How come I'm only finding out about this now?
DocMcCoy
"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
I mean, seriously, guys, what the fuck?
Bam's treatise on the state of hip-hop = :face_melt: :face_melt: :face_melt: :face_melt: :face_melt:
Thanks to Cos tweeting this, I didn't get to bed until 2:00 this morning. Essential reading, and one of the most thorough, rigorous and genuinely thought-provoking pieces of writing on hip-hop I've ever read. Set aside an hour, make some coffee and sandwiches, and dig in. And I haven't even got onto james' stuff yet. If you don't bookmark this immediately, you're a mug.
Bam's treatise on the state of hip-hop = :face_melt: :face_melt: :face_melt: :face_melt: :face_melt:
Thanks to Cos tweeting this, I didn't get to bed until 2:00 this morning. Essential reading, and one of the most thorough, rigorous and genuinely thought-provoking pieces of writing on hip-hop I've ever read. Set aside an hour, make some coffee and sandwiches, and dig in. And I haven't even got onto james' stuff yet. If you don't bookmark this immediately, you're a mug.
Comments
Got an email about this thursday I think... suffice to say that apart from helping my now very pregnant wife around, the weekend was lost.
b/w
:shh:
I see similarities in a few other musical genres, all of which eventually die and fade away. I doubt that Rap will be the exception and artists like Lil B are more the death knell than the new wave.
In the 50???s Rockabilly shared a similar fate. With Elvis leading the charge, a generation of kids used music to make a political statement about race relations and the acceptance of black culture through their music. Like Rap, Rockabilly was a street level underground scene with every small town having their Elvis wannabees making countless records that captured ???the Devil???s music???. Unlike Rap, the lyrics were not overtly political, nor were the fans attracted by it???s politics, but the underlying premise was/is undeniable. And it had its very vocal, ultra conservative opponents, which ranged from deranged preachers to corporate sponsors who withdrew funds from those radio stations who played it. Jimmy Snow > Tipper Gore.
Dirt poor southern white folks with names like Alvis Wayne and Ersel Hickey trying to sing their way out of poverty by following the path that took Elvis from a Tupelo shack to Graceland. This movement, which based on the some 10,000 documented 45???s within the genre, was substantial. It without question opened a window for black artists to get airplay, billing and acceptance within the white (especially southern) community. Without this movement I don???t believe we would have seen labels like Motown or artists like Chuck Berry get their comeuppance. Did it solve the problem of inequality???No.
But twenty years later this genre was dead???..done???.kaput???.over. It had run its course, and was consumed by the very animal it had opened the door for, including a new generation of artists that also embraced black music via the Beatles and Stones.
The Stray Cats, kids from the middle class suburbs rather than a coal mining town in Kentucky, managed to squeeze a few drops of fame out of Rockabilly???s already rotten carcass twenty years after the fact. And in my opinion, that???s what Lil B is doing today. Every political view has been expounded, every shocking jab taken. Once you espouse killing the police, championing the drug trade and misogyny there really isn???t much left to shock and awe with. So Lil B does his best Brian Setzer impersonation and grasps at questionable straws to say something ???new???. And a generation searching for an identity, along with critics who want to be on the cutting edge are stuck with meaningless pabulum generated through a bedroom computer rather than a crime ridden street corner.
Musical styles come and go but crime, poverty and bigotry were here long before Rap, and they???ll be here long after it???s gone. Music is never the total solution, only the mirror of society???s problems that when looked into by the right people help us take a step in the right direction.
ONSBPFATF
Started reading the blog post but found it a little cumbersome. will have another crack tomorrow with a bigger screen.
This is a fantastic post, Rock. Thanks.
And yeah, Odd Future does indeed suck teenage marketing balls.
Really not worth the time or effort.
No.
I did wonder at times, given the word density, if dude got anything else for Christmas.
Harvey, with that Cal Wayne video/song--intended as some sort of rebuttal--I think you actually proved the point of the article and at the same time showed that you seem to have missed the point: "In fact, this article has nothing to do with subjective interpretations of rap; what???s ???good??? or ???bad??? about the music."
(And, make no mistake, I enjoyed the song you posted.)
How about just robbing them?
But Harv, Bam's point wasn't really anything to do with the things you're talking about. He wasn't trying to say that rap was qualitatively better when rappers didn't have any money. Nor was he saying rap would be better if more rappers were Marxists. The way I read it - and I'm simplifying it massively here - he believes that rap has been co-opted by the industry to the extent that every aspect of "the struggle" has become a marketing point, whether you interpret the struggle as being the struggle to survive, to overcome racism and injustice, or just to get that paper. Furthermore, what this actually does is perpetuate the struggle, to the benefit of everyone but those who actually are struggling. He isn't trying to say Boots Riley is better than Mac Dre because he's a Marxist - in fact, one of the great things about the piece is the way it completely avoids making those kinds of proselytising value judgements. He might be saying that, because Boots Riley is a Marxist, he has a clearer grasp of the contradictions rappers face, or at least a particular way of looking at them. Really, there's tons of fascinating shit in that piece, and it made me re-examine my own position on a lot of the things he talks about. But more importantly, even if I'd never read a word of anything Bam had written, either here or elsewhere, I would never have been in any doubt that that piece was written by someone who was a hip-hop fan. Dude even says as much.
b/w
"Apolitical"? GTFOOHWTBS. If you flip your advance to sell drugs in the hood, or endorse a signature sneaker, or start a clothing line, or do a P&D deal with a major label, or invest your money in a bottled water company, or do a G-rated movie when you were rhyming about killing Whitey a little more than ten years earlier, you're making a political statement whether you like it or not. By the way, if this is a bit too long-winded for you, my apologies.
Bonus beat: What happened to this place? Write something that demands a bit of concentration, then throw in some revolutionary/situationist philosophy and a shit-ton of long words, and it's like a cross to a vampire round here. Makes me sick, motherfucker, how far we done fell.
it must be said, some people would rather just feel it (or not) rather than analyse, in which case, fair enough to them.
Well, maybe if this piece had been written 5-10 years ago, the industry then could be better be critiqued for coopting the struggle as portrayed through rap. But in 2011, there is basically no industry to speak of. And with what little there is left, it's not coopting anything whatsoever struggle related. That's why it's now imperative for rap fans to go back to the source, the streets, to find the real deal. And there you will find hip-hop just the way anyone with any balls would want it....unadulterated. None of the videos I posted give a fuck about a Marxist perspective or someone ascribing some political interpretation to them and they clearly carry more revolutionary power than a million after-the-fact, trying-way-too-hard-to-be-over-complicated essays ever could. I just don't see why someone would take the time to write another hip-hop-is-dead type article when all they have to do instead is you know, actually be a part of hip-hop enough to speak on all the great shit out there right this moment.
Agreed, but to that I'd say; if you wanna do both and you can do both, then knock yourself out. If there has to be incredibly dense and rigorous SOTA analyses of hip-hop, I'd much rather they came from people who actually like the music and who know what they're talking about. Otherwise the field is left open to people like Simon Reynolds, who seems more interested in making the music fit whatever his angle happens to be.
I'm on an iPhone so excuse any typos...
Overall I thought it was an interesting if not indulgently overly-academic. It seemed at times that certain ideas fell back on the obscure analogy to add some sort of weight to the argument, as if the more esoteric the reference the more it vindicate the hiP hop point. Which made me skim some parts.
That said, if a critic (in this case someone who is outside, not an artist or part o the subject matter) wants to climb the ivory tower and opine, then on those grounds my own response will stay - as opposed to say pasting in youtubes. Then from a theory standpoint, and I left this comment at the page as well, this whole analysis is rooted in certain concrete assumptions, which, in a certain sense, are guilty of the same types of categorizing that he points to the industry for. He cites lyrics and the ego trip book here and there throughout the piece with a hip hop is this and now it's this and then it was that. as a hip hop artist, I believe that destruction and deconstruction are the two primary forces at work in this as a medium, and any attempt to pin down the ever shifting context of rap as art in order to try and make sense of any of it is going to fail. Worse, to overly insert te "struggle" "success" paradigm is going to reduce rap to two fields. And this has been the folly of "rap critics" and "scholars" since the first academic hip hop attempts.
I suppose if rap really was nothing more than a creative medium, then there would be nothing to write about. An that would be great. Hip hop would be back where it started. RAD.
That seems to be open to interpretation.
I will check them out as I haven't heard much rap that I'd call revolutionary for a long while.