I just had a strange flash idea, which is like most of mine.. a scene, a vignette that implicates a host of ideas that I attempt to flesh out in text here on the primary blog.
The image is of an old Philco radio, you know the old cathedral style, and a white gloved hand from outside the frame reaches out to turn it on. The radio screeches for a minute and then the hand turns the tuner. The stations warble in and out of tune and then it settles on a beat. It's Rakim's "You Got Soul". The camera pulls back and the owner of the gloved hand is a 70 year old Jimi Izrael reclining in an old wingback chair. He says, "Now that's hiphop!".
It's the future and nobody knows what we know about that thing that made us emotionally detached from the everything that was Bootsy Collins, George Clinton and Cameo. It was hiphop, conceived in rebellion and dedicated to the proposition that all beats are not created equal, and dammit we need more of the right kind. (And Janet screams, Gimme a beat!). Those were the beats that made even Yes kick ass. I gotta bite, appropos:
I can feel no sense of measure
No illusions as we take
Refuge in young man's pleasure
Breaking down the dreams we made
Real
Is it real son? Is it really real? Hard to say what level of reality hiphop needs to be. It's always been my way out. Just take it light. The heavy burden is on the man who wants to make hiphop more than something with a good beat that you can dance to. And I tell you true, I feel for the men and women who assume the position of the hiphop Sysiphus, but I ain't rolling that boulder. It's like a snowball that keeps on picking up more caca every trip down the slope. Now its a Katamari hairball of truly bizarre dimensions.
So I envision a legion of old men who play dodgeball with hiphop criticism. For every "what about..?", there's a "Not real hiphop" reply. Hiphop keeps growing, and the percentage that old men can stomach gets smaller. We get to the point at which we devolve into debates about whether or not any real hiphop was ever issued on anything but vinyl, let alone iTunes and the distributions of the future mesh. That doesn't stop a bunch of screaming teens on some MTV show calling Flo Rida's "Ayer" an 'instant classic'.
I must confess I have shrinking heartspace for music. I'm giving it up for food, tell you the truth. I appreciate the man who can cut, scratch, transform with finesse (and all that mess), but the man who can cook a pot of gumbo gets invited to my house first.
I have lived to see the elevator music station in my home town (KBIG) get jiggy. Adult contemporary. Heh!
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