You absolutely must read The Literary Thug today:
What makes someone like Jeezy get under the skin of millions of black people lies in how he manipulates the vocabulary of black music to make his money. James Baldwin said it best here when he said that
Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand--or sleight-of-hand--by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary--without the faintest notion of what it really means--the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience.
What the crack rapper does is turn this shorthand on it’s axis. He takes the rhetoric of black english and creates a vocabulary for the privileged white teenager in which he makes the most vicious damage against black people seem like a day at the beach. In this vocabulary, he gives the white rap fan a sort of self reflecting mirror into black life, not enough empathize with the black people that rappers are bragging about committing crimes against, but enough to trample on black people’s most vulnerable wounds and get away with it. If black music has been an artistic sanctuary from life, the crack rapper opens the church gates, burns the church down, and allows life to smack the parishioners around as they leave.
I'm not prepared to riff off this immediately as I am in the midst of frying other fish, however it does reflect a theme I've been pushing from the Old School perspective. I think we are all in agreement that hiphop is an artform, and that there is no such thing as 'hiphop culture' or 'hiphop politics'. However LT illustrates the default of progressive, multicultural and liberal critics who have allowed hiphop to represent black culture far beyond the extent to which it is actually representative.
The conversation I really want to have is with people like Jimi Israel and Danyel Smith to understand where black critics to the left of Stanley Crouch went so wrong when the commercial appeal of hiphop took off and left the more organic elements behind. From the perspective of my timeline, John Legend, Common and the rest of Neo Soul came ten years too late partially because of how black critics allowed The Source and Vibe to become what they became, the literary bitches of gangsta. New Jack was there, and it didn't do this. Kid & Play and Salt & Pepa and Heavy D were there and they didn't do this. The aesthetic of spoken word died for a lack of critical oxygen and money. Savion Glover was there and didn't do this. And I think really that Janet Jackson was the last R&B star who understood the hiphop art. And it ended with her with all due respect to the Native Tongues.
The head svengalis of rap degeneracy have to be producers like Master P and others too numerous (and partially unknown to me) to mention. But I think we can start there.
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