Reply #10: Hip Hop is sick because it is old and feeble. [View All]

[slampoet]

As probably the only person on this board who has ever made his living in the service of Hip Hop I can back up that like other art forms 90% of those out there are in for the short game and want to be stars rather than artists. I find that the skills of even 20-30 year veterans of rap and hip hop are often fair at best and with very few exceptions.

The main problem and difference is that to an even greater degree than previous music forms the obsession with getting paid is killing whatever chance Hip Hop had in gaining respectability. Almost all rap for widespread public consumption is Capitalistic. Rather than embrace the Africa-centric themes of 80's hip hop, the genre has instead decided to go for the money train. The resulting focus on the right clothes car products accessories owes more to poor people wanting to emulate fashion week more than emulate Gil Scott Heron (Xtra points if you understand WHY he is the person to emulate, because 95% of rappers i encounter don't know who he is).

Those that don't rap about themselves, expensive toys, parties, violence, or sex are relegated to the alternative section that is a ghetto within a ghetto. The same executives that brag about pulling themselves up from the streets often either don't have that story and just made it up, or they fear going back to the streets so much that they don't produce anyone who doesn't rap about themselves, expensive toys, parties, violence, or sex. The subject matter is so closed that even rapping about weed was seen as a radical thing 12 years ago.

The best thought on the matter is a quote from the group De La Soul.

In 1988 they said, "It's not that we're so different, It's just that everyone else is trying to be the same."

(19 years later and De La Soul is still considered alternative, non-commercial, and experimental and it is because every time someone listens to what they are talking about the listener is shocked that they are talking about things that matter to ordinary people, not Moet and Escalades.)