So I had a moment earlier this morning where I felt less irrelevant. My cousin, a decade my junior, mentioned a favorite rapper. Thankfully I needed no hater-stance since she wasn’t going on about Kanye or MC Derpenstein 2011.
It’s not even that I have any intense burning dislike of Kanye West except that he’s not and will never be a Chuck D, a KRS-ONE, a Mr. Lif or an Immortal Technique.
When she name-dropped Tech N9ne I actually knew who she was talking about. So there’s that sense of being somewhat less than stupid about current rap/hip-hop.
But I am also left with the sense that the reason everybody started hating on rap in the first place was that the barrier had been broken. It was once a fledgling art form nobody had any words for and it sounded more like disco than like autotuned bullshit.
So it took once-in-a-generation stuff like Run DMC and Public Enemy, 2 Live Crew as well as N.W.A. to make hip-hop into a wide enough genre that it went mainstream.
That also meant that the difficulty of making a name for yourself in that genre meant less skilled and less professional people thought they could get ahead.
So we had the gangster era give the scene a big black eye and then go through g-funk to straight up pop rap for white girls too young to go anywhere but the mall without a legal guardian.
The inevitable decline went from A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Mos Def to complete teeny trash with 50 Cent and whoever he was beefing with a year or two ago. Nobody cares.
Just like rock-n-roll before her, rap/hip-hop broke down doors and gave the world many groundbreaking, memorable, culturally significant musicians. But it also gave us WHO LET DA DAWGS OUT?!?
I’m not saying anything. Just maybe making a subtle point that I once would’ve been unable to even recognize. Sigh.
FIGHT THE POWER!
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