Hip-Hop on Life Support

Let me establish two things before I get into the discussion proper: first, Hip-Hop is musically my first love (I’ll come back to that later) and second, I generally try to avoid cultural topics because of the relativity of values and opinions but for this one i will make an exception. Hip-Hop is hurting me. She is like a bad girlfriend and I’m steady looking at other women because she keeps breaking my heart. She’s cheating on me with Soulja Boy. Look, at some point I was 17 too and I liked really silly stuff but I don’t think I ever strayed into minstrelsy. Soulja boy and the paradigm that allowed him to become successful have taken the bite out of one of the most powerful types of social protest music. Hip-Hop even in the days when it was about fun, had a form of social commentary that was particularly relevant. From obvious critiques like “The Message”, through less clear forms of commentary like the albums of NWA, Hip-Hop has always had something to say and usually it was something sorta relevant. Soulja Boy and his contemporaries are in the process of destroying that. Hip-Hop isn’t just going pop, it’s transforming into music whose sole purpose is to sell irreverent, irrelevant music to stupid people from the suburbs. One of my friends offered this opinion: Soulja Boy is saving Hip-Hop and making it relevant. If making bad music with no legitimate content is relevant, well you get the idea. Though this subject doesn’t really change a lot politically, I do think that Hip-Hop has a relevant history of being politically important even when it just expressed rage, indifference or violent lack of regard for the norms of western society. These expressions took the temperature of urban black life and that in and of itself was important because it allowed older generations to better understand the children they rejected or abandoned to die in inner cities across America. I don’t mean to pick on Soulja Boy but he’s the best example that I can find of this sad new movement of Hip-Hop. He’s a kid and he wants to sell records, yeah yeah yeah I’ve heard all the reasons (read: excuses) but the fact of the matter is that much of our leadership is based on celebrity and we’re really not in a position where we can afford not to hold people accountable for their garbage. Soulja Boy doesn’t raise kids nor does any other rapper but in many cases nobody raises these kids and to ignore the responsibility of those with so much power over youth culture is frankly being ignorant. Nas was right, Hip-Hop is on some silliness now but it isn’t dead it just needs to be reminded why it became relevant in the first place. In the words of my first girlfriend, Lauryn Hill, (everybody has dreams, right?) “Hip-Hop started out in the heart, uh, now everybody tryna chart…”