I've wanted to write a column about hip-hop music for a long time now—and the recent debate about its putative death has really piqued my interest—but I've always run up against one tiny little problem: I don't know the first thing about hip-hop. I'm as ignorant to the genre as I am to Renaissance lute music. Which, really, is pretty strange—we grew up in the thick of the hip-hop movement, the 1990s, a decade saturated by rap stars and their stardom.
I remember when the East Coast/West Coast wars were raging—I didn't understand them, really, but I remember them. I remember when Nelly became a national icon (as someone from St. Louis, this was a pretty big deal). And I remember pretty much every car I've ever been a passenger in has been more or less a roving boom box for hip-hop music.
And yet I've never understood the genre. Not really. I've had friends attempt to give me primers: here's what to look for, here's what to notice, pay attention to this ... and it's given me some insight, but not enough, I feel, for me to make any kinds of judgments. All of which leads me to, admittedly blindly, discuss this comment (and album title) by the rapper Nas that, ""Hip-hop is dead.""
That's a big statement. And, as I understand it, Nas is a fairly big name in the world of hip-hop—this isn't Third Eye Blind proclaiming the death of rock 'n' roll—so it's a statement that should be taken seriously, or at least be seriously examined. Before getting into the merits of the debate, though, I want to take a closer look at what Nas actually said. The full quote is: ""Hip-hop is dead because we as artists no longer have the power."" Nas goes onto discuss the death of America due to corporate strangleholds over art, bad politics and the fact that ""everything in this society has been done.""
Despite my lack of hip-hop expertise, I think money and socio-political problems are fairly universal in their pervasiveness and in their effects. Hip-hop is dead, according to Nas, because—well, what is it about these things that have effectively killed the genre? Did the genre sell out? Give up its artistic quality for a bigger paycheck? Has the corporate world of record companies overpowered the artists? What's the story?
To answer this I turn to my friend and avid hip-hop fan, Alain. Alain explains that part of it has to do with character—e.g. guys merely pretending to be ""tough"" or ""from the mean streets of ____"" —and part of it having to do with character in a greater sense of the word—e.g. rappers getting into feuds over pride, etc and refusing to work them out.
But the most interesting part of listening to Alain's opinion on the ""Hip-hop is dead"" comment was his own opinion on the subject. I quote him at length here:
""Yeah, I have problems with hip-hop, too, but mine are more ... at the core. I have problems with some of the fundamentals. Hip-hop has exhausted the boasting and the bragging about riches. Every new song has me thinking, ‘I've heard this guy bragging about this before' but then I realize ‘but this is a new guy and he's got new money,' and of course once someone gets big they'll start rapping about what everybody else whose made it big raps about. And it's getting old. Rap should use the medium for something else. I'd like to see more messages in rap. Some rappers do that sometimes, but usually it comes off badly. They have their foot in the door but they're still trying to sound really cool. Kanye West and Ludacris can do this well. Telling stories. Songs with a point. Rapping is supposed to be an art of storytelling and, more often than not, it's anything but that. Hip-hop is not dead,"" said Alain, ""but its soul is kinda bleeding to death.""
