Hip-hop icon Nas made the provocative statement, "Hip-hop is dead,'' in September and set off a firestorm of controversy. It was intensified by the January release of his album bearing the same title.
Many questioned why Nas would say hip-hop -- a worldwide phenomenon that has generated billions of dollars -- could be "dead.
'' After all, more hip-hop albums are being released then ever before, and the music's influence extends to movies, corporate marketing and theater. That it's dead seems absurd -- until you realize Nas was looking beneath the surface.
He was speaking of the corporate side of the music and the mentality of executives more interested in turning a quick buck than nurturing rap culture.
Nas realized sex, violence and bling, as themes for the music, had pretty much run their course. Album sales had plummeted, and ratings at hip-hop radio stations in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere had hit all-time lows.
A number of people, including this writer, also had spoken out about mediocre product coming from some of the genre's biggest stars.
Yet such talk was rebuffed by so-called industry experts, who blamed digital downloading and satellite radio.
We critics, however, were vindicated by a study published earlier this year by the University of Chicago. Data from the "Black Youth Project'' indicated that while 58 percent of blacks between ages 15 and 25 listen to hip-hop daily, most are dissatisfied with it.
They find the subject matter is too violent, and women too often portrayed in offensive ways.
Such feelings hint at a dirty little secret of the music business: Blacks are used largely to validate musical themes being marketed to the white mainstream. In other words, while 90 percent of commercial rap artists on TV and radio are black, the target audience lies outside the black community.
Paul Porter, a longtime industry veteran and former music programmer at BET and Radio One, is now with the watchdog organization Industryears.com. He says the University of Chicago findings offer proof positive that commercial hip-hop has become the ultimate minstrel show, and rap artists are pushed by the industry to remain perpetual adolescents.
As a result, we watch Diddy, Cam'ron, DMX and others brag about wealth and throw bills at a camera while bikini-clad women gyrate in the background. Should these artists attempt to break out of the mold, they'd risk having their work questioned by record and radio executives.
In our conversation, Porter also pointed to something more sinister: payola.
He claimed hip-hop is dead only because payola is rampant at labels intent on investing in songs with sexual and violent themes.
During a separate conversation, Questlove of the Roots supported Porter's allegation with his own story about the process behind the group's Grammy-winning hit with Erykah Badu, "You Got Me.'' He said the Roots had to pony up close to "a million dollars'' to a middle man who "worked his magic'' at radio stations.
Initially, the overtly positive song had been rejected, he explained, so palms were greased with the promise that key stations countrywide would get hot "summer jam'' concert acts in exchange for airplay. According to Questlove, more than $1 million in cash and resources were eventually laid out for the success of that single song.
In the documentary "Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,'' shown recently on the PBS series "Independent Lens,'' filmmaker Byron Hurt confronts Stephen Hill, BET's senior vice president for programming, to ask why the cable network plays so many videos with misogynist and otherwise degrading themes.
The fortysomething Hill walks away without answering. This is the same executive who refused to broadcast videos by the group Little Brother, because he considered their material "too intelligent'' for the BET audience.
With thinking like that, no wonder commercial hip-hop appears dead.
It's the ideas of the gatekeepers that are dead. unfortunately, especially with the "mergers" (takeovers) of smaller record companies by larger ones, music is all about money. The US government sued a grandmother for thousands and thousands of dollars cause it could - because she was sharing music.
I have a feeling that I hope is right that there is an actual community just below the radio surface who are writing, performing, and finding a way to present real music. It is not just hip-hop that is getting a bad rap about this (he he) but almost every kind of music.
Unfortunately, people with money see art as a commodity, not as an extension of someone's soul.
If you take the soul out of music, keep out the positivity, keep feeling (except for getting a feel of that ass) distant, you can keep the money rolling in because people don't have to think, they just have to react in the pre-programmed manner...
. Hip hop is too annoying to go away anytime soon.
Most good music is underground.
Once in a while, something half-decent breaks through the surface. This helps, because then you have an idea of where to dig for even better music.
A more rare exception is good music making a big break into the mainstream.
I can't explain the late 60s or early 90s. If someone wants to have a go at it, I would be interested to hear your theories. Jeez, the hatred and intolerance of Hip Hop and Rap in these Comments is indeed something to behold!
Leave it to Alternet readers to tar the whole spectrum of Hip Hop with the "violence and misogyny" brush. You sound just like parents in the early 1960s, those "squares" who didn't like Rock Roll and never understood that Rock was and is about freedom and rebellion from the dysfunctional status quo.
Hip Hop is possibly the most important art form of the late 20th, early 21st century, a form that has influenced every aspect of modern popular culture.
Hip Hop and Rap gave a voice to the most disenfranchised and reviled members of society -- young black males -- and empowered a generation of black entrepreneurs and artists.
Wholesale condemnation of an entire musical genre smacks more than a little of the kind of condescending racism reserved for "liberals" on the Left. Such denounciations basically parrot the mainstream Hip Hop bashing that has permeated corporate media for over a decade.
If it weren't so proudly ignorant it might be more amusing.
The fact that commercial Hip Hop often sucks has nothing to do with the merits of the art form and everything to do with the greedy, unimaginative recording industry. In this, Hip Hop is no different from Rock and Roll, film, or journalism.
The best and deepest stuff always emerges from the underground. I love rap music, and it's really sad what's been happening to it over the years. It's easy to understand why so many people hate it because of the direction mainstream rap has gone, with excessively poor quality of rap being pushed on the radio and in music videos.
The real appeal to rap is when it's used as a positive means of creative expression. There are countless examples of this, one you should all be familiar with is "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang. When you listen to a rap song like that, you are absorbed by the style and creativity, stimulated by the cleverness of the lyrics and rhymes, moved by the beats and the themes and the personalities expressing them.
This is human expression at one of it's finest levels. Rap like this is not only great music, but a way of empowering and uplifting people, raising conscience awareness and helps people realize they are valuable.
Increasingly, radio stations and BET bury rap under a mountain of ignorant themes, degrading women, coveting money and material things, hate and violence, forgoing actual substance with stereotypes and tired slang.
It's really sad the methodical way they are spoiling an entire art form. Music companies are taking rap music away from the people it is suppose to empower, returning it as a new form of oppression. They engineer ignorance by distributing degrading and destructive messages over catchy beats.
It really saddens me that so much of the progressive-left community (read: white) dismisses hip-hop completely out of hand, when they fail to realize that the aspects of hip-hop culture that they find most abhorrent are the same aspects that are deliberately marketed by white music executives as a way to continue repressing the black community. While "gangsta rap" is marketed down our throats, it stifles any true understanding or compassion that could arise within the surburban kids who consume it, instead keeping everyone preoccupied with "diamonds on our necks and ice in our grills." So young black men are cast exclusively as dangerous, glamorous criminals, easy for the white community to dismiss and easy for their children to admire, while all hip-hop with a positive message of unity is kept beneath the radar.
It is sinister and deliberate.
As a disclaimer, I'm a young white chick, but I live in the East Bay and love hip-hop. Some of the best acts out there have never come near a radio station (except for Davey D's show on KPFA, which is amazing).
It saddens me that my peers assume I'm selling out to "thug life" because I listen to hip-hop, but I love it as an intelligent, socially-conscious and ever-changing art form, and the last extant form of lyrical poetry in our popular culture. By finding good acts on your own, it's possible to screen out all the garbage mass-marketed to us and find some real gems. Check out The Living Legends, Hieroglyphics, and Lyrics Born for music with a positive message that won't put you in mind of a music video.
Anyone in the white community who wholly dismisses hip-hop culture as offensive and dangerous is simply buying into the divide-and-conquer strategies used against us by corporate suits to discourage any thoughtful discussion about hip-hop's true cultural value. The bigotry I've seen on this message board is disheartening, to say the least. In the United States, racist songs praising the Ku Klux Klan or promoting .
.. Neo-Nazi Hate Music: A Guide RULE Introduction.
Posted: November 4, 2004 ...
I am no defender of 'gangsta' rap...
...
my point is that the
big tent of 'hate' music...
broadly defined...
self hate..misogyny
religion based.
.etc.,etc.
...
.has several rings. Wasn't it just last year that Dave Chappelle's Block Party came out?
Dead Prez, Blackstar, Bilal, Common, not to mention the ladies, Erykah Badu and Jill Scott. Chappelle has used his star power to bring smart hip hop to the masses. The Roots are still kickin, MeShell Ndegeocello, Jurassic 5, Ozomatli incorporates rap in their work.
...
There's life yet. And that's not even going underground with Paris and all them.
With the internet changing music distribution channels, good hip hop will always find a way.
I'm so glad, though, that some people on this post leaped to the defense of hip hop. So many haters! Damn!
Get a music education before you criticize, people.
Country and western music is not my cup of tea, but even I know better than to make a broad, sweeping generalization about how "it's all crap" yadda yadda. I could say, "Oh yeah, C W is just a bunch of racist, misogynistic rednecks who twang guitars and sing about how America is going to kick Iraqi and immigrant ass," but I also know there are artists like Willie Nelson, the Dixie Chicks, and Lyle Lovett out there who buck that stereotype.
Think about where the hate comes from, y'all.
Big ups to Davey D for keeping the critique alive and fighting for the soul of hip hop. And he nails the problem: suburban white kids with the disposible income to buy all the rap albums at retail who want to purchase a piece of gangsta life.
I'm not saying they're the only ones who fall for the posturing, but they are primarily driving the market. And rap artists who wanna get paid know where the money is and fall in line. It's a bad relationship.
Davey - follow up with a list of hip hop artists who are staying true to the political roots of hip hop. That would be a public service. How many Rap entertainers or top forty entertainers today.
...
.Play instruments,sing a melody ,write and produce their own songs.
There are very few who do.
Sampling other peoples songs or using pre-programed beats is NOT music.
Rap may to some may be entertaining and it also may be poetry..
.but it is rarely music.
That said the advent of MTV and only 5 record labels and few independent radio stations has led to the demise of music as other than product.
It is like comparing Mom's delicious and nutritious home cooked meals to eating fast food from rat infested ratraunts.
Record companies used to nuture artists they believed in ,now and since the early 80's an artist has to do it themselves and only once they have sold a few hundred thousand copies will record companies pay attention.
The pussy crap dolls are the kind of trash we get these days.
With electronics that correct bad pitch anyone can sing.
Thank goodness for underground stuff. It has always been where the best music has come from.
I always find it interesting that people who complain about violent and misogynistic rap music almost never apply that criticism to heavy metal, or to traditional Ivy League culture a la Larry Summers ("women can't do science") and to the backbone of American industry, i.e. weapons manufacturing.
Speaking of heavy metal and rap music, see this clip:
Soul on a roll, but you treat it like soap on a rope
Now across the country has us up for the war.
We got to demonstrate, come on
They call themselves black. but we'll see if they'll play this"
It's pretty simple to understand: record company executives aren't into promoting music that attacks the corrupt status quo, whether it's the Dixie Chicks("I'm ashamed of Bush") or Eminem ("the FCC won't let me be, they try to shut me down on MTV").
Then there's the old plantation strategy of keeping the poor whites and the poor blacks at each others throats (that Anthrax/Public Enemy mix will confuse a fair number of people).
It's very evident that popular music and television both have a huge effect on the so-called 'American pysche' - just witness the military recently going to Fox and telling them to stop using torture on '24' because of the effect it was having on soldiers in Iraq. The corporate entertainment media is going to promote the corporate view of things, which is largely pro-Bush and pro-fascist, unpleasant as that may be.
They'll try and keep the traditional race/sex/class stereotypes as well. While some may call it conspiracy theory, it appears to be a deliberate strategy for maintaining social control over the population, in Chomskyan terms: Necessary Illusions are needed to keep the public in line. the voice is the sound of the most original instrument.
..henceforth, every other fabricated, fashioned and fully realized instrument is a reflection of it's creator with the nature of creation, which is the source of its conception.
This can and has manifested countless forms of sound producing intruments, from reeds to brass to drum machines. Over which is of higher quality in comparison, is purely subjective, relative and usually in the mode of the organic vs. sythetic/processed argument (ie.
among things we tend to consume). But back to the point, voices and drums were/are the basic, original instruments. The former generally expresses melody and the latter expresses rhythm.
Hip Hop in aural form, is the modern day revival of the most ancient form of musical expression. It's a full circle. The griot returned and dissapeared as fast as kids were signing their souls to a dotted line, for the 'bottom line.
' A good question in this case would be "Is Hip Hop relevant" or any popular forms of music for that matter. Of course, Industrially, anything is relevant as long as it generates interest - the most important thing for war is war itself - enabling to keep its gears
'grinding' (those hustlin these days like refer as grinding - ain't that on point). Is recorded material of musical rituals/performances capable of passing along it's essence to next generations.
The youths of the Bronx, and the other boroughs of New York originally attempted to make this a realization, of course following the natural instinct and desire to cultivate oneself - that is the root of Hip Hop. The Dj was the 'tribal leader' (actually, some were originally gang leaders like the one called Afrikka Bambattaa), and he was responsible with connect them to the rituals of music. Now, it important to understand, these kids come from the worst parts of concrete provided by this society, so opportunities, even moreso, the relevance of learning how to play the violin and ones survival in the Patterson Projects of the South Bronx was as slim as the areas education budject.
I like romantacize it into the idea that the Ancients, the Ancestoral Voice called on these kids to improvise, 'freestyle' if you will. So they did. Beautifully, and in surroundings that were everything but.
But these kids, as all are, were extremely impressionable. Especially for the boys, the b-boys. In American, everything is based on force and competition.
So what started as a pure expression of the self, became a breeding ground for competition. Either your battlin another emcee, dj, graf artist, or the breaker. It went boys being b-boys to boys imitating men (which is another very important aspect: the role of the adult male figure).
Cuz in America, if you are 'The Man' then you had it all. And these boys wanted it all, especially when you come from almost nothing. Hence the disintegration of Hip Hop and it's subsequent marriage with the Music Industry thats supplies the sounds of American pop-culture and those westernized abroad.
*I'm gonna cut this short, for i did not originally intend to type this much, but note I left out keywords like crack epidemic, Reagonomics, AIDS, the Vietnam War, gang violence, "word as bond", musical heritage, the church, the Jamaican sound system and so on - an array of social/environmental elements that contributed to the creation and detioration of a young culture. One could go so deep into connecting the mystery of universal laws and principles, the balance of the microcosmic macrocosmic realm, planetary conciousness and metaphysical planes*
And so The real question is regarding our Cultures (in this day of a virtual global village a New World Order) and the experiences that it culitvats for one's Self and for one's community: Is the Culture that I harmonize with Living or Dying?
"Im not a human being into no spirtual shit,
he's got a smoking gun pointed right at the user.
click on a link and bam, you're shot.
i will definitely be checking out some of the artists mentioned here as being political poets and revolutionaries! Nothing here is unique to hip-hop, of course--the same thing's happened to every form of expression with which money can be made.
Music, visual art, the written word, dance, you name it. It's not racist, it's just general exploitation for the purpose of creating wealth for people besides the artist. That's capitalism, plain simple.
Or perhaps, that's human nature.
Personally, I think this pronouncement of "death" is several years overdue. Like many forms of music before it, hip-hop/rap has ascended commercially, been turned into mass-produced dreck by record companies (who may well know that people ultimately know the difference, but as long as we keep buying the dreck, they don't care), and spawned an alternative, underground route that avoids the commercial spotlight.
There's always a popular side and an underground side to any art form, and it looks like hip-hop culture as a whole is starting to come to terms with that reality. The degree to which its underground freely intermingles with the underground of other genres/art forms is a sign of health.
Obviously there's already a lot of artistically viable underground hip-hop out there, but it's always good to see a genre emerge from its own bloated, commercial shadow and continue on its artistic way.
Almost every other genre has managed it--areas like pop metal, heavy metal, classic rock, and disco are alive and flourishing after becoming stale or mainstream jokes (see the likes of The Darkness, Boris, The Sword, Kings of Leon, Jamiroquai, etc, etc for excellent next-generation artists in those genres).
"[Poetry] It's probably the art form that has the least money involved, you know--there's no Top 100 Billboard of poets. There's no cocaine glamour associated with it.
People write it for the love of it and people read it for the love of it. Apart from the stylistic tricks you have up your sleeve, there's no way you can enhance your poetry--you can't electronically process it to make it better poetry. So that's what I really like about it.
To me it's probably the most pure art form there is." That was for Brooklyn..
Ha ha, we get it everytime
You got me on? Ohh
Shout out to all of my crew, East-West, North-South
All the continent, Europe, all abroad international
Bring it in, bring it in, bring it in, bring it in
A lot of things have not, mainly us
We gon' get it together right? I believe that
Listen.
. people be askin me all the time,
"Yo Mos, what's gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?"
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?
)
ask yourself.. where am I goin?
How am I doin?
So..
if Hip-Hop is about the people
and the.. Hip-Hop won't get better until the people get better
then how do people get better?
(Hmmmm...
)
Well, from my understanding people get better
when they start to understand that, they are valuable
or cause somebody, think they sexy
And God, makes you valuable
And whether or not you, recognize that value is one thing
tryin to be God, wishin that they were God
With thinking like that, no wonder commercial hip-hop appears dead. It's the ideas of the gatekeepers that are dead.
This final line was obviously something 80% of the commenters here missed.
Thank the cosmos some commenters know from hiphop and know it's far from dead. Non-artists are always saying this shit or that is dead. Thanks to Dead Prez, The Coup, Michael Franti Spearhead, all these represent the genuine article.
As a white ex-progrocker (temproary hiatus), I hated hiphop until my kids started groovin to it. I sat down and listened and damn if there weren't the best damned bass licks and rhythmic texture from what I heard. In every genre there's well done stuff and crap.
The existence of crap means there's compost, not that the genre is dead. The good shit still smokes and that's all that counts. Now kuntry music, that's some twisted sick dead shit that I wish really would die.
.. like yesterday.
Like I tell my kids, "wear clean draws, every day...
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