I’ll be 35 tomorrow and I recognize that I am getting a little long in the tooth to try to pretend I am cool by discussing Hip Hop versus Rap with my daughter and her friends. So rather than embarrass myself with “The Child” I will have this conversation here where no one will laugh out loud when I admit that I don’t get Soulja Boy (why the hell would he spell it that way?). That said this post is dedicated to Hip Hop.
While driving to work this morning I was listening to my Hip Hop CD. Let me tell you up front very few Rap artist move me and so there are not any on my CD. I listen to the Diggable Planets (of The Rebirth of Slick fame), Asheru (of Boondocks Theme fame), Common, Mos-Def, Kanye, LL, Tribe Called Quest, Erik B & Rakim, Eric Sermon and a few others. There is also a good mix of reggae on this CD because admittedly I prefer lyrical content with my “wake me up” beats.
Imagine my surprise when I came across a couple of the songs off of Jay-Z’s American Gangster CD. (I did not buy the CD but a friend let me ripped his copy because he thought I’d like it.) I was pleasantly surprised at the intricacies of his artistry. I could feel his vibe, the flow was excellent, and the lyrics were not only hard-hitting and poignant but also witty.
I can appreciate his view on jealousy…
“…Males shouldn’t be jealous that’s a female trait
Whatchu mad cause you push dimes and he sell weight?
Y’all don’t know my expenses, I gotta buy a bigger place
He he he, and more baggies, why you all aggie?
Nigga respect the game, that should be it
What you eat don’t make me shit – where’s the love?”
So where does this leave me. Nas claims Hip Hop is dead. Al Sharpton wants more responsibility in the music. Russell Simmons says it the label’s fault for pushing the gimmicky garbage. Nelly says all rap is not meant to have a message — sometimes its just fun and sometimes the fun is adult only. Chuck D says it has lost some of it conscious, and Oprah just wants it to stop abusing women. So where am I in this mix? I am nowhere.
I love real music. I love honest poetry. So, here is my take. Hip Hop has been taken over by the mass marketing corporations and been remarketed for a more public palette. The problem is that Blacks are the driving force of creativity in Hip Hop. They always have been. This leads to a situation where the slave mentality takes over.
Eldridge Cleaver in his book Soul on Ice discusses the four racial archetypes. The Omnipotent Administrator, The Ultrafeminine, The Amazon, and The Supermasculine Menial. For the purpose of this post I will only go into the Supermasculine Menial and the Amazon. In his book, Cleaver explains that the Supermasculine Menial represents the Black male, the Amazon represents the Black Female and the way they are seen by the other 2 archetypes. The Black Male is the strong, sturdy, mentally lacking workhorse of the group while the Black Female is the domesticated, scheming, street-smart watered down version of femininity. She is not expected to be beautiful, graceful, or classy — she just needs to be able to do all the domestic chores, birth and mammy the babies. Both of these groups are expected to be prolific; however, the black male sexuality is to be feared and the black female is the height of sexual inhibition and is to exploited.
Now stay with me this is where this gets interesting in relation to Hip Hop. Hip Hop began as spoken word with groups like the Last Poets who began doing militant spoken word over music. This was hip Hop in its infancy. This is its soul — poetry that speaks to a people while soothing its brutal honesty with music. Now put Cleaver’s archetype into play and this is what happens.
The “powers that be” (Omnipotent Administrator) dislike intelligence displayed by who they have for centuries considered the lesser species. Therefore, they threw money at Hip Hop (under the guise of socio-economic upliftment) with the condition that the intelligent thought was watered down and restructured to fit better into the idea of thuggish, brutal, sexually dysfunctional work horse males and over sexed, classless, hoodrat-esque females. This creates a group of caricatures of what the genre originally set out to do. This was the birth of rap. That goes a long way to explain Flavor of Love and I Love New York. Shows like this are siblings to the rap counter culture. It is black face for the new millennium.
So does that mean Hip Hop is dead. No. Rap has eclipsed Hip Hop as its dumbed down cousin. True Hip Hop is forced to hide itself underground. It has been exiled to live its life with all of its artistic and creative ingenuity in the proverbial wilderness of American society. Occasionally one of the well-known artists (in this case Jay-Z) will put together a project that takes us back to the days before Hip Hop became rap.
You see we like to glamorize the past of Hip Hop by pretending that its social conscious only discussed the uplifting aspects of life. We will tell our children that real Hip Hop spoke of positive things and gave messages of hope, but the reality of the situation is that true Hip Hop was a barometer of the life of its poets and very seldom was that life clean and neat. It was the intelligent ghetto news.
True Hip Hop covers all aspects of black life. It discusses God; it talks about Sex, Drugs, last night’s party, police brutality, racism and love. Hip Hop has always had multiple personality disorder. It has always been both misogynistic and loving. It has always wanted political justice right along side street justice. The difference is that before the money and fame it was educated, concise, and well thought. What does this tell me? Hip Hop is not dead… right now it just rest in pieces.
