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The Hip Hop Inauguration
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Russell Simmons, Jay-Z and others are coming to Washington next month to celebrate Barack Obama. Didn’t Obama's election make much of hip hop...boring?
As Russell Simmons and his crew prepare for the first and probably the last hip hop inaugural ball, those with an eye on Amerian life may find it ironic. After many attempts made against it by responsible people, the idiom of hip hop may well be on the way out. The murders, the shootings, the corruption, and every other reprehensive innovation in conduct that came into popular entertainment in the name of "keeping it real" finally seems to be facing an audience that has grown up, changed direction, and become bored. We are approaching a time of no mo hos. No mo bitches. No mo black nigger motherfuckers. The denigrated appear to be losing a taste for the hatred, the pornography, the violence.
We are approaching a time of no mo hos.
Let's get one thing straight. Black Americans are not the only ones capable of embracing the most pernicious stereotypes and declaring them emblems of liberation. The important and insightful reporting found in Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs makes a case for how American women seem to have bought into the happy slut vision of themselves that has come from the world of pornography. As never before, they feel particularly liberated, or equal to men, at wet t-shirt contests, dressing like hookers, and when meeting friends in strip clubs. Imagery once considered suffocatingly sexist is now acceptable because younger women think themselves free of the repressive modes out of which feminism expressed itself in the early 1970s. They just want to have fun. The popularity and acceptance of glittering, middle-aged sputum like Madonna and the young, the restless, and the hollow Paris Hilton must mean something.
The trouble in black popular culture over the last 25 years is perhaps much deeper and more poisonous. Every so often this boil of decadence largely delivered by extreme hip hop is nicked and the public gets a good serving of stank cultural pus. In my own case, this trouble has been obvious for a long time.
I became an enemy of hip hop more than 25 ago when my daughter was less than ten and recited proof that all rap "songs" did not have bad words in them:
I'm a ho you know I'm a ho
I'm a ho because I tell you so
That did it. I imagined little black girls across the nation walking along and happily denigrating and dehumanizing themselves. No one had ever known or heard of any such thing. A serious cultural crisis was emerging. It was soon a new version of crack in which all of the worst elements of black culture were seized and promoted as the most authentic because they came from the street (where, as you know, the truth hangs out more than anywhere else).
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. Next year the first volume of his long-awaited biography of Charlie Parker will appear.
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. Next year the first volume of his long-awaited biography of Charlie Parker will appear.
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. Next year the first volume of his long-awaited biography of Charlie Parker will appear.
Brothanorm
F**k you Stanley!I am so tired of your old ass crying about Hip Hop artist. You have made a cottage industry out of crying about Hip Hop culture. If it wasnt for them what would you have to say. NOTHING!
Grow the fuck up! Who made the culture police. What have you done for the black people that is so great? NOTHING!
Take your old ass to Florida and be quiet. Punk ass!
Barbara416
I hope you are right Stanley. I can't get passed the Obama Plates being sold on television. Who is behind this, and doesn't Obamas' likeness belong to him?
xesenta
Big problem with being of African origin in America, Stan is the reality of having been enslaved. The Hip-Hop concept saved a lot of lost souls; yet indeed, it has lost its humour. Randall Robinson, Skip Gates, and now Obama have brought value to being "Pan-African" which probably trumps the identity of being downtrodden and inferior. Disproportionately, American blacks have profited from being abject. Time to lift UP.
Vlasta
Hats off and a huge thanks to you. Superb article. How can we spread the word? Perhaps someone else can address the musical vacuity of hip-hop.
oddie303
i still think that hiphop has done more good for african americans then bad. theres a parental advisory warning on music for a reason, and if your daughter is receiting rap lyrics change what she listens to not the entire industry. if you dont like how a baseball player looks are you going to try to ban the game? no, you should just watch another sport.
Mary50
And this is why I love you, Stan. No amount of praise does justice to your insight.
oddie303
the fact that the author is a jazz critic makes sense, as his OPINIONS are just that and clearly biased ... you should put that at that the beginning of the article, as i would not have read it if i knew his background. i dont ask a barber for economic tips.
mavin1620
The big problem with being in America is that we have given our media over to a small handful of multi-national mega corporations. It is not an accident what songs get recorded by the labels that put them into the stores with lots of hype and salesmanship. Hip-hop as presented in this format is highly destructive to all the communities of the US, and probably elsewhere.
Luckily, hip-hop does not have to be pimps and hos, but unfortunately that level of hip-hop dominates the play list. The kids whom this affects don't have anything to say in that play list. They just absorb it.
Thank you for speaking out on this topic, and keep doing so, please.
This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
kluivertus
Thank you brothanorm, for that reasoned and well-argued point about why Mr. Crouch is wrong. And now for a stab at something a little more measured . . .
Mr. Crouch, you're voicing your opinion on what I agree is a serious problem (mind you, I'm speaking as a white person, so I don't know that my perspective is necessarily as relevant). However, where we diverge paths is when you lump ALL hiphop into one package. Just as you can't package all jazz into one category, hiphop has numerous subdivisions. I defy you to listen to Mos Def's "Black on Both Sides," Reflection Eternal, De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising," Nas' opus "Illmatic," or Blackalicious' "Blazing Arrow" and not come away with a sense of vivacity, of new voices blazing trails.
Hiphop also is responsible for new musical expression all around the world, exemplified in the styles of M.I.A.'s genre blending escapades.
The parallels between REAL hiphop (exclude the nonsense propagated by Nelly & Co) and jazz are not accidental. They're real, and deserve to be recognized.
BobbyxDigitalx
While I agree with Stan on some artists poor choice of lyrics, I don't agree with him lumping ALL Hip Hop in one category. From my perspective there is a difference between real Hip Hop (which does not get much radio play, if any) and the commercialized crap rap (booty shakin and shiny rims type of songs) you hear on top 40 formats. In this sense RAP has lost its way, not Hip Hop. True Hip Hop is about poetry with a beat. When I say poetry, I mean lyrics with meaning and message. My two best examples would be the song, Hip Hop by Dead Prez and and the whole album by the Roots, Things fall apart.
Antometrios
He's right, though. We build our understanding of life with the words we hear day to day. If a young girl hears (and sees!) a popular personality using words like "bitch" and "ho" to describe the women gyrating in his lap--and if she sees boys at her school dancing, rapping along, using the same vocabulary in their own rhymes--she then exists in relation to that context (whether inside or out), and also with the knowledge that others, too, will relate her to it.
I don't see hip-hop as a problem. Music is math and logic, simple and elegant, enjoyable (or not)--but inoffensive, period. Music doesn't suppress. I think there is a problem with the music "industry" producing "artists" who haven't the emotional depth or personal discipline to view their work as anything more than means to money and fame. I enjoy dancing, so I don't mind most hip-hop--but all the while I'm having wholesome fun, I can't help but be aware of how easily I avoid association with its lyrics because I am white. Sorry to say: when hip-hop is so closely tied to "black America," it BECOMES "black America" for those who don't know better. As unfair as that is, why would anyone want to compound the problem with negative terminology? The answer might be that creative control of hip-hop is in the hands of corporations who don't care as long as they make a buck (we've seen this problem a lot in the news recently, haven't we?). I think hip-hop fans should ask themselves whether they are okay with that.
Side bar: A few years back I became a regular cannabis user, and now few things irritate me more than that particular culture of words like "stoner," "munchies," and "far-out," when my own experience has been expressed in terms of "humanity," "self-improvement," and very NOT far-out, very near-and-dear and totally relevant ideas to which "mainstream" perceptions often seem numb and dumb.
I don't use words I find self-deprecating, and I ask other people not to use them around me. Small steps.
LukeofNazareth
Rock music is terrible now, too. Coldplay teaches well fed whites how to fall in line and listen to carbon copies of U2 and Radiohead songs. White music hurts the white community, too, but in a much different way. Hey, I want to defend hip hop --and I think the "Tip Drill" video is hot as hell-- but I'm more concerned with both blacks' & whites' collecvtive propensity for banality and mediocre, unremarkable music. While it's heartening yo think that finally blacks & whites are in concert, unfortunately it's a concerted effort to consume terrible music. The black community needs to dust off their Hendrix records and produce a punk rock movement of their own; and whites need to dust off our Jesus Lizard & Melvins records, and start acting like grown ups again. Less Coldplay, more Clash. Less Jay Z, more Rage Against the Machine.
runaway
"American women seem to have bought into the happy slut vision of themselves that has come from the world of pornography".
and exactly what version of yourself did you buy into posting THAT photo of yourself to represent you. I pray that you tell us...
MYWORLD5
MOST OF THESE THINGS , SADLY, REFERS TO THE BLACK CULTURE............
IF SOMEONE DOESN'T PULL A HALT TO IT , THIS WILL ALWAYS BE A KEYHOLE PICTURE OF WHAT THEY LIKE ................
ARE THEY PROUD OF THIS IMAGE??????
I CAN'T SEE THE MOTHER OF A BEAUTIFUL, TALENTED BLACK GIRL BEING PROUD OF THIS INSULTING CULTURE
AND , SADLY IT'S SEEMS TO BE YOUR BLACK MEN THAT CARRY IT ON AND THINK IT'S TALENT??????????????
Thank you.
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