Hip-hop or die!!!

This is reposted from my Yahoo! 360 blog.

Tuesday January 10, 2006

So I’ve been considering starting a new blog for a while now, and here it finally is. The purpose was to write down my random thoughts on random things, not really to write about myself or my life. The problem is now that I’m sitting at the keyboard, there are no random thoughts. Randomness can be so inconvinient at times. It never happens when I plan for it to.

Well, since I can’t count on the unpredictable , I’m going to pick a subject that I had a heated discussion about a few weeks ago. I post regularly on a message board for musicians (and music related people). A few weeks ago somebody posted an article about a studio owner who was shot and robbed by some guys who initially gained his confidence by posing as rappers and prospective clients. You lose ten points if you can’t guess what happened next. A bunch of people posted some ignorant ass responses, things like “that’s why I never work with rappers.” A long time ago somebody told me “choose your battles” and I try very hard to live by those words because they make sense. Why fight a battle you can’t win or if winning isn’t worth what it takes to fight? I knew it wasn’t a battle I was going to win, but as its so close to home, I had to jump in to let those people know that that was some dumb shit to say. Of course then a long back and forth followed with more ignorant comments and in vain responses to them. I had a few backers along the way, but I think most of the people who were smart enough to understand what was wrong with what people were saying were also smart enough not to waste time on that conversation. I’m not going to rehash the whole thing, but if you’re really interested in reading it, here it is.

So from that argument I realized two things that I already know. (What? Sometimes you need to be reminded of what you know)

1 – Hip hop is seriously misrepresented in mainstream media

2 – A lot of people don’t know that

Let’s take a very rough trip back through hip-hop history. Hip-hop music started out as a party thing – fun and good times. Hip Hop music evolved and developed new species. there were different sounds and different subjects. Some hip hop was still about parties, some was political and social commentary, some expressed racial pride, some was about love and relationships. Most of it wasn’t very big with the “mainstream.” In the 80s and early 90s, it definitely seemed that hip-hop was for black folks and rock was for white folks. At some point that changed. Back then, the jewish kid who used to lend me Ice Cube CDs was an oddity, today he would be the norm. It seems that around the same time that that change was happening, the whole “Gangsta Rap” thing was getting big. I remember at first the radio was loving it, but then some of the “leaders of the black community” (Maybe I’ll explain the quotes in another post sometime) started getting upset and making noise about the negativity they were hearing on FM frequencies. I remember when WBLS in NY decided that they were boycotting gangster rap.

I guess that despite (or maybe because of) the controversy and protests, gangster rap sold well. Record companies decided it was profitable and media companies agreed. Today, when you hear rap on the radio, chances are its about how hard someone is, how much ass someone gets and/or how much money someone has. That is what a large chunk of the population believes hip-hop is about. Nowadays if you listen to the radio and watch TV, you rarely hear uplifting words or social commentary or anything substantial coming from a rappers mouth. If Sony and ClearChannel and all these other corporations are right, hip-hop is a culture of violence, excess, negativity, and nothing more. But what happened to the diversity that used to be there? Did the rappers who had something to say beyond these three categories suddenly stop talking?

I’m going to end this here and leave the (probably 1 or 2) people who read this with that question along with the answer’s rmifications to think about. Also, I’m tired of typing.