My own views on hip hop are well known. Here are some reasons why I don't like it any more:
1. Black indie. Yes, yes, hip hop is very diverse from a certain POV, but the same case could be made for indie. The reality is that hip hop, like indie, is in the main massively conversative and inertial. Like indie, it serves a consumer base who will be loyal to it no matter what. The difference is that no-one would be mad enough to pretend that indie is cutting edge, whereas ppl still, ludicrously, make that case for hip hop.
2. Tedium. Unlike Tim F, I have no interest whatsoever in guns, hos and booty. I find them boring. Hearing actual ppl talk about such things would be extremely boring, why does it become interesting over a breakbeat? (And it really isn't the case that I 'thought that about hip hop before I was into it' - I really did like hip hop in the 80s, when it was a modernist force, not a complacent cartoon.) Hip hop keeps black males in blackface.
3. Ethics. A logic that can only be called racist excuses all this. If white males were engaging in misogynistic, violent discourse, they would presumably be condemned. The licence given to the black males of hip hop reflects what? A sense that this is 'all that can be expected' of them? Or a 'liberal' causal argument that this is the effect of their social conditions etc? Either way, the message is that less can be expected of black males than of other groups.
4. Masculinism. Consider the posturing of the hip hop male - that frozen swagger, the conspicuous refusal to engage with others except from a position of imperious hostility. It's ugly and unpleasant, and what it represents is FEAR, not confidence. I have to deal with the consequences of this behaviour on a day to day basis. It contributes to a situation in which black males achieve much less than almost any other social group in education, with obvious knock-on effects for life chances, employment etc.
5. Contracted horizons. Hip hop produces a double trap for the underclass black male. He is already trapped at the level of the social, marginalized, unemployed or underemployed; but hip hop also traps him at the level of fantasy. Hip hop's utopia is only a grotesque hyperbolized version of capitalism; in his dreams, the hip hop male still acts like a slave (to the reality principle). In other words, hip hop is Capitalist Realism.
6. Fashion. Hip hop has a HORRIBLE effect on male fashion.
(btw, did anyone see Ekow Eshun's piece on Biggy Smalls as his hero in the Independent the other week? In a year replete with rubbish journalism, that nevertheless stood out for its embarrassing cluelessness...)