America has found its latest cultural crisis, United States v. Hip Hop. Although it’s not news that we have had a long and tumultuous relationship with the music form, its role in the country’s culture is now clearly defined - having been adopted and firmly entrenched by all ethnic groups and economic classes.
The spark that has set this new blaze is Don Imus’s comment regarding some black female youths, using dismissive colloquial terms. Don Imus is, without a doubt, a racist, but he is only the product of his environment (clearly not having the opportunity or need to interact with black people in any way). The liberty he enjoyed to speak like that is a product of the perceived culture of depreciation in the black community. But everyone agrees that Don Imus is not the problem, only the most recent sad reflection of the intersection of race relations, big business, and culture.
The first sector to draw ire from virtually all sides was the Hip Hop community, or more specifically, the mainstream Hip Hop industry. It’s said and repeated in article after article and by countless talking heads that the mainstream Rap industry is to blame for releasing a continual stream of music that glorifies misogyny and black self-denigration. While this may be true in some part, Rap artists did not create this culture of denigration. At the beginning, rappers sang about what they observed in their communities: drugs, prostitution, domestic violence and betrayal - things that had been happening for ages. The early years of Rap music were largely a document of what was happening in urban black communities.
The situation changed dramatically when Rap & Hip Hop became a viable business for the mainstream record industry. I would (perhaps erroneously) estimate this happened in the early 1990’s around the release of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. This is also when Rap was embraced by the white youth market with widespread intensity. At the point when black music became an avenue for the record industry to make real money, a major shift in the content of the music occurred. Artists began writing lyrics about things people wanted to hear: drugs, violence, and misogyny, instead of what they observed. They created a cultural fiction, which would later evolve into a mythology.
In the public eye Hip Hop was no longer a cultural movement, it was now a business and thus wholly subject to market forces, and nothing more.
More after the jump… (more…)
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From the IFPI (international music industry trade rep organization), reprinted without comment.
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