Hip-Hop As Social Commentary

Have you been visiting the Blood Is One Twitter page? No? Well, you should!

Will Pierce is the cofounder of Blood Is One. He isn't as prolific of a writer as I am but actually says some really brilliant stuff almost regularly. On the Twitter page he wrote:

The question of how much rappers should provide an example is the only mainstream debate about ethics in art the last 30 years.

Hiphop provides the only satisfactory compromise between naturalism and romanticism in contemporary art.

No other artform but hiphop has successfully decried the situation of a cultural underclass while trumpeting success beyond it.

That's in abstract- substance, means is another matter. It at least engages the listener to the thump and challenges them with a message.

Modern art does not invite question, fears it; hiphop is cultural dialogue. It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder.

Where would country music be if it had a sinuous system of self-criticism of hiphop? The social dialogue collapsed, biting became the form.

Hip-hop has been good and bad. All music genres have big problems and the biggest one that I have noticed for rap is that, in escaping the hood, rappers and DJs often bring the hood with them. For a long time, hip-hop was dominated by entourages of rapper's friends from back in the day who they've brought along in order to spread the wealth. Think Outsidaz, Ruff Ryderz, D12 and G-Unit. That doesn't happen that much anymore. Now record labels are filled with business ventures.

Despite becoming more and more business inclined, however, hip-hop manages to "keep it real" in a way that the lubricated genre of country, which Will mentions, rarely does. Rappers frequently start and own their own labels. Raekwon has been releasing his last few albums independently, directly to his consumers, while Eminem has owned his own Sirius satellite radio station and 50 Cent has used his fame to launch an acting career. This doesn't happen so much with rock musicians, who often are total messes and sneer at the business ropes that get tied around them when they ignore them. When trying to grab for money, rock musicians like the guys at Metallica often do so in reaction, using the courts to give them all sorts of copyright money while guys in hip-hop use piracy and bootleg music to their own benefit. Country music, meanwhile, with a few exceptions, has totally sold itself to corporate radio, with the only hope of breaking the hold being the rise of alt country guys like Jamey Johnson through iTunes and the internet.

As Will Pierce said, "Modern art does not invite question, fears it; hiphop is cultural dialogue. It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder." Hip-hop puts right up front alot of stuff that we prefer not to recognize. While educators talk theories about socially constructed gender roles, hip-hop shows us what happens in real life to young men when dad leaves home and mom drops her kids off with grandma so she can work all day. It shows us - through the tales of former drug dealers 50 Cent and Jay-Z or Yelawolf, who hails from methodone lab hotspot Alabama - what the drug war has done to African American, poor white and Hispanic communities.

In one song called "I'm Paranoid," 50 Cent declares, "We thought the dope and the coke would help us escape poverty. When that didn't work, we resorted to armed robbery." In a duet with Wu-Tang veteran Raekwon, Yelawolf called "I Wish," rhymed of life in the south, "Confederate flags I see 'em, On pick up trucks with the windows down, Why's he playing Beanie Sigel? Because his daddy was a dope man. Lynyrd Skynyrd never sang about slinging keys of coke, man." Even when it thinks it's apolitical or even ignorant, hip-hop packs more social commentary than your average indie rock or country band will in their entire career.

In fact, when you think about it in retrospect, the fact that academia wasn't pouring over rap lyrics and relating them to modern society shows academia might not be that clued into American societal dynamics.