The most interesting discussion I've heard in a long time about hiphop culture has been happening over at Respectable Negroes. Interesting because it has focused on the role of critics and tropes. Now I've done more than dangled my feet in post-modern rhetoric when dealing with the selection of roles for something newer than Coloreds, Negroes, Blacks and African Americans. So I can navigate some of that. But I have been a skeptic of identity politics and have paid extra attention to the slights of hand that say 'culture' when they mean 'race'. Nevertheless there is a fascinating set of verbiage and ideas that get to the fore when people who know their Insane Clowns from their ESDs from their Bone Thugs start talking about that big old subject: Why Hiphop Is Not Just Music.
Now I'm offering my blog as neutral territory for something that has raised a few hackles over there. I think mine is a good spot for several reasons.
1. I do Socratic pretty good and I think I can flush out some of the inside ball.
2. I have no dog in the hiphop crit fight.
3. I know enough hiphop to be dangerous.
4. I'm generally skeptical rather than looking to be convinced of something, so I'm happy to be corrected.
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So let me flesh out my biases up front, which can serve as a standalone blather in case nobody over there cares enough to come over here.
I was once one of those clever individuals who thought he had what it took to save hiphop from intellectual decline. In fact I've written more than a few couplets in my day. On the edge between performance poetry and lyrical hiphop and under the influence of the likes of Cornel West, Sekou Sundiata, ATCQ and Arrested Development, I did my own NY thang in the early 90s. I gave it up primarily because of the success of Onyx and the fact that I looked, to those who cared (and produced) much more like an R&B seducer than a Large Professor. Plus I thought all the 5%ers were straight wack, booty, and gas-faceable. If I couldn't have made money doing what I do now, I would be somewhere with the likes of where ever KMD is now. The dude who succeeded where I failed is Common, but I was of the Fishbone generation.
So I have long had a personal interest in seeing how hiphop might be extended for the purposes of cultural production under the dual headings of 'generic Talented Tenth race raising responsibility' and 'look on my black cultural works ye mighty and despair' on wave of the hybridization of American pop to what it is now, all 16 beat. I ended up falling in love with MC Solaar and French Rap in general, because it could be hard without the embarassing idiocy of those who are not Acey Alone level rap intellects. In short, I became a rap snob, and decided to call the whole thing off - including all that responsibility to the masses stuff. I sprouted children, wingtip shoes and insurance policies, and I knew that nobody writes hiphop for me in a world where Living Colour is no longer and house parties in the ATL featured low energy stuff like D'Angelo.. but I digress.
Rap today is like all things related to blackness. Which is to say its popular interpretation tends to low common denominators, and its historically accurate, aesthetically contiguous expression tends toward esoterica. Sure there are lots and lots of people who understand and respect to the best - true to the roots, just as there are people who read Colson Whitehead, but.. such people find themselves marginalized towards the edges of academia and philanthropy. Which is to say that there are no institutional legs for them to stand on and control. The most rigorous and discipline orthodoxy of the aesthetic is co-opted (from a black nationalist standpoint) and the rest is commercialized.
So my belief is that the prospects for hiphop commercially is excellent, but that hiphop's ability to become and remain fine art in the Western World is severly limited. I'm curious as to where the middlebrow of hiphop lands and what history is being written right now.
The only thing I think that might lift my spirits about hiphop as a middlebrow or fine art would be the trend towards artists who actually read music and play instruments, and the best dance choreography influenced by the wild style. I also wonder why rap has not done well with the separation of lyricist and performer.
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