50 Years Later, Is There Anything Left Of Hip Hop?

[Low End Derrick]

(It's a long ass article, so I'll only post some choice excerpts: )

Hip hop at 50 is dealing with that cost; it has reached its midlife crisis. It took the corporate job, bought the Ferrari, left its family, and hit the dating apps. It found new crowds, and is still going out to the clubs, but no one has the heart to tell it that just maybe it isn’t the coolest motherfukker in the room anymore. It has also done the lamentably cliché thing of veering conservative as it aged. There’s a fascinating story to be mined from this mid-life crisis—but few are telling it.

Part of it is inevitability. As Succession’s Logan Roy proclaimed, "money wins." Greg Tate (RIP) wrote that story on hip hop's 30th birthday. In December of 2004, Tate assured that "twenty years from now we'll be able to tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people's folkways." Back then Tate laughed at the people who gathered for a birthday party when, in his view, they were really presiding over a funeral. Hip hop had died, the moment it fully married into global hyper-capitalism.

Fifty years down the line, you can start this
Cuz we'll be the Old School artists
And even in that time, I'll say a rhyme
A brand-new style, ruthless and wild
-Boogie Down Productions, "I'm Still #1"​

When KRS-One promised to say a rhyme “50 years down the line,” who would’ve imagined just how wild his style would be? This past July, the man who wrote “Black Cop” and “The Sound of the Police” performed a half-baked freestyle for a former black cop turned ethically unsteady mayor at a press conference that kicked off the hip-hop-at-50 block party series in New York City. That’s … some wild shyt.

A week later, the man who gave us “Buck tha Devil” and “[fukk] You and Your Heroes” rode through “the hood” with Tucker Carlson and waxed cynical about the COVID-19 vaccine. Ice Cube has been flirting with right-wing talking points for a while now, while leaving the tiniest bit of room for plausible “both-sides” deniability. He levies harsh critiques against the Democratic party while conducting business with Steve Bannon. The rapper who once warned us not to aspire to be “just like Jack—‘cause Jack is calling you a ni**er behind your back” is in cahoots with the whitest of white dudes who seem likely to call someone like me a ni**er to my face. That’s … some wild shyt.

Jay-Z, who has been recording Robert Kiyosaki–style Rich Dad Poor Dad rap albums in his later years, went from aiding Bruce Ratner in expediting Brooklyn's gentrification to bringing bitcoin to Marcy while cosplaying Basquiat. When people noted his status as the apex capitalist predator of hip hop, leveraging his and our cool and our purchasing power and values to enrich himself and then jump ship, he cynically equated the term capitalist to anti-black, racist slurs. He also recently made a joint album with Jay Electronica—a militant NOI devotee who had an affair with a literal Rothschild heiress! That’s … some next-level wild shyt.

Both the hip hop mainstream and underground/alt scenes are teeming with anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists encouraging black people to abandon “the Democratic plantation.” You can find Freddie Gibbs on Joe Rogan’s show; you can find Rogan on Gibbs’s latest album. The other day Griselda affiliate Benny the Butcher took a break from recounting all the plugs he met to pledge fealty to Trump. Ransom is making songs from the perspectives of Kyrie Irving and Kevin Samuels.

Killer Mike is glad Reagan died. Killer Mike is expressing affinity for Candace Owens. Killer Mike is in conversation with the Dalai Lama. What the fukk is going on here?

This isn’t some condescending view from a lofty perch. To borrow from Michael B. Jordan all those years ago: "This shyt? This is me, yo, right here." I grew up smack dab in the middle of hip hop culture. My cousin is Kool Keith from Ultramagnetic MCs (just saw him two weeks ago at the family picnic); Kurtis Blow is a family friend; my uncle Vernon was a well-known b-boy; several of my cousins are aspiring rappers. We were there in the parks and housing projects, at the shows, and in some cases in the street crews, from Harlem to Fort Greene, participating in the culture, pushing it forward.

Which is why I can look at hip hop at 50 and say: This is some wild shyt. What the fukk is going on here? Even worse, it is now precisely what it abhorred in its incipience: conservative, white-flattering, and, maybe worst of all, predictable. Hip hop in 2023 is utterly formulaic. Check Instagram and you can see any number of white women mouthing drill verses at weddings. Everyone knows the viral dances and can replicate the flows. I never imagined hip hop would be so cute, so safe, so generic.

A few years back I stared in astonishment when the Times ran a story about white 20-somethings and the burgeoning culture of beatboxing. Beatboxing! A very basic improvisational art that quite truly almost every negro my age in my building practiced was being Columbused 25 years later, described in the paper of record as having journeyed from a party trick to being tied to Hamilton. It recalls all I’ve read about jazz history, an art built on the talents, perseverance, blood, and breath of orphans, of dispossessed and disenfranchised savants—playing in the windows of storefront churches, or clubs the performers were barred from frequenting as guests—many of whom died penniless, from the pains of life: from racism, harassment, poverty, drug abuse, alcoholism. Look at the faculty pages of music departments that teach jazz across the country today. Look at the critics. Americans generally want blackness without black people. Public Enemy’s song title "The Anti-****** Machine" springs to mind. And when that machine revs up, good night, Irene. Hip hop will get there, because it is inevitable.

Having been there since its infancy, I can say hip hop has never been more warped, absurd, hilarious, and incoherent. It has never been less of an organic culture, or more a commodified circus; it has never been less black or less anti-establishment. Yet, somehow, it has never taken itself more seriously. Which is, indeed, deeply American. More morbid than that, a significant portion of the black audience has adopted the white gaze. White acceptance, once anathema, now buys one an enduring credibility with an increasingly aspirational black audience.

Someone close to me was homeschooled in an evangelical household—wasn’t allowed to listen to any music that wasn’t religious. She explained to me that she worries about her lack of taste in music. Some genres, like hip hop, she finds especially challenging to decipher. The cadence, the slang, the speed of speech. But she loves the Hamilton soundtrack. As someone who has consumed music obsessively across nearly all genres for my entire life, I was horrified by the idea of being deprived of music until adulthood. It made me think of how long and complicated the process is to build taste, to understand culture—how long it takes to even understand what either means, both on the personal level and more widely. So many years of consumption; experiential knowledge; perspectivism; the balancing with and bouncing off history that we call contextualizing. It brought me to a chilling thought: What happens when the people who lack all that in a certain area are setting the standard for what has value there?

A 41-year-old white woman from Iowa who didn’t listen to rap until five years ago sat across from me at a bar and let me know that "Album of the year is between Kendrick and Pusha T.” NPR proclaims the opening bars of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” “the darkest, most nihilistically dejected thing you’ve ever heard.” Two white dudes are explaining to me via ESPN that a Jadakiss bar about Sam Cassell was “for the streets.” They identify as “veteran storytellers in the hip hop space.” To paraphrase Shawty Lo: Must be two streets; must be two hip hop spaces. Maybe that’s why my favorite moment of the year that hip hop turned 50 was Tek—who’d finally had enough of a doltish, overzealous podcast host in a tacky shirt, who was angry about Smif-n-Wessun’s friendship with Tupac—shutting down the bullshyt discourse.

Read the whole thing, though. Really intersting perspective on the whole Hip Hop 50 celebrations.

50 Years Later, Is There Anything Left Of Hip Hop? | Defector

I went to hip hop’s 50th birthday party, and all I got was a collection of insipid lists. And a new Sprite commercial. To be fair, there were also the usual puff pieces. The New York Times detailed “How Hip Hop Conquered the World.” But I’ve been with it almost every step of the way, […]

defector.com

 

[Knucklehead]

Interesting article.
Props for posting.
Times change but culture persists.
Just may not be recognizable to the originators.

 

[Stone]

We’re at the end of Hiphop being the dominant cultural force that’s for sure. One thing I’ve wondered for years is what the next wave is.

Typically it would’ve been created by now

 

[Knucklehead]

Besides obviously Taylor Swift the dominant cultural force right now is Tiktok.
I’m too washed to be on it but my little cousins be showing me all kinds of cool artists doing super creative things with the music.
A lot of the exploding Latin and Afro artists also heavily hip-hop influenced.
The cultures not going anywhere just morphing.

 

[WIA20XX]

When folks use phrases like this , "Hip hop had died, the moment it fully married into global hyper-capitalism."

It's hard to take them seriously. This is some FD Signifier type analysis, although with more crediblity.

Later he says

Back in 1984 Tony Van Der Meer, in his intro to David Toop’s book The Rap Attack, wrote, “It’s very simple: Hip hop has become a public relations and marketing strategy that promotes and sells products to the youth.” Again: in 1984........Once the record deals, videos, and movies were brokered and created, hip hop shifted from something happening to just some new shyt to sell.

If Hip Hop died in 84 because Run DMC managed to sell Adidas across the country - well then just consider what hip hop made after 1984. The "culture" would be better off without Rakim, Kane, Kool G. Rap, Chuck D, Krs-1, Nas, Jay, Biggie, Dre, Cube, Snoop, Outkast, Weezy, Master P, Ross, TI, Jeezy, Gucci, etc. Really? You're good with not having Low End Theory and Enter the 36 Chambers and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy?

Just stop hip hop at 1984.

Would anyone still be listening? If Hip Hop never got better than White Lines...

Breakdancing/B-Boying basically stopped being popular then, but they have B-Boy competitions all over the globe, to this day.

There are competing freestyle battle rap circuits now.

And then pulls out this old man ism

What does it mean when the most original, populist, counterculture arts movement of my lifetime doesn't seem to have anything meaningful to say anymore?

This dude ain't listening to nothing young people are listening to. And he doesn't have the bandwidth to understand it.

Like Rapping Duke's "D'Huh, D'Huh" is something to aspire to.
I'm sure he was good with "The Pee Wee Herman", but looked down on Stanky Legg

 

[Hannibal Fox]

This is some FD Signifier type analysis, although with more crediblity.

Yo, that's an apt description

 

[Stone]

When folks use phrases like this , "Hip hop had died, the moment it fully married into global hyper-capitalism."

It's hard to take them seriously. This is some FD Signifier type analysis, although with more crediblity.

Later he says


If Hip Hop died in 84 because Run DMC managed to sell Adidas across the country - well then just consider what hip hop made after 1984. The "culture" would be better off without Rakim, Kane, Kool G. Rap, Chuck D, Krs-1, Nas, Jay, Biggie, Dre, Cube, Snoop, Outkast, Weezy, Master P, Ross, TI, Jeezy, Gucci, etc. Really? You're good with not having Low End Theory and Enter the 36 Chambers and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy?

Just stop hip hop at 1984.

Would anyone still be listening? If Hip Hop never got better than White Lines...

Breakdancing/B-Boying basically stopped being popular then, but they have B-Boy competitions all over the globe, to this day.

There are competing freestyle battle rap circuits now.

And then pulls out this old man ism



This dude ain't listening to nothing young people are listening to. And he doesn't have the bandwidth to understand it.

Like Rapping Duke's "D'Huh, D'Huh" is something to aspire to.
I'm sure he was good with "The Pee Wee Herman", but looked down on Stanky Legg

What are the young people listening to that requires this great bandwidth to understand?

 

[Suspicious Dingo]

Article should be titled "All My Favourite Rappers Got Old "

 

[Stone]

Also a lot of people are gonna read that article and get defensive because they wanna protect their favorite rappers and their “era” but they’ll be missing the point

People have already done it on twitter

 

[WIA20XX]

What are the young people listening to that requires this great bandwidth to understand?

Ice Spice is a perfect example.
Travis Scott is another one.

If you hear those artists and write them off as some pointless bs, you're not hearing it with the ears of the youth.

This guy doesn't have it, prolly lost it a long time ago.

 

[⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐]

Name a worthwhile culture that doesn’t honor it’s legends and forefathers

I’ll wait

 

[papa pimp]

Lol topic has gotten stale now

 

[Stone]

Ice Spice is a perfect example.
Travis Scott is another one.

If you hear those artists and write them off as some pointless bs, you're not hearing it with the ears of the youth.

This guy doesn't have it, prolly lost it a long time ago.

What do you hear when you listen to Ice Spice?

 

[Piff Perkins]

It recalls all I’ve read about jazz history, an art built on the talents, perseverance, blood, and breath of orphans, of dispossessed and disenfranchised savants—playing in the windows of storefront churches, or clubs the performers were barred from frequenting as guests—many of whom died penniless, from the pains of life: from racism, harassment, poverty, drug abuse, alcoholism. Look at the faculty pages of music departments that teach jazz across the country today. Look at the critics. Americans generally want blackness without black people. Public Enemy’s song title "The Anti-****** Machine" springs to mind. And when that machine revs up, good night, Irene. Hip hop will get there, because it is inevitable.


Whewwww. This seems even more prescient today, which happens to be the birthday of Charlie Parker, who would be 103 today. Yet outside of some college courses and jazz-related twitter accounts you wouldn't know that. Arguably one of the top five most influential American artists yet the story wouldn't garner much more than a yawn from audiences today. Makes you wonder what the "culture" will be decades from now, when comparable hip hop legends like Rakim reach that mark.

 

[JNew]

All I know is it’s slowly on its way out. I can’t see it going another 20 years.

If I had to make a guess will get some Afro/Hispanic mix in the next decade.

Even the name ice spice sounds Hispanic.