Posted on 04/22/2014 2:57:07 PM PDT by nickcarraway
This is the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future.
There are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, There but for the grace of God go I. (Actually, he said There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford, but the switch to the pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as spooky action at a distance. And for the third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in Gangsta Gangsta back in 1988: Life aint nothing but bitches and money.
Those three ideas may seem distant from one another, but if you set them up and draw lines between them, thats triangulation. Bradfords idea, of course, is about providence, about luck and gratitude: You only have your life because you dont have someone elses. At the simplest level, I think about that often. I could be where others are, and by extension, they could be where I am. You dont want to be insensible to that. You dont want to be an ingrate. (By the by, Bradfords quote has come to be used to celebrate good fortune when people say it, theyre comforting themselves with the fact that things could be worse but in fact, his own good fortune lasted only a few years before he was burned at the stake.)
Einstein was talking about physics, of course, but to me, hes talking about something closer to home the way that other people affect you, the way that your life is entangled in theirs whether or not theres a clear line of connection. Just because something is happening to a street kid in Seattle or a small-time outlaw in Pittsburgh doesnt mean that its not also happening, in some sense, to you. Human civilization is founded on a social contract, but all too often that gets reduced to a kind of charity: Help those who are less fortunate, think of those who are different. But theres a subtler form of contract, which is the connection between us all.
And then theres Ice Cube, who seems to be talking about lifes basic appetites whats under the lid of the id but is in fact proposing a world where that social contract is destroyed, where everyone aspires to improve themselves and only themselves, thoughts of others be damned. What kind of world does that create? Those three ideas, Bradfords and Einsteins and Cubes, define the three sides of a triangle, and Im standing in it with pieces of each man: Bradfords rueful contemplation, Einsteins hair, Ice Cubes desires. Can the three roads meet without being trivial? This essay, and the ones that follow it, will attempt to find out. Im going to do things a little differently, with some madness in my method. I may not refer back to these three thinkers and these three thoughts, but theyre always there, hovering, as I think through what a generation of hip-hop has wrought. And Im not going to handle the argument in a straight line. But dont wonder too much when it wanders. Ill get back on track. * I want to start with a statement: Hip-hop has taken over black music. At some level, this is a complex argument, with many outer rings, but it has a simple, indisputable core. Look at the music charts, or think of as many pop artists as you can, and see how many of the black ones arent part of hip-hop. There arent many hip-hop performers at the top of the charts lately: You have perennial winners like Jay Z, Kanye West, and Drake, along with newcomers like Kendrick Lamar, and thats about it. Among women, its a little bit more complicated, but only a little bit. The two biggest stars, Beyoncé and Rihanna, are considered pop (or is that pop-soul), but what does that mean anymore? In their case, it means that theyre offering a variation on hip-hop thats reinforced by their associations with the genres biggest stars: Beyoncé with Jay Z, of course, and Rihanna with everyone from Drake to A$AP Rocky to Eminem. Related Stories
It wasnt always that way. Back in the late '80s, when I graduated high school, you could count the number of black musical artists that werent in hip-hop on two hands maybe. You had folksingers like Tracy Chapman, rock bands like Living Colour, pop acts like Lionel Richie, many kinds of soul singers and that doesnt even contend with megastars like Michael Jackson and Prince, who thwarted any easy categorization. Hip-hop was plenty present in 1989 alone, you had De La Soul and the Geto Boys and EPMD and Boogie Down Productions and Ice-T and Queen Latifah but it was just a piece of the pie. In the time since, hip-hop has made like the Exxon Valdez (another 1989 release): It spilled and spread. So what if hip-hop, which was once a form of upstart black-folk music, came to dominate the modern world? Isnt that a good thing? It seems strange for an artist working in the genre to be complaining, and maybe Im not exactly complaining. Maybe Im taking a measure of my good fortune. Maybe. Or maybe its a little more complicated than that. Maybe domination isnt quite a victory. Maybe everpresence isnt quite a virtue. Twenty years ago, when my father first heard about my hip-hop career, he was skeptical. He didn't know where it was all headed. In his mind, a drummer had a real job, like working as music director for Anita Baker. But if Im going to marvel at the way that hip-hop overcame his skepticism and became synonymous with our broader black American culture, Im going to have to be clear with myself that marvel is probably the wrong word. Black culture, which has a long tradition of struggling against (and at the same time, working in close collaboration with) the dominant white culture, has rounded the corner of the 21st century with what looks in one sense like an unequivocal victory. Young America now embraces hip-hop as the signal pop-music genre of its time. So why does that victory feel strange: not exactly hollow, but a little haunted?
I have wondered about this for years, and worried about it for just as many years. Its kept me up at night or kept me distracted during the day. And after looking far and wide, I keep coming back to the same answer, which is this: The reason is simple. The reason is plain. Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once its everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant. Not to mention the obvious backlash conspiracy paranoia: Once all of black music is associated with hip-hop, then Those Who Wish to Squelch need only squelch one genre to effectively silence an entire cultural movement.
And thats what its become: an entire cultural movement, packed into one hyphenated adjective. These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as hip-hop, even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. Hip-hop fashion makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: Hip-hop food? Hip-hop politics? Hip-hop intellectual? And theres even hip-hop architecture. What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer?
This doesnt happen with other genres. Theres no folk-music food or New Wave fashion, once you get past food for thought and skinny ties. Theres no junkanoo architecture. The closest thing to a musical style that does double-duty as an overarching aesthetic is punk, and that doesnt have the same strict racial coding. On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hops success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion. The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range social contract, anyone? but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black starliner. Containers on the container ship are taken from here to there and never mind the fact that they may be empty containers. Keep on pushin and all that, but what are you pushing against? As it has become the field rather than the object, hip-hop has lost some of its pertinent sting. And then theres the question of where hip-hop has arrived commercially, or how fast its departing. The music industry in general is sliding, and hip-hop is sliding maybe faster than that. The largest earners earn large, but not at the rate they once did. And everyone beneath that upper level is fading fast.
The other day, we ran into an old man who is also an old fan. He loves the Roots and what we do. Someone mentioned the changing nature of the pop-culture game, and it made him nostalgic for the soul music of his youth. Itll be back, he said. Things go in cycles. But do they? If you really track the ways that music has changed over the past 200 years, the only thing that goes in cycles is old men talking about how things go in cycles. History is more interested in getting its nut off. There are patterns, of course, boom and bust and ways in which certain resources are exhausted. There are foundational truths that are stitched into the human DNA. But the art forms used to express those truths change without recurring. They go away and dont come back. When hip-hop doesnt occupy an interesting place on the pop-culture terrain, when it is much of the terrain and loses interest even in itself, then what?
Back to John Bradford for a moment: Im lucky to be here. That goes without saying, but Ill say it. Still, as the Roots round into our third decade, we shoulder a strange burden, which is that people expect us to be both meaningful and popular. We expect that. But those things dont necessarily work together, especially in the hip-hop world of today. The winners, the top dogs, make art mostly about their own victories and the victory of their genre, but that triumphalist pose leaves little room for anything else. Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive. People who want to challenge this theory point to Kendrick Lamar, and the way that his music, at least so far, has some sense of the social contract, some sense of character. But is he just the exception that proves the rule? Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.
Hip hop is pig’s slop and ray is cra*.
If he doesn’t think there’s folk music food he hasn’t been in a Whole Foods. And yes when New Wave was new it very much had fashion. Lots of music genres double duty as overarching aesthetics. If he doesn’t understand that he’s not in good shape to talk about the cultural impact of any type of music.
People always want it all, then when they get it, they’re always surprised that it isn’t what they thought it would be and that they aren’t satisfied.
To now try to turn this eternal human predicament into yet another oppression by whitey is laughably ignorant.
And pathetic.
Fo’ Shizzle my Nizzles!
Run-DMC rapper blasts hip hop culture for being disrespectful and immature
http://metro.co.uk/2013/08/04/run-dmc-rapper-blast-hip-hop-culture-for-being-disrespectful-and-immature-3910776/
I like the essay, but I can sum it up quicker. The author is waiting for the next big thing. Instead of waiting for it, he should go invent it.
If only for the bitches and money..
It is a good essay, and a writer with talent.
“Just because something is happening to a street kid in Seattle or a small-time outlaw in Pittsburgh doesnt mean that its not also happening, in some sense, to you.”
http://www.johnspeedie.com/healy/crap.wav
As someone in his sixties, I’ve often wondered if younger people who grew up listening to rap and hip-hop (I don’t know what the difference is) still listen to that “music” when they’re in their forties and fifties. When I was a lot younger, I mostly listened to rock and roll. As I got older, my tastes increased to listening to (and loving) a lot of music (classical, adult contemporary, older country) I hated when I was younger. So are the lovers of rap and hip-hop now entering middle age still listening to and loving the stuff they listened to as teens and young adults? Help me out here.
I loved rap ad hiphop during my youth, but they no longer speak to me nor reach me. It’s Country, Americana, and Christian music for me now.
Nowadays black yut are all growing up to be “rappers”.
Worthless wannabe’s.
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