When Missy Elliot cranks out one of her jams, she has got the groove nailed and the infectious beat. I'm going to call that Funk, not Hiphop. And in that realm, I'll gladly admit things get complicated for me.
People like me who hate what hiphop has become, do so because of the cramp it has put on its dynamic emotional range. We invested so much of ourselves to it and in the end it grew into a monster, and so we had to let it go and disclaim it. Yet there stand many sentinels, diehard lovers of hiphop who with age have begun to equivocate their love for it. They speak of hiphop as a woman, a goddess, for whom they once gave their all, and she betrayed them and became a cheap, dirty whore. And now they long for the beauty of yesterday while she still enhances her attractiveness and flashes of her beauty remain as brilliant as ever. To have truly loved the art of hiphop is to have endured the worst sort of heartache, better to have loved and lost the hiphop struggle than to not have loved at all.
Lonnae Parker writes in today's Washington Post:
We felt ourselves united, with the power of a language we didn't begin to understand. "Rap at its best can refashion the world -- or at least the way we see it -- and shape it in our own image," said Adam Bradley, a literature professor at Claremont McKenna College who is working on a book about hip-hop poetics. It has the capacity "to give a voice that's distinctively our own and to do it with the kind of confidence and force we might not otherwise have."
I grew older, and my love affair with the music, swagger and semiotics of hip-hop continued. There was Kurtis Blow, Melle Mel and the seminal Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five:
Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge
I'm tryin' not to lose my head.I learned all the rhymes played on black radio, because do you remember when MTV wouldn't touch black music at all? I got to college and started getting my beats underground, which is where I stayed to find my hip-hop treasures. Public Enemy rapped "Fight the Power" and it could have been the soundtrack to CNN footage of Tiananmen Square or the fall of the Berlin Wall:
Got to give us what we want
Gotta give us what we need
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We got to fight the powers that be.I was young and hungry and hip-hop was smart, and like Neneh Cherry said, we were raw like sushi back then, sensing we were onto something big, not realizing how easily it could get away from us.
Gospel remains the music of inspiration and devotion. But there are things that even young people's tastes make pefectly clear (if I'm a competent judge) and that is Old School romantic R&B still counts. Funk remains the basis of the hottest dance music, especially electric funk. And there are not enough days remaining in my life to adequately describe Jazz and the Blues. But I would stop to bow my head against the pinpricks of shame any growup blackfolks feel in regards to the most popular hiphopification of a blues song, Golddigger by Kanye West.
But there are times when I like hiphop for being exactly what it is, raw, stupid, loud, arrogant, angry rebellious noise. More often than not, I like that musically without listening to the words, which can be like a bad sermon in a beautiful church. There is something to say about music that conveys this belligerent spectrum of human emotion. I predict that one of these days, the most awesome and shocking martial music ever is going to be a hiphop anthem. If you listen to American military cadences you can hear African chants, and that call and response deep in black American music. We're only a step away from going way beyond what Country has done in righteous anger over attacks we've suffered and hiphop could be a transcendant vehicle, but..
But hiphop culture is a fragment of youth culture and America suffers from a youth culture that is dysfunctional in any nmber of directions. That is primarily because we have the nerve to call what youth do 'culture', but secondarily because the dumbing down of American culture that is youth culture has been commercialized successfully. What sells well is considered good. Sex and violence sells well. And part of the dysfunction that masquerades as blackness today manifests sex and violence in hiphop as lust and anger. Hiphop perverts any romantic or chivalrous code that might be vehicles for the full spectrum of emotions around sex and violence. They are common denominators, but hiphop brings them uncommonly low.
I don't feel compelled to denigrate hiphop. It does an excellent job of self-destruction. Nor do I feel any desire to reclaim it as I once did before I had a family. But it's clear that the genre could use a lot of work. There is no King of Hiphop who might direct it to a better place, as far as I know there are no critical awards other than Grammys. Hiphop improvisationally defies those definitions that might put it's tradition of sucka MC self-criticism on a philosophically consistent track. What was once 'dope' now must be 'crunktastic'. The opacity of hiphop crit is inside baseball to the nth degree. It's always crypto- something. Just try reading Byron Crawford (aka Bol Gueverra) sometime. You know something mysteriously wrong is going on when you have a category like 'Least Tragic Hip Hop Deaths'.
As a conservative, I'm more likely to find new undiscovered classics in other genres than wait for a Hiphop renaissence. That's ok. It doesn't concern me as a black man because there are five other flavors of black music. Our generation was wrong in rebelling against Peaches and Herb, and expecting as much from Salt & Pepa. But now that we're older and wiser, we can look to all the other forms of black music and be reunited. And it feels so good.
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