Hip-hop is dying a slow, excruciatingly painful death. I may sound like a music snob by saying this, but ask most other hip-hop heads: Most of the hip-hop that is being put out right not, quite frankly, sucks. It's very depressing to see how far the genre has fallen. It's torturous for me to see a medium with so much potential to be degraded like this.
Public Enemy's Chuck D once called hip-hop the Black CNN, meaning that it was a medium that related the happenings of urban inner cities in a way that mainstream media could never touch. Artists like Public Enemy, KRS-One, and 2pac used hip hop to rap about subjects such as the government, police brutality, and teenaged parents. And they sold albums, too. A lot of them.
Now? We have guys like Nelly talking about grillz (platinum cosmetic dental apparati) And the most infuriating part? The audience loves this stuff. This kind of hip-hop is mind-bogglingly popular, while artists who rap about anything other than guns, drugs, or money are placed with the dreaded "underground" label and are forced to stay within that dead-end niche. These are the artists who deserve to have their voices heard and they're being silenced because their subject matter doesn't move units.
The blame is not just on the artists; the audience is also guilty of selling themselves short. Is it really worth the 18 bucks to pay for an album with a guy who talks about how much richer he is than you for an hour? I may not be the ultimate judge on this, but that's not art (as music should be), that's a product.
There is hope, however. Some of hip-hops' old guard (KRS, Nas among others), along with artists like Common, Talib Kweli and Mos Def, still realize how important of a medium hip-hop can be and they respect that power by making music that is worthy of being heard by millions.
Jacqueline Colozzi @ Mon, 02/27/2006 - 5:01pm
As my father once said on the subject of hip hop artists: "They must be laughing all the way to the bank."