Rather see the above links in your inbox or feed reader?
Subscribe to our Links for hand-picked items from around the web
Plight Deepens for Hip-hop, Black Men to Blame · by Rafi Kam
Several recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of hip-hop music from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of musicologists (whatever that means), pundits and real “heads” to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.
The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in “rap” music (which we reiterate is not hip-hop!) and its circles since the mid-1980’s: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group’s cultural attributes — its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members — and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools, bad housing, police abuses, yatta, yatta, yatta.
“There’s something very different happening with hip-hop, and it’s something we can no longer ignore,” said Reyna Montalvo-Strauss, a Musicology major and graduating senior at Oberlin University.
Ms. Montalvo-Strauss may die alone but she is not alone in her observation about hip-hop. Something is happening that is very different from say country music, klezmer or any other form of music.
Hip-hop alone among all musical forms is plagued by its obsession with urban life, rhyming non-sequitirs, “slanguistics”, repetitive ad-libs and criminal narratives. The candid answer to this problem is that hip-hop is stagnated, held back because it is mired in the “cool-pose culture” of young black men.
Yes, once upon a time young black men had their part to play in hip-hop. Who else would have thought of stealing power from the city streetlights or breakbeats from the records of their elders? These are the pillars upon which a Kulture was built.
But these days young black men and hip-hop just shouldn’t mix. Experts say there were portentious moments in the late 1980s when that gangster vibe developed.
Click to view graphical breakdown
In the early 80s hip-hop was a movement that pushed for peaceful gatherings, “throwing up” (not in the sense of vomiting but showing off what you could do) and consumption of cocaine and booze (which would lead to the other kind of throwing up). By the late 80s thanks to movies like New Jack City, some black men got the idea to louse up hip-hop by talking about crack and guns all the time instead of spinning on their head. Even the black men who stayed positive (or political as it was known then) were spouting some pretty dicey rhetoric. Not the kind of things you’d want to play in front of your rabbi.
I think I’m getting away from my main point which is that the thing holding hip-hop back is young black men. Since this is apparently a vice-versa type of thing why don’t black men and hip-hop just agree to leave each other alone? This is for the advancement of a culture after all.
– endtroducing1996@yahoo.comNote: This piece was part of an April Fool’s satire.
Comments for "Plight Deepens for Hip-hop, Black Men to Blame"
satirical racism… No…
old white ceo’s killed hip hop thankyouverymuch.
— dubble Feb 27, 08:48 PM