In the summer of 2012 I will turn 39 years old and I have seen the rise and fall of Hip-Hop music. Now when I say the rise and fall of Hip-Hop music, I mean, I was there for the first national circulated albums. We started with Blonde's "Rapture" and Sugar Hill Gang's "Rappers Delight's". I experienced a revolution in music that has empowered a people and is now impoverishing an entire generation.
When I was in my final year of middle school, I remember my brothers being house party deejays and having that grand connection to all the music that a normal 13 year old would never have access to. I remember listening to Eric B. & Rakim, N.W.A., Run D.M.C. and of course, Public Enemy. Now if you let anyone else tell this story, they would have you believe that all artist in the late 80s were glorifying violence, sexism and gangsta mentalities but in truth, there was so much more.
Hip-Hop to many youth of my time was the only connection to the Black Power, Black Love and Power to the People movement of the 60s that existed. I would watch my white friends (growing up thirty minutes outside of L.A. in Covina, CA) recite the lyrics to a great many black conscious and powerful songs like Run D.M.C's "Proud to be Black" and N.W.A's "F*uck the Police". I use to watch them and think how weird this is that these rappers were screaming anti-white, anti-establishment and anti-authority lyrics and what I saw as the exact people they were talking to were the ones that were loving it.
It took me over a decade of wisdom to realize that the movement I had belly-flopped into full force was not just representing the voice of black people but the voice of an entire generation just as Janice Joplin, Hendricks, John Lennon and Marvin Gaye had done in the 60s. We sought out self-awareness and self-identification through the unity of music. Though these groups would battle with mainstream crossover acts for radio time, they were constantly present and relevant. There just as many if not more party rap and dance tracks but the fact that there was also a voice representing something different than personal gain was what made those times so different.
From 1988 to 1994 we saw the emergence of a many great hip-hop artist. No matter how self-promoting or self-indulged their music appeared, there was always an element of pushing some sort of greater community cause. We had gangsta rappers (Ice Cube, Kool G. Rap & Dr. Dre), we had party rappers (MC Hammer & Rob Base)and the dirty, x-rated rappers (Slick Rick & Too Short) but through it all they all included at the least a couple of tracks with a positive message on each album.
I look at mainstream rap music today and like many other veterans of the art, I can not begin to call it hip-hop. It is as different to me as sitcoms are from reality shows. I listen to complete albums by rap artist today, though only the most successful like Drake, Nicki Minaj & Lil Wayne (to name a few) actually get more than a single deal and they all sound like monotonous monologues of materialism and misogyny. Don't get me wrong, there has always been this problem in hip-hop before but never to this extent.
The biggest difference between the first decade of hip-hop & this last decade of hip-hop is that there is zero balance. Before you had an equal opportunity to chose what you wanted to hear. You had party songs, love songs, pro-black songs and hardcore x-rated songs. The odd part was that some of these artist figured out how to put these four different elements in the same song. There were no artist ever telling you to not have fun and be broke, they just wasn't such a degradation for those that were.
When you listen to today's rap artist. I feel like my modest life has added up to nothing because they do not just tell you how fabulous their life is, they do everything they can to remind you that if you do not live like them then "You Ain't Sh*t!" (to put it bluntly). The constant message I receive is that it is me against the world. Rappers today even hate their fans.
I understand that rappers have always projected a braggadocios and audacious superiority but it seemed to somehow to incorporate its followers over belittle them. I could not begin to enjoy when today's rap artist tells me that because I do not own a $100k car or $10 million home that I am not worthy of existing.
In closing, my only wish is to hear more Outkast, Cypress Hill and Tupac artist emerging on the mainstream music scene so that the younger generation does not fall victim to the "Hybrid Society" which wishes to end human life as we know it.
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