k-punk said:
The Cure and Skinny Puppy disconnect with the world, are disgusted with it, to the point of pathology, sickness ---- but hip hop IS the world, is engaged in selling the world back to us,
Hiphop is wiser than Post Punk or Goth or Industrial angst because it realizes that unless you are really going to off yourself, you have to make this life liveable. thus there is a vitality in the music which is as much about the ugliness of the world as it is about the will to fight on, for the things that make it all worth while.
there is humor, there is life giving energy, it's FUN, it gives pleasure, it makes people have a good time, and it properly rocks a party.
this is why it is so popular around the world. and this is why capitalism jumps on it.
the same thing happened with Jazz 100 years ago. it was a music of the underclass, Robert Smith did not in his worst LSD crash have it as bad as people who have been beaten and worked to death their entire lives. YET there is celebration, there is fucking JOY in the music. as much as it expresses abject suffering. and it became so popular and commercialized that gradually it lost most of it's original meaning.
the same thing happened with Tango. it was originally a music of the slaves, a dance black men danced together. and gradually it became the music and dance preferred by bourgeois high society. (and the slaves who started it were not even allowed in the clubs)
So sure today you see the Republican party joining forces with the Source (or was it Vibe?), sure you see hiphop representing some of the worst aspects of this culture, but this is just the effect that Capitalism has on ANYTHING this popular.
I understand what you are saying and where you are coming from, K-Punk, but It is a mistake to not distinguish the music from the forces that exploit it; and it is short-sighted and shallow to blame hiphop for the world's sickness.