the death of hip hop

I have been struggling with what does it mean to be part of the hip hop generation.  On the one hand, I love hip hop.  I love the sounds, the beats, the creativity, and the global reach of the music.  On the other hand, there is so much radio/pop hip hop that is horrible.  I understand why Nas created an ode to the death of hip hop. I too feel that my generation is dying.  My people and my culture are dying and I worry about what is going to take their place.

Why is hip hop dying?  In my humble opinion its death is due to large music companies that started in the mid-nineties to throw alot of money toward hip hop artists.  Before this, hip hop music represented the diversity of black and latino cultures.  There was political hip hop.  There was misogynist hip hop.  There was party hip hop.  There was womanist hip hop.  There was fantasy hip hop.  Hip hop was the amalgamation of the conflicts and unity of our cultures.  But, corporations owned by powerful white men noticed that the musical expressions from our marginalized cultures were making alot of money.  And so they bought it.  But they didnt buy all of the different forms of hip hop.  They focused on one form of hip hop: gangsta rap.  Now, I love gangsta rap.  I remember when Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre came out with the Chronic.  Every party that I attended that summer bumped that album.  It is a classic.  It was just one more expression of our culture.  It wasn’t the ‘end all be all’ of hip hop.

Honestly I become defensive when people (especially white people) start critiquing hip hop.  This is because they define hip hop through the narrow prism of what gets played on the radio.  They define hip hop as what makes the top 10 on BET or MTV.  I swear that is like the tip of the iceberg.  It is what is most visible, but not my culture.  And when you critique hip hop, it feels like a personal attack on me and my generation.  When I start talking about hip hop, these same white folks often roll their eyes as if their limited experience of hip hop defines my culture and my generation.  I identify with the good and the bad of my culture, the tip of the iceberg and the other 90 percent that is not visible, but so powerful.

And I, like so many others, am struggling watching the death of our culture by powerful white folks.  It hurts.  It hurts to see our multi-colored, polyphonic, poly-rhythmic culture reduced to white folks’ fantasies of black crime.  It hurts to know that there are a few artists who are willing to sell out their communities in order to escape poverty.

I believe in us.  We are survivors.  We survived so much, we can survive the death of hip hop.   We created jazz from blues and funk from jazz and hip hop from funk.  I am grateful that I am a part of one of the greatest cultural expressions of our age.

We are hip hop.

November 3, 2008. Uncategorized.