stelfox said:
this is quite interesting actually, moving on to prince, hip-hop and house music, especially in the light of mark's recent comments about hip-hop as all-consuming 21st century evil, i always find it pretty odd how white people who don't really like hip-hop have such high-minded expectations of black people and what blackness should be - like somehow the discursive standard should be higher, more "conscious" (bleaaarghhh!), more progressive in urban music than rock and pop. this is just daft.
In fact, of course, and as I've argued previously, exactly the opposite is the case. It is the white soulboy contingent who have different, lower, standards for black performers than they would ever dream of employing in relation to whites. 'White' genres that are relentlessly cartoonish, boorish and misogynistic are rightly derided and ridiculed. That's why Marcello's comparison of hip hop with hair metal was completely apt - but you have to ask why hip-hoppers escape that kind of disdain, why it is that much less is expected of blacks than whites.
But there's something else lurking behind this position I think: a kind of outrage that there is someone who doesn't like hip hop, as if not liking hip hop was an ethical and aesthetic flaw which automatically invalidated any other judgement the person daring not to like it could make. There's a strange circularity to the outrage: 'you don't like hip hop because you don't like hip hop', as if 'not liking hip hop' was some ethnic fate rather than a preference a person can have at particular points in their life for very good reasons. Simon's had this kind of shit in the past - people confusing not being a fan of hip hop with an inability to appreciate it.
Again, I think we have to reflect on why it is that hip hop is accorded this singular status. No-one would demand that everyone like Industrial...
the constant harking back to the 80s as hip-hop's creative high point "because it talked about real things, man, and wasn't all about the benjamins" is really misleading - everybody wanted to get paid right from the off, look at eric b and rakim, pe, flash and melle mel - and somewhat odd.
That isn't really the position. There's a difference between wanting to be paid, which every artist has a right to expect, and endlessly bleating on about wealth, appearing on MTV Cribs, etc. Like it or not, hip hop simply is mainstream dominant global culture in a way it never quite was in the eighties. There was still some frission, some friction then... now, when you see Jay-Z doing a Reebok commercial, you know you are looking right into the eyes of global capital.
Plus, to compare the mid-80s to now in CREATIVE terms is somewhat embarrassing for hip hop, to say the least. The breadth of hip hop then, the invention - everything from Schoolly D to the Skinny Boys to Mantronix to Boogie Down Productions (not to mention the obvious, but still untouchable Public Enemy, who were genuinely
breathtaking to hear, nor worthy dullards like De La Soul and the other Naked Tongues lot) - totally shames the streamlined, predictable stuck in the mud state of the genre now.
there is just as much socially conscious, politically engaged dancehall reggae and hip-hop as there is rock.
Maybe that's the problem then.. because who would defend rock, the most reactionary and creatively bankrupt of all genres?
as martin clark once said, even grime is political. maybe it's not explicit and flag-waving about it, but there's a real sense of internalised, implicit discourse, chronicling people's dreams, the mundanity of daily life, their desire for change. this can all be heard in what i'll call, for the sake of argument, "lyrical black music", with quite a bit being clearly stated in hip-hop, if you bother to actually listen to it, and more than you can dream of in dancehall. in fact, dancehall itself and the building of a dance, as stoltzoff has written (linking pretty nicely with a few of hakim bey's ideas), creates an autonmomous zone where discourse is actually made possible - the dance becoming a medium, a forum for community gathering and idea-exchange.
This is now gone off on some soulboy tip, whereby any attack on any black-identified music becomes an attack on all black music, for all time, and any good aspects of any black music are used as a defence of the whole lot. I simply don't think there is a 'black music' in that sense. This, even though everyone knows that hip hop is propped up by a mainly white audience. I've never said anything about dancehall and my problems with Grime aren't the same as my problems with current hip hop.
It's telling that a supposed defence of hip hop quickly has to call for reinforcements from other genres, perhaps revealing how deeply in denial the hip hop fan is now. It's like old rockers sitting there, 'rock's not dead'...
the lesson here: don't expect everyone and everything to fit in with your idea of what they should be and society will surely reveal itself to be pretty fascinating and music a hell of a lot more fulfilling.
thanks for that advice. You will be extending the same courtesy to everything you disparage then Dave.
See you at a Goth club sometime soon then?
