Where Hip Hop Went Wrong...

I hate to even talk about hip-hop anymore, I really do. But for the sake of all that is real, I'm gon' do this.

When Nas dropped his "Hip Hop is Dead" album a few months ago, a loooooot of cats in the South got mad.

(On a side note, they say a hit dog will holla.)

In response, I kept hearing southern MCs saying, "Naw, naw, he hatin'! He mad cuz we gettin' money now! It's our turn now!"

Aight, cool... You notice in that response that NOWHERE is music mentioned? THAT's what Nas is talking about... THAT'S why hip hop is dead. He didn't hafta call out regions and whatnot; all he had to do was say it, and look at who comes out talking about "get money" this and "get money" that. Gettin' money has nothing to do with hip hop or real music. Hip hop was an art before it was a business.

But I'm straying from my point. See, hip hop really is the music of the African-American. You know why? Cuz we got the same history. Lemme break that down:

The biggest obstacle for African-Americans is that we were a people brought over as capital who lost our identity and had to create ourselves anew. Because of our lack of identity, we're easily manipulated. Likewise, hip hop was a genre of music that started out with good intentions, but never had a definite identity. Thus, it was easily taken advantage of by merchant capitalists. Now it's being exploited and used against the very people who made it.

Lemme break that down further. Hip hop started from the streets and gathering places of the inner cities. It was once the voices of poor people struggling to make it in the world, talking about their experiences and hardships, weaving poetry, entertaining with clevery rhyme. It was once about education and having fun and self-expression. That's one school of hip hop. Hip hop is now littered with icons, most of whom really aren't that talented, over-payed producers, who make better music on their own than with rappers on their tracks, self-expression in the form of imitating others, and the largest consumer participation from White (and sheltered Black) kids in the suburbs. It's false stories of men who claim to be more than what they really are, claim to do stuff that they never really did, rent items and women to shine in their videos, and pay producers and directors to make them notorious. That's the new school of hip hop.

See, the problem isn't whether or not hip hop has a good or bad side; the problem is, hip hop never decided what it wanted to be in the first place. It started amongst a group of people who had no "legal" control of their own creation; copyrighting lyrics and beats is not the same as copyrighting genres. Ownership is the key word; no one ever had the authority over hip hop to define and defend by force that which IS hip hop from that which is NOT hip hop. So now, hip hop is one big identity crisis. And the industry, the people who control the airwaves, the record labels, the market, the merchant capitalists.... they've decided they prefer a mercantile, cashcow hip hop more than a pure, meritable hip hop.

I work with cats that honestly believe hip hop is a get-money scheme; somehow, I messed around and ended up indebted to 'em, so I gotta hold up my end. What's sad is, as bad as I wanna choke hell out of 'em, I can't. Because, as far as I'm concerned, hip hop is whatever you say it is. When thousands of people go to concerts and shout this fool or that fool is the greatest MC, and they don't know jack about poetry, or creativity, or delivery, or flow, or originality, or depth, and they aren't willing to learn, what can you really do?

You can say hip hop is dead, and continue to do what you do for the love of good music, period.


Common, I Feel You Dawg; I Used to Love H.E.R. Too B-(