Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Dude... Who Killed My Music?

Ok, ok, so ever since Nas proclaimed the death of hip hop, everyone’s taken it upon
themselves to do a post-mortem to finally get to the culprit.

What a conundrum. Some people have blamed Biggie and Pac because they introduced beef to hip hop. I say nay, because it promotes competition- and frankly, I enjoy seeing a good battle every now and then. Especially because these days, the immediacy of the internets can never be underestimated: Just two years ago, you were only most likely to find diss records on sites such as ahh, sohh and realtalkny, but it always took a day to get access because a) I would be sleeping when people stateside were awake b) mobile internet was a bitch. These days boy- you know said rapper’s got that diss song on their phone and they will waste no time in uploading it to or announcing it on their website/twitter/facebook. I’ve been trying to ignore mainstream hip hop for the last few months but my favourite current beef is Game/Jayz [bwaha-no one on the corner got swagger like you cos no one on the corner’s 42]; mostly because I laffed really hard at Game, who made himself a trending topic using the standard “me against the world tag” that he adjusted to #ihategame. Beef and battles keep rappers on top of their game- as long as the shots that aren’t spared are figurative.


Then they blamed Southern Hip Hop brands like Crunk- even though the East & West Coast rappers were clearly cool with the outrageous Lil Jon- who has produced quiet a few good beats for them. Later on, people pointed fingers at poor scapegoat, Souljaboy. His empty lyrics were made fresh for the ringtone generation; they earned him over $3mil in 2007 in downloads alone. I don’t think that it’s his fault that one day he found himself getting popular on youtube and an already ailing and fickle industry took him seriously enough to let him be the hip hop custodian for so long. Respected hip hop journalist Toure called him out last year after he made the ignorant remark that if it wasn’t for slavery, he would be back in Africa without his ice and tattoos- Toure dismissed him as ignorant and immature. We can’t blame a misguided Souljaboy- has everyone completely blanked out on Nelly’s Tipdrill video when he slid the credit card in that girl’s buttcrack, and the lyrics it must be yo ass/cos it aint yo face? I’ll never forget when I first heard the great Slick Rick’s ’88 track Treat Her Like a Prostitute? It was all about how girls/women are so evil and only deserve to be treated like prostitutes until they prove their worth (sad hurt boy issues clearly). And just cos Uncle Luke of the Miami Bass group 2LiveCrew is now married to a respectable woman, it doesn’t mean they didn’t sing all the music they sang in the early 90’s.
While T-Pain is a great producer, he needs to lay off the auto tune. This is my pet hate. He should actually stop performing; we’ve had enough of that Minstrel Show already. Thanks T-Pain. There’s the door. I can think of a few moments where I was like ‘oh there goes hip hop now-for real for real!’ but it’s not just because of autotune, T-pain (he does make me sick though), Souljaboy. It’s all of that and the rest of the Coonery Congress.

Dear Flava Flav, you are a 50 yr old man with gold teeth, you wear a viking hat and you rock a clock around your neck. No matter how much they pay you for shows, they are laughing at you, not with you.


Above: The Tipdrill video- Not for the fainthearted ;)

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