Welcome to Hip Hop Essays.
This site will feature weekly writings on hip hop: past, present, and future. It will take an extensive look at the culture and history along with presenting ideas and thoughts about where hip hop has gone and how it got there. I will start with by addressing a common theme I continue to see throughout the hip hop community and that is the theme that hip hop should go back to the way it was in the 80s/early 90s. People think it sucks now and they wish it was the way it used to be. To those people I would like to say this ---
IT AIN'T '94 NO MORE!
Look I love hip hop as much as the next person, in fact more than most. I, like most, also feel as though hip hop has never been the same as it was in the early 90s. With that said, I think we all need to move on and stop focusing on this fact.
Hip hop will never be the same as it was back then. For starters it wasn't mainstream back then. Yes you had artists like Dre and Snoop, Biggie and Nas, who were commercially successful, but it wasn't mainstream in society in general. Nowadays hip hop is everywhere and it is being spoofed more than any other stereotype. How many TV commercials have hip hop in them (as far as clothing, speech)? How many movies have that hip hop style white boy character (Can't Hardly Wait really started this)? How many people in mainstream society use hip hop terms (bling bling, ice, holla)? I mean shit even Hillary Clinton used the word "diss" when talking about George Bush's stance on social security. Hip Hop is the most popular form of music and also the most popular form of satire. Every time i turn around I see some character in the media that is a spoof on the hip hop stereotype. White people saying "yo yo" and wearing "hip hop" clothing is everywhere. Shit they even have "hip hop" dance classes for little girls.
Back in this "golden age" of hip hop, society was not hanging on every move that these rap artists made. Singles weren't mass produced for millions of people. The grunge movement was still big and hip hop was confined to a select few who chose to appreciate it. Adults did not know hip hop and wanted nothing to do with it. Now they not only know about it but they make fun of it by referencing certain aspects of it (mainly the clothing and the speech). When I was in second grade I can remember wearing my pants low and my teachers asking me if I didn't have a belt. They were confused as to why I would want to wear my pants low. They thought maybe the pants were tight around my waist, or maybe the pants were too big. Basically they didn't understand the style because they had never seen it. They questioned my Naughty Gear sweatshirt (remember that insert from 19 Naughty 3, i didn't have the bedsheets but damn did I give those mafuckas a lot of lucci). As I grew up and hip hop became part of mainstream society the comments went from "why are you wearing your pants low" to "pull up your damn pants, you kids these days......". That is a perfect example of hip hop's progression through the 90s.
The music and the artists were different back then because even the biggest rappers (again Dre and Snoop) were still somewhat underground. They may have had a top 10 hit but no one like Newsweek or 60 Minutes was interviewing them. They didn't have articles in the New York Times or reality shows based on their life. There was no one tracking their every move and there wasn't a legion of suburban white kids with their parents never-ending money supply buying every possible thing related to their favorite rap artist. You were lucky if you got a 2 page poster of your favorite rap artist in Word Up!
Also the coverage that hip hop was getting was almost solely by people who loved hip hop and who were involved in hip hop themselves. The writers reviewing the material and deciding what was classic were people who had been listening to Rakim and Public Enemy all along. They remember Eazy-E before N.W.A. They remember the impact that The Message had on communities of people. Now most people reviewing rap are shirt-and-tie upper-middle class reporters who go from reviewing Common's album to reviewing the newest Nickelback record. They give the "big" stories on hip hop to people who have never even heard an Ice Cube record other than "Put Ya Back Into It". Therefore the entire world of hip hop is twisted.
Think about this, when Lord Finesse entered a studio no one paid attention. No one documented his time inside and no one followed him when he left. He didn't get stopped by hundreds of people in the mall asking for his autograph, wanting pictures, introducing their parents to him. He never got a call from MTV asking him to perform on the music awards, get interviewed by Serena Altschul, and then do an appearence on TRL the next Monday. He didn't get asked by Pepsi to be in an ad that exploited his image as a "rap superstar" by making him wear fur coats while pouring champagne on hot scantily clad black chicks. There was no Yahoo or Google that would have a front page featuring his picture with links to download songs. Record stores didn't have HUGE posterboards advertising his HUGE release featuring the RADIO SMASH SINGLE. He just made his albums, pleased his fans, and did it again a year or two later. The hype was there but only throughout the hip hop community, which was very small at the time.
Does anyone remember when the hip hop bin at your record store was like 2 rows? Now it's an entire aisle. I remember going in once a month and buying the maybe 3 new hip hop tapes that dropped. Now there are at least 6 hip hop albums released every week with maybe 1 a month being worth the listen. The reason why we are all so disgusted and wish it was 94 again is because back then you could almost guarantee that any hip hop album you bought was going to be sick. Now there is so much crap that you have to weed it out and find the good stuff instead of just taking a chance on that Little Indian record knowing that it was probably gonna be hot. There is also the point that singles used to be something exciting to grab because of the remixes and bonus tracks but we won't get into that here. Basically the record industry did away with singles because it was no longer worth charging $2.99 for something that you could get on the album 2 weeks later.
Anticipation, artwork, originality....all these things are lost, they may not be gone completely, but they are certainly scarce, an endangered species if anything.
In conclusion I would like to say that I still love hip hop, today and yesterday. I got the new Kanye record bumping nonstop for like 3 weeks now in my whip. But right next to that i got the D.I.T.C. record and when I'm feeling real nice I bump Taste of Chocolate (Put Ya Weight On It is easily my favorite Kane track next to Young, Gifted, and Black). The music is still there but it's classic to me. The way Led Zeppelin can be played at the highest volume with everyone around knowing that we will never hear rock music like that again, but we can still enjoy those legendary cuts. I LOVE hip hop and my love of this music will never die. It keeps building as great albums keep coming out. I just have to realize, like everyone else, that what was then is no longer but the memories will always be there. Even though a lot of great records are out of print we have access to them through the internet and the few mom-and-pop record stores that haven't gone bankrupt yet. We can always keep the spirit of hip hop alive through both new releases and the classics. We just have to remember that a classic is just that, a classic, "a work that is honored in its definitive field", as defined by the dictionary. Another defintion being "something noteworthy of its kind and worth remembering". We can hold these classics up high and praise the legacy that they leave. Then we must move on and dig through the new release crates for more classics as they come to us, maybe few and far between but with the amount of rap records that get released these days it is much harder to find those classic albums.
Thank you all for your time and I hope you enjoyed reading this piece. I encourage comments but please let's keep it a mature discussion as opposed to a sling of shit throwing.
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