I hate hip-hop music. I mean, I hate today’s hip-hop music. Wait, let me change that: I hate today’s mainstream hip-hop music.
It’s important that I make that distinct, because although probably 99 percent of what we hear on the radio and play in the streets is poisonous garbage, there are still some artists producing music that can be genuinely described as real hip hop. This essay isn’t about hip hop’s last artists; this is about the faux-artists that have hijacked hip hop.
I’m too young to remember what hip hop was like when it first began. From what I’ve been able to piece together from documentaries, books, the conscious tracks of old and their true descendants, hip hop started in the South Bronx as a way for Blacks and Puerto Ricans to express themselves and spread awareness of what was really going on in their neighborhoods.
For over a century, poor colored communities have always been corralled into the segregated sections of major cities – on the other side of the river, on the other side of the bridge, or like in Chicago, on the other side of the expressway. Even today, American cities remain highly segregated (as people living in Chicago, D.C. or the Bay Area will agree). These darker parts of the city were then systematically underinvested in or perhaps disinvested in, while higher-class neighborhoods saw better schools, cleaner parks, bigger community centers and, therefore, safer streets. The poorer inhabitants of the city were forgotten for most of the 20th century, specifically following the Civil Rights Movement, which represented the peak of their empowerment and influence. The 70s and 80s witnessed poverty, drug addiction and violence establish a firm grip on places like the South Side of Chicago. Meanwhile, mainstream America had its attention on other issues.
Then came hip hop. Actually, the birth of hip hop coincided with the decline of the inner city. It began with DJs in New York in the early ‘70s, pioneers like Bronx’s DJ Kool Herc and the popular dance parties he organized to keep people off the streets. The innovations they made in music were pretty simple: DJs would take small portions of a popular song – usually only a few seconds long – and loop it over and over again on turntables. The MCs, who followed DJs around and acted as promoters, began coming up with clever rhymes to say into the microphone as the DJ played his music.
Hip hop quickly assumed a more socially-conscious role as an art form that focused on the serious issues facing the urbanized Black and Latino communities. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 song “The Message” is considered by most people to be the first influential track in socially-conscious hip hop. It not only shaped what hip hop would sound like; it affected what hip-hop lyrics would discuss, as well. “The Message” presented a sharp description of life in the inner city and how society at large was responsible for the conditions many poor Black and Latino people faced on a daily basis.
“The Message” was released two years before I was born, and so I don’t remember the immediate affect it had on ‘80s hip-hop music. My first introduction to hip hop came in the mid-‘90s, after gangsta rap had fully invaded and conquered the hip-hop scene. At the head of the pack was Death Row Records. I remember listening to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992), Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle (1993) and Tupac’s All Eyez on Me (1996); it appealed to the type of angry, nothing-to-lose attitude that most Black and Latino kids felt growing up poor and in terrible conditions. Being from the Chicago area, my friends and I were big fans of Midwest rappers like Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Three 6 Mafia and Twista. The music these rappers produced was like a giant middle finger to the rules that benefited people who weren’t us, the cops who weren't there to protect but to confine, and the whole one-sided system kids like me had no hope in overcoming.
Most contemporary fans of hip hop can describe what happened next: a small portion of hip hop remained conscious while the mainstream became engulfed in the East Coast-West Coast feud that left hip hop’s two biggest stars dead; most of the music went commercial somewhere in the chaos. Nothing much has happened to hip hop in the past decade – save for, maybe, Eminem, who showed the hip-hop world that a person could be White and out-rap anybody in the game.
Conscious hip hop seems to be gaining some popularity again, which is promising, but mainstream hip hop (what I call hip pop) is still being overrun by nothingness.
In reality, something did happen nearly 10 years ago that represents the ongoing war in hip hop today: Jay-Z and Nas had a very public, inter-borough feud in New York. It started in 1999 when some of Jay-Z’s lyrics were taken by members from Nas’ camp to be a diss toward Nas. The legendary lyricist from Queens decided to let the insult slide. But in 2001, Jay-Z released the song “The Takeover” off his monumental album The Blueprint. In it, Jay, one of the founding fathers of present-day hip pop, dedicates an entire verse aimed at Nas, one of the founding fathers of present-day hip-hop consciousness. Jay says things like “Switch up your flow. You’re shit is ga’bage/ What chu tryin’ to spit? Knowledge?” and “Ask Nas. He don’t want it with Hov.”
Nas, who wasn’t as visible or popular at the time as Jay-Z was, released his album Stillmatic, whose name is a reference to Nas’ classic 1994 album Illmatic. The album contained the song “Ether,” which is arguably the best diss song ever written and solidified Nas’ reputation as a true lyricist. In the song, Nas says to Jay, “You traded your soul for riches,” and goes on to accuse the Brooklyn rapper of being “a phony” and “a fake.” He also describes Jay as unoriginal who fashions his style and persona after other people.
The feud between Jay-Z and Nas – which, fortunately, ended without bloodshed – represents the state of hip-hop music today: in the end, while Nas won the battle lyrically, Jay-Z won commercially. To this day, fans of hip hop are still debating who the better rapper is between the two; one side arguing that Jay-Z has sold ten times more than Nas, and the other side contending that Nas’ lyrical skills rest on a level that Jay’s have never reached.
Truthfully, I think both rappers are two of the greatest lyricists ever to pick up a microphone. And the issue has never been with the skill level that Jay and the sea of rappers that have followed his lead possess. No one doubts their skill. But I, and the other fans who place Nas above Jay in hip hop’s pantheon, feel hip hop should be more than clever rhymes.
If it’s going to continue on as an art form that represents the dispossessed people of the inner city, hip hop needs to contain a positive message about empowerment and community uplift. It’s not that hip hop shouldn’t talk about guns, drugs and violence; in fact, the music needs to address those issues, too. On Illmatic, Nas had a song called “N.Y. State of Mind” in which he talks about all the terrible things that gangsta rap was also discussing around the same time. But when Nas’ lyrics focused on conditions in the ghetto, they were never glorified. Of his own neighborhood, for instance, he comments, “Each block is like a maze full of black rats trapped.” Yet, Nas was not so much trying to describe what life was like in the ghetto, as he was telling the people in the ghetto – who understand full well what the ghetto was and what it wasn’t – that they needed to escape.
A despicably small portion of hip-hop music still delivers such messages, and mainstream hip-hop music no longer provides a commentary on inner-city life. Socially-conscious music, by a sleight of hand, has become a sub-genre of hip hop. Lyricists like Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Black Thought, Immortal Technique and Chicago’s own Common and Lupe Fiasco keep the art form alive. Common’s own 1994 song “I Used to Love H.E.R.” off Resurrection provides a brief history of hip-hop music up until that point, detailing the rise and commercialization of hip hop. Mos Def and Talib Kweli formed the group Black Star in 1998 and have produced many popular, socially-conscious tracks since then.
Lupe Fiasco – with all my hometown pride aside – seems to be the next in line to carry that torch. The West-Side Chicago rapper has succeeded in something that many before him have failed to do: becoming mainstream while remaining socially conscious. His widely popular album Lasers features the song “All Black Everything” in which he envisions an America where everyone is Black – and thus, where slavery and racism have never occurred. The track “Words I Never Said” is a biting criticism of popular culture in America, the American news media and even hip hop culture itself, and has become the official anthem for the progressive Internet-based group Anonymous.
In 2006, Nas released the title song “Hip Hop Is Dead,” and since then, many people in the hip-hop community have been debating on whether hip hop truly is dead and what that means. I myself don’t think hip hop is dead, but it is definitely lost. Also, there are a few aspects of popular hip-hop music that need to be killed: those parts that promote misogyny, homophobia, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and materialism over intellectualism. Such characteristics are like weeds that have overrun hip-hop music and threaten to destroy it for good.
And I don’t entirely blame consumers like most critics tend to do. It’s not my peers’ fault that most of them have become slaves to popular culture; they have been socially engineered that way. I blame the industry and the executives who don’t care about the message hip-hop music promotes so long as it sells. The most popular record labels in hip hop are owned by the largest of the ‘big four” music companies, Universal. It’s roster includes all the big-name artists dominating the airwaves today: Lil’ Wayne, Drake, Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, Big Sean, Ace Hood, Jadakiss, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Ne-Yo, Young Jeezy, Ludacris and Rick Ross. There is just too much power and influence over hip hop in the hands of too few people in London (where Universal is headquartered.)
Popular hip-hop music – the kind of music produced and controlled by Universal and Warner– no longer represents Black and Latino life in the inner city, and I don’t think that’s an accident. When socially-conscious music began inspiring gangsta rap in the late 1980s, mainstream America realized the power that empowered Black and Latino communities could potentially have. Groups like N.W.A. and their politically charged lyrics scared a lot of mainstream Americans who had always been afraid of the people who inhabited the inner city.
Today N.W.A. is viewed as the genesis of gangsta rap by most people, but the music they produced was significantly different than the lower-quality gangsta rap popularized by Death Row Records a few years later. N.W.A. presented social consciousness in street packaging, whereas later gangsta rap presented a thug persona with no packaging. N.W.A. told Black Americans living in the ghetto to fight the system, but today’s music tells listeners to fight whoever. The Eazy-E complained that mainstream America had sentenced Blacks and Latinos to live in communities infested with crack dealers, prostitutes and pimps, but rappers like Rick Ross and Lil’ Wayne are imitating such people. Early gangsta rap was gutter music with a solid nucleus of social consciousness; today's rap is just gutter music.
It’s not a matter of when hip hop will return to its socially-conscious roots, because some artists have never strayed far from hip hop’s home. But I’m wondering when the people of my generation will begin to see popular hip-hop music for what it is: violent, ignorant, tasteless, and banal. The music we listen to and enjoy may be good for a house party or a night on the town, but we must realize that it’s a poor rendition of what hip hop’s truly supposed to be. Hip hop used to be something of us, by us, and for us. It needs to be that again.
It’s time the hip-hop community starts taking back hip hop.