Essay No. 3 - Hip Hop As A Teenager

I would like to stray from the constant hate that hip hop is getting these days and focus on the some of the reasons why it might be looked at in such a bad way. I myself have helped spread the hate while i'm listening to The Sun Rises in the East wondering, like many of you, "what happened and why does everything suck now?". I touched on the subject last time by describing the franchise of hip hop. I would like to pose a different theory this time and see what type of reaction this one gets. After this i will tackle an entirely new topic in the hip hop world rather than continuing to focus on where hip hop was versus where it is.

Hip Hop is a teenager.

Now what exactly does that statement mean? We all know hip hop is pushing 30 years old so how can it be considered a teenager? Well time periods don't age at the same rate as people. This is a culture we are talking about, a large group of people and ideas and traditions. These things take time to get into place and therefore at 30 years old hip hop can definatley be acting as though it is a teenager and I believe it is.

In order to explain it's teenage status we must first look at its childhood years and then that will lead us up to it's current young adult status. Since we all know where and when hip hop started i won't rehash information everyone already knows but instead i will focus on its life as a child. I will refer to the child as "it" for two reasons. The first being not to place a gender on hip hop and the second reason being of course that hip hop is not male or female and therefore the only other appropriate pronoun in this sense would be "it". When a child is young it has no cares and worries. It does not stress over things, it simply lives as it wants to live (aside of course from some parental rules) but it does not have humiliation. The child is rarely embarassed and does what it wants to do, regardless of what anyone else thinks. We laugh at children for their strange activities and while they may notice our laughter they typically continue the activity if it makes them happy and it doesn't bother us. This is parallel with the hip hop of earlier times. You had everyone doing their own thing, from pimps to prophets, boastful to concious, partiers to fighters. You would see them all together, happy to be around one another, all while doing completely different things in completely different ways but with the same goal, to make good hip hop music. While there were beefs, those beefs never left the playground and at the end of the day everyone was friends again (who just did an album together?...hint...bronx meets queens). To clarify, it is not that the Real Roxanne and Shante were chillin on the stoop together or out together getting drinks at night but at your average block party MC's would battle, i mean really chew each other out, then eat together at the same table once the food was ready. Kids at recess might get into a fight but back in class everything was always fine, or maybe the next day shit was back to normal. That's how young kids act, they don't take anything too seriously because they know at the end of the day they are all in it together. They all gotta take that history test together and they all gotta get the same minimum grade to pass. Biz Markie never gave a fuck what people thought of his crazy style. X-Clan preached quite seriously while wearing the most African of outfits. Run-DMC, on the other hand, wore Adidas and partied hard. It was a time of discovery, everybody was learning about everyone else's uniqueness and style, just like you learn about your classmates throughout grade school. But then as all kids do, hip hop grew up, and around 97 it hit the pre-teen years and about the turn of the millenium it became a teenager.

So why is hip hop a teenager today? Well let's first look at the attitude. What is the attitude of most teenagers? That they are better than everyone else and that they know everything there is to know. Their biggest concerns are what clothes they wear, how their friends perceive them, and where they are going to party that night. Everything else is meaningless to them. They don't have any real direction, or focus. They just wanna live and be left alone to do their thing, however they want to do it. You can't tell a teenager how things are because they don't wanna hear it. You try to teach them and they don't care. Teenagers are also notorious for following whatever trend is popular at the time. Right now male teens are growing their hair out longer than they used to. Back when I was in high school the thing to do was to have short hair, now the thing to do is to have long hair. Everyone of them follows, for the most part, the same trend. If Abercrombie & Fitch is the popular brand then they all wear it. If Polo becomes "cooler" than they all wear it. How many teens did you see rocking a pink polo after Kanye dropped College Dropout in 2004? Teens follow trends, unlike young children who, when asked to pick out their own clothes, end up with a completely mismatched outfit that to them looks cool. I have a few nephews and recently their grandmother let them decide what they wanted for lunch. One of them decided to have a bowl of Rice Krispes topped with peanut butter. Now most of us would think that is crazy, but he loved it and i think we can all agree it was certainly an original meal. But you ask a high school kid what he wants to drink and it's all red bull and other energy drinks. Why? Mountain Dew has close to the same amount of sugar and caffeine, yet since all the other kids drink energy drinks then that is what your typical answer will be from a teenager. Let's look at hip hop in that sense. Record labels are looking for certain types of talent, a certain look, a certain sound. If you sound LIKE what they want to hear then you will get signed. This is why when a trend catches on it just blows up and artists mimicking it come out of everywhere. We had a few southern artists back in hip hop's childhood years. Most popular were Scarface and Outkast. I think we can all agree both Scarface and Outkast had very individual styles copied not only by no one else in their region but no one else in hip hop in general. Now you get Mike Jones putting out a record and Paul Wall does the same thing, followed by all their affiliates doing same-style records. Once a style catches on everybody has to follow it. What's sad is that some of the real rappers are accepting it and buying into it. Now Jay-Z did a track with Rick Ross and dropped the southern flow. Some argue that was genius that he proved he could do it, others might say it proves that originality is dead in hip hop (there's your Nas album). Jadakiss dropped a "south paw" punchline and while it was humorous, I ask the question - Why should people switch their style up? Recently 50 Cent and Kanye went head-to-head in a record sales battle and Kanye West came out on top. However my ears are hearing that the streets feel the 50 Cent album a whole lot more than Kanye's. Now the argument can certainly be made that 50's album has much more of a "street" sound than Kanye but still, wasn't it the same streets that was bumping "Award Tour"? That ain't the most "hardcore" record. Kanye's album, whether liked or hated, is an absolutely original and unique sounding record. It does not follow a formula, it takes chances. 50's album, whether liked or hated, follow a formula for modern day street rap, it's "safe" to market to the audience it is targeting. So even the streets seem to be a part of hip hop's teenage years by only wanting to hear what already exists. The arrogance also follows the teenage attitude with how everybody is really just rapping about what makes them great. They got big cars, big jewelry, everything is BIG BIG BIG. They all drive the most expensive cars and wear the most expensive clothing. Rappers will floss on their first single, da fuck is that? How you gonna tell me you're this incredibly sick rapper that's mad rich when i don't even know who you are? You gotta pay dues, everyone knows that. These rappers don't pay dues, they get signed based off of a nice hook and then get handed all this money. By the way, don't be fooled into thinking any of that stuff you see in the videos is actually theirs, it is all rented, in fact there is a huge business in renting out nice cars for music videos. These rappers have no sense of respect for the culture as they blatently exploit it before they even make a first album. Teenagers will spend their whole paycheck on something that is way beyond their living means just as rappers live beyond their means without realizing that at any moment that money could be cut off and now they are back on the street.

So my solution is that hip hop needs to grow up. Now this is where the mystery comes in. In some cases a person can tell what their teenager is going to grow up in to but in a lot of cases you can't. You see them graduate high school and either go to college or enter the work force and these days they change careers many times before truly settling in. It's hard to tell when a teenager will mature or what process it will go through to get there. Therefore I am saying that time will work itself out, hopefully, and hip hop as a culture and a movement will grow and mature. At this point we will again be happy with where it is. However the counterargument for that is that hip hop has always been a youth oriented entity and therefore it will always be dumbed down because the people who come into it now are young kids who want the teenage crap.

Either way, right now hip hop is an arrogant, ignorant, rude teenager. And what do you do with an arrogant, ignorant and rude teenager dissuade their behavior? You ignore them because without attention they don't act up. The good teenagers don't demand attention because they know they are doing good and they just keep doing it. The bad teenagers demand attention and act out to get it, hence the commercial rappers we all love to hate. Instead of spreading the hate, ignore them and they won't act out as much, they will instead look for love instead of just trying to spark controversy.