Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Hip-hop Diabetes
It goes without saying to most who really know me that I’m a hip-hop fan. Ever since before I could remember, I’ve been bopping my head to something. From “you talk to much, homeboy you never shut up!” to “Rollin’ down the street smokin’ endo sippin on gin and juice…” I have been hooked.
I liken hip-hop in the soul of a ghetto native to food in the digestive system. It nourishes us, energizes us, gets us ready to face whatever is out there in the world. It strengthens us through its affirmations of life’s ills and the prospect of coming up out of poverty (or just plain hard situations). It tells us it’s ok to be angry sometimes, it’s also alright to want to release it all and just move to the beat placed in front of you.
Well, if hip-hop is the nourishment of the ghetto, then the state of hip-hop today is leaving us at a stage of pre-diabetes.
How many songs do I have to listen to about people’s cars and their chains and how many women they can seduce? About getting high? I mean for real. Used to be that images of sex and material things were metaphoric of larger concepts and I understood that. Didn’t always agree with it, but I understood it. Now it’s truly just “look how much I have and how much you don’t.” What happened to the community? What happened to rapping the stories that we all share? Last time I checked, my car has regular rims and I have never so much as breathed near a Maybach. So obviously all the stories ain’t our stories.
But what is so hard for me to digest about hip-hop is the implosion of the core values that defined it in the first place. It was a competition. A back and forth. A battle. But not a battle emaciate your opponent. It was a battle of respect. Of who had the best skills. Who could lyrically sleigh people? Now anything to set to a hip hop backtrack is hip-hop? Methinks Nas, although being ironic, might have a point. Is hip-hop dead?
Nowadays, I take my doses of hip-hop in smaller versions than I used to. Too much of it makes me unhealthy. Watching it on tv makes me think I should have a body that affords me the task of taking my clothes off and shaking my ass at a camera. It tells me that I should want a man for money and that I don’t need one for anything else. It tells me that my little pile of bricks isn’t worth mentioning because it doesn’t have forty rooms. So I take small, controlled doses of mostly older stuff (ahem…second generation old school, that is). Public Enemy before Flava-Flav became a spectacle. Leaders of the New School before anybody really knew who Busta Rhymes was. A little LL. Some Fresh Prince. Wu-Tang. And of course Biggie and Tupac. Jay-Z gets a pass because of his lyricism. These artists, and others like them that I haven’t mentioned, are not the pioneers who frontlined hip-hop, but they defined the standard to which I hold artists today and I believe they represent the spirit of what hip-hop is and should be.
Everything else is just sugar gumming up our systems.
I liken hip-hop in the soul of a ghetto native to food in the digestive system. It nourishes us, energizes us, gets us ready to face whatever is out there in the world. It strengthens us through its affirmations of life’s ills and the prospect of coming up out of poverty (or just plain hard situations). It tells us it’s ok to be angry sometimes, it’s also alright to want to release it all and just move to the beat placed in front of you.
Well, if hip-hop is the nourishment of the ghetto, then the state of hip-hop today is leaving us at a stage of pre-diabetes.
How many songs do I have to listen to about people’s cars and their chains and how many women they can seduce? About getting high? I mean for real. Used to be that images of sex and material things were metaphoric of larger concepts and I understood that. Didn’t always agree with it, but I understood it. Now it’s truly just “look how much I have and how much you don’t.” What happened to the community? What happened to rapping the stories that we all share? Last time I checked, my car has regular rims and I have never so much as breathed near a Maybach. So obviously all the stories ain’t our stories.
But what is so hard for me to digest about hip-hop is the implosion of the core values that defined it in the first place. It was a competition. A back and forth. A battle. But not a battle emaciate your opponent. It was a battle of respect. Of who had the best skills. Who could lyrically sleigh people? Now anything to set to a hip hop backtrack is hip-hop? Methinks Nas, although being ironic, might have a point. Is hip-hop dead?
Nowadays, I take my doses of hip-hop in smaller versions than I used to. Too much of it makes me unhealthy. Watching it on tv makes me think I should have a body that affords me the task of taking my clothes off and shaking my ass at a camera. It tells me that I should want a man for money and that I don’t need one for anything else. It tells me that my little pile of bricks isn’t worth mentioning because it doesn’t have forty rooms. So I take small, controlled doses of mostly older stuff (ahem…second generation old school, that is). Public Enemy before Flava-Flav became a spectacle. Leaders of the New School before anybody really knew who Busta Rhymes was. A little LL. Some Fresh Prince. Wu-Tang. And of course Biggie and Tupac. Jay-Z gets a pass because of his lyricism. These artists, and others like them that I haven’t mentioned, are not the pioneers who frontlined hip-hop, but they defined the standard to which I hold artists today and I believe they represent the spirit of what hip-hop is and should be.
Everything else is just sugar gumming up our systems.
# posted by Bariatric Foodie @ 10:48 AM 
