I just came across this article. Thoughts?
Is hip-hop bad for black America?
by Courtney Garcia
Kendrick Lamar. Nicki Minaj. Childish Gambino. Chief Keef. From the profound to the profane, these rap artists represent the scale of hip-hop’s status quo. They are the heirs to one of America’s most authentically black art-forms, for better or for worse.
While rap music began as a voice of youth rebellion in marginalized communities, its present incarnation denotes an often times different perspective, one that may not be entirely positive for the African-American community. Though the genre has improved musically with the incorporation of new styles and sophisticated performers, the good is arguably matched by the bad. Talk of drug use, squandered wealth and hypersexual behavior permeates the text of some of rap’s top lyricists, and real life philandering creates a questionable parallel to the stories told in their music.
“Rap hasn’t been a revolutionary means of protest, if it ever really was, for more than two decades now,” says Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip Hop Culture. “What it is now is a mellifluous soundtrack to a certain kind of lifestyle that has its roots in the black and Latino ghetto. The voice of rap today is more sophisticated, yet ultimately shallower than ever before. It does not tend to serve or represent those marginalized communities well. What it does do is conflate the notion of black authenticity with street credibility.”
Williams grew up a middle class kid from New Jersey who idolized Tupac Shakur. For most of his youth, he strove to be more “street” in order to keep up with the “cool posse” – until he realized in college that there were higher pursuits. Perhaps that’s why one of Williams’ biggest gripes with hip hop is the weight it carries in the minds of youth.
“The difference between rappers – even the best and smartest rappers – and serious thinkers is one of kind and not degree,” he says. “So one of the real tragedies of black life today, to my mind, is that so many kids are sold this idea that the two are equivalent.”
Other rap aficionados agree. Leslie Jones, an actress and comedian who’s watched the genre evolve, says she wouldn’t even listen to rap music anymore if it weren’t for the beats.
“I was actually around when rap started,” Jones explains. “The original rap – Sugar Hill and Grandmaster Flash, and then we moved on to Whodini and Run-DMC, Big Daddy Kane. It was all raw. It was stories. It was beats. The rap now has no plot … Sometimes I listen to Lil Wayne and I go, ‘This motherf*****’s retarded.’ The music is awesome, but [he] ain’t saying sh**. I want to take my belt off and just discipline him.”
Over the past decade, the production value of rap music has increased significantly, with the rising popularity of deviations like trap music, “emo” rap and dubstep. The southern crunk artists like T.I. and Young Jeezy have found a larger niche among popular rappers like Rick Ross, Gucci Mane, 2 Chainz and Wacka Flocka Flame, and the trend carried over into the electronic scene. Similarly, emo rap has allowed hip hop to expand its margins, luring audiences from the worlds of pop and electronic into a newfound rap-alternative led by stars such as Kid Cudi, Drake and Kanye West. Yet Jones believes hip hop lyrics have subsequently veered too far from their roots to be respected, even if the production has improved.
“The way that music changed, it shows how our society also changed,” she points out. “It’s also because it’s made to look easy. Back in the day, when you were listening to it, you’d be like, ‘Can’t nobody rap like that!’ But now everybody feels like they can put a record out. I think it’s cheapened us in a way. It’s made us very nonchalant about what’s going on in our society.”
More specifically, the voice of black America has been strained.
“Every person in your neighborhood should not have their own demo tape,” writer Ferrari Sheppard points out. “I’m afraid our dependence on entertainment and art as means of gaining capital, empowerment and liberation has thrown us (so-called minorities) overboard. Examples of success are dangled in front of us like a fruit fixed to a hamster wheel. Jay-Z is one person; Diddy is one person; there are over 30 million black people in the United States. In 2011, Forbes released its list of Billionaires of Color, and out of 1,210 billionaires worldwide, only six are people of color. Not black Americans, people of color. This is extremely telling.”
“Let’s talk about what hip-hop represented when it became the ‘hood’s CNN,’” he continues. “Or a window for white America to safely view the nightmarish effects of crack and Reaganomics on the black community. Every hip hop participant you asked back then would have told you that hip hop represents what’s happening in their neighborhoods: murders, prostitution, degradation, police brutality and harassment. What they couldn’t have told you was that in a decade, billions of dollars would be generated from exploiting those very realities, and that they, the disfranchised, would not be the beneficiaries of that fortune.”
On the other hand, academics like Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson go so far as to teach courses and write books on the philosophy and reach of hip hop. Dyson used Jay-Z as the subject of a sociology course at Georgetown University, looking at how rap globalized a conception of blackness with political impact.
Is hip-hop bad for black America?
by Courtney Garcia
Kendrick Lamar. Nicki Minaj. Childish Gambino. Chief Keef. From the profound to the profane, these rap artists represent the scale of hip-hop’s status quo. They are the heirs to one of America’s most authentically black art-forms, for better or for worse.
While rap music began as a voice of youth rebellion in marginalized communities, its present incarnation denotes an often times different perspective, one that may not be entirely positive for the African-American community. Though the genre has improved musically with the incorporation of new styles and sophisticated performers, the good is arguably matched by the bad. Talk of drug use, squandered wealth and hypersexual behavior permeates the text of some of rap’s top lyricists, and real life philandering creates a questionable parallel to the stories told in their music.
“Rap hasn’t been a revolutionary means of protest, if it ever really was, for more than two decades now,” says Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip Hop Culture. “What it is now is a mellifluous soundtrack to a certain kind of lifestyle that has its roots in the black and Latino ghetto. The voice of rap today is more sophisticated, yet ultimately shallower than ever before. It does not tend to serve or represent those marginalized communities well. What it does do is conflate the notion of black authenticity with street credibility.”
Williams grew up a middle class kid from New Jersey who idolized Tupac Shakur. For most of his youth, he strove to be more “street” in order to keep up with the “cool posse” – until he realized in college that there were higher pursuits. Perhaps that’s why one of Williams’ biggest gripes with hip hop is the weight it carries in the minds of youth.
“The difference between rappers – even the best and smartest rappers – and serious thinkers is one of kind and not degree,” he says. “So one of the real tragedies of black life today, to my mind, is that so many kids are sold this idea that the two are equivalent.”
Other rap aficionados agree. Leslie Jones, an actress and comedian who’s watched the genre evolve, says she wouldn’t even listen to rap music anymore if it weren’t for the beats.
“I was actually around when rap started,” Jones explains. “The original rap – Sugar Hill and Grandmaster Flash, and then we moved on to Whodini and Run-DMC, Big Daddy Kane. It was all raw. It was stories. It was beats. The rap now has no plot … Sometimes I listen to Lil Wayne and I go, ‘This motherf*****’s retarded.’ The music is awesome, but [he] ain’t saying sh**. I want to take my belt off and just discipline him.”
Over the past decade, the production value of rap music has increased significantly, with the rising popularity of deviations like trap music, “emo” rap and dubstep. The southern crunk artists like T.I. and Young Jeezy have found a larger niche among popular rappers like Rick Ross, Gucci Mane, 2 Chainz and Wacka Flocka Flame, and the trend carried over into the electronic scene. Similarly, emo rap has allowed hip hop to expand its margins, luring audiences from the worlds of pop and electronic into a newfound rap-alternative led by stars such as Kid Cudi, Drake and Kanye West. Yet Jones believes hip hop lyrics have subsequently veered too far from their roots to be respected, even if the production has improved.
“The way that music changed, it shows how our society also changed,” she points out. “It’s also because it’s made to look easy. Back in the day, when you were listening to it, you’d be like, ‘Can’t nobody rap like that!’ But now everybody feels like they can put a record out. I think it’s cheapened us in a way. It’s made us very nonchalant about what’s going on in our society.”
More specifically, the voice of black America has been strained.
“Every person in your neighborhood should not have their own demo tape,” writer Ferrari Sheppard points out. “I’m afraid our dependence on entertainment and art as means of gaining capital, empowerment and liberation has thrown us (so-called minorities) overboard. Examples of success are dangled in front of us like a fruit fixed to a hamster wheel. Jay-Z is one person; Diddy is one person; there are over 30 million black people in the United States. In 2011, Forbes released its list of Billionaires of Color, and out of 1,210 billionaires worldwide, only six are people of color. Not black Americans, people of color. This is extremely telling.”
“Let’s talk about what hip-hop represented when it became the ‘hood’s CNN,’” he continues. “Or a window for white America to safely view the nightmarish effects of crack and Reaganomics on the black community. Every hip hop participant you asked back then would have told you that hip hop represents what’s happening in their neighborhoods: murders, prostitution, degradation, police brutality and harassment. What they couldn’t have told you was that in a decade, billions of dollars would be generated from exploiting those very realities, and that they, the disfranchised, would not be the beneficiaries of that fortune.”
On the other hand, academics like Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson go so far as to teach courses and write books on the philosophy and reach of hip hop. Dyson used Jay-Z as the subject of a sociology course at Georgetown University, looking at how rap globalized a conception of blackness with political impact.