{"id":176435563,"date":"2014-04-23T00:37:53","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T05:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/?p=176435563"},"modified":"2014-04-23T00:37:53","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T05:37:53","slug":"pov-when-the-people-cheer-how-hip-hop-failed-black-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/2014\/04\/23\/pov-when-the-people-cheer-how-hip-hop-failed-black-america\/","title":{"rendered":"POV: When the People Cheer:  How Hip-Hop Failed Black America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/vulture.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-176435564\" alt=\"vulture\" src=\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/vulture.jpg\" width=\"308\" height=\"94\" srcset=\"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/vulture.jpg 308w, https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/vulture-300x91.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 308px) 100vw, 308px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>April 22, 2014<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>\n<header>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: xx-large;\">When the People Cheer: <\/span><\/h1>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: xx-large;\">How Hip-Hop Failed Black America<\/span><\/h1>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/quest-love.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-176435565\" alt=\"quest love\" src=\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/quest-love.jpg\" width=\"610\" height=\"407\" srcset=\"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/quest-love.jpg 610w, https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/quest-love-300x200.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 610px) 100vw, 610px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><strong><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><cite>By\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/author\/questlove\" rel=\"author\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Questlove<\/span><\/a><\/cite><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\"><i>This is the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop&#8217;s recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">There are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, \u201cThere but for the grace of God go I.\u201d (Actually, he said \u201cThere but for the grace of God goes John Bradford,\u201d but the switch to the pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as \u201cspooky action at a distance.\u201d And for the third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in \u201cGangsta Gangsta\u201d back in 1988: \u201cLife ain\u2019t nothing but bitches and money.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Those three ideas may seem distant from one another, but if you set them up and draw lines between them, that\u2019s triangulation. Bradford\u2019s idea, of course, is about providence, about luck and gratitude: You only have your life because you don\u2019t have someone else\u2019s. At the simplest level, I think about that often. I could be where others are, and by extension, they could be where I am. You don\u2019t want to be insensible to that. You don\u2019t want to be an ingrate. (By the by, Bradford\u2019s quote has come to be used to celebrate good fortune \u2014 when people say it, they\u2019re comforting themselves with the fact that things could be worse \u2014 but in fact, his own good fortune lasted only a few years before he was burned at the stake.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Einstein was talking about physics, of course, but to me, he\u2019s talking about something closer to home \u2014 the way that other people affect you, the way that your life is entangled in theirs whether or not there\u2019s a clear line of connection. Just because something is happening to a street kid in Seattle or a small-time outlaw in Pittsburgh doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s not also happening, in some sense, to you. Human civilization is founded on a social contract, but all too often that gets reduced to a kind of charity: Help those who are less fortunate, think of those who are different. But there\u2019s a subtler form of contract, which is the connection between us all.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">And then there\u2019s Ice Cube, who seems to be talking about life\u2019s basic appetites \u2014 what\u2019s under the lid of the id \u2014 but is in fact proposing a world where that social contract is destroyed, where everyone aspires to improve themselves and only themselves, thoughts of others be damned. What kind of world does that create?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Those three ideas, Bradford\u2019s and Einstein\u2019s and Cube\u2019s, define the three sides of a triangle, and I\u2019m standing in it with pieces of each man: Bradford\u2019s rueful contemplation, Einstein\u2019s hair, Ice Cube\u2019s desires. Can the three roads meet without being trivial? This essay, and the ones that follow it, will attempt to find out. I\u2019m going to do things a little differently, with some madness in my method. I may not refer back to these three thinkers and these three thoughts, but they\u2019re always there, hovering, as I think through what a generation of hip-hop has wrought. And I\u2019m not going to handle the argument in a straight line. But don\u2019t wonder too much when it wanders. I\u2019ll get back on track.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">*<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">I want to start with a statement: Hip-hop has taken over black music. At some level, this is a complex argument, with many outer rings, but it has a simple, indisputable core. Look at the music charts, or think of as many pop artists as you can, and see how many of the black ones aren\u2019t part of hip-hop. There aren\u2019t many hip-hop performers at the top of the charts lately: You have perennial winners like Jay Z, Kanye West, and Drake, along with newcomers like Kendrick Lamar, and that\u2019s about it. Among women, it\u2019s a little bit more complicated, but only a little bit. The two biggest stars, Beyonc\u00e9 and Rihanna, are considered pop (or is that pop-soul), but what does that mean anymore? In their case, it means that they\u2019re offering a variation on hip-hop that\u2019s reinforced by their associations with the genre\u2019s biggest stars: Beyonc\u00e9 with Jay Z, of course, and Rihanna with everyone from Drake to A$AP Rocky to Eminem.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<aside>\n<h6 style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Related Stories<\/span><\/h6>\n<article style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/2013\/06\/questlove-my-youth-in-27-records.html\" name=\"&amp;lpos=Vulture: Story: Side Related Story\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/pixel.nymag.com\/imgs\/daily\/vulture\/2013\/06\/07\/07-questlove.o.jpg\/a_97x97.jpg\" width=\"47\" height=\"47\" \/>Questlove: My Youth in 27 Records<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/article>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">It wasn\u2019t always that way. Back in the late &#8217;80s, when I graduated high school, you could count the number of black musical artists that weren\u2019t in hip-hop on two hands \u2014 maybe. You had folksingers like Tracy Chapman, rock bands like Living Colour, pop acts like Lionel Richie, many kinds of soul singers \u2014 and that doesn\u2019t even contend with megastars like Michael Jackson and Prince, who thwarted any easy categorization. Hip-hop was plenty present \u2014 in 1989 alone, you had De La Soul and the Geto Boys and EPMD and Boogie Down Productions and Ice-T and Queen Latifah \u2014 but it was just a piece of the pie. In the time since, hip-hop has made like the Exxon Valdez (another 1989 release): It spilled and spread.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">So what if hip-hop, which was once a form of upstart black-folk music, came to dominate the modern world? Isn\u2019t that a good thing? It seems strange for an artist working in the genre to be complaining, and maybe I\u2019m not exactly complaining. Maybe I\u2019m taking a measure of my good fortune. Maybe. Or maybe it\u2019s a little more complicated than that. Maybe domination isn\u2019t quite a victory. Maybe everpresence isn\u2019t quite a virtue.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Twenty years ago, when my father first heard about my hip-hop career, he was skeptical. He didn&#8217;t know where it was all headed. In his mind, a drummer had a real job, like working as music director for Anita Baker. But if I\u2019m going to marvel at the way that hip-hop overcame his skepticism and became synonymous with our broader black American culture, I\u2019m going to have to be clear with myself that\u00a0<em>marvel<\/em>\u00a0is probably the wrong word. Black culture, which has a long tradition of struggling against (and at the same time, working in close collaboration with) the dominant white culture, has rounded the corner of the 21st century with what looks in one sense like an unequivocal victory. Young America now embraces hip-hop as the signal pop-music genre of its time. So why does that victory feel strange: not exactly hollow, but a little haunted?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">I have wondered about this for years, and worried about it for just as many years. It\u2019s kept me up at night or kept me distracted during the day. And after looking far and wide, I keep coming back to the same answer, which is this: The reason is simple. The reason is plain. Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it\u2019s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant. Not to mention the obvious backlash conspiracy paranoia: Once all of black music is associated with hip-hop, then Those Who Wish to Squelch need only squelch one genre to effectively silence an entire cultural movement.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">And that\u2019s what it\u2019s become: an entire cultural movement, packed into one hyphenated adjective. These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as \u201chip-hop,\u201d even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. \u201cHip-hop fashion\u201d makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: \u201cHip-hop food\u201d? \u201cHip-hop politics\u201d? \u201cHip-hop intellectual\u201d? And there\u2019s even \u201chip-hop architecture.\u201d What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">This doesn\u2019t happen with other genres. There\u2019s no folk-music food or New Wave fashion, once you get past food for thought and skinny ties. There\u2019s no junkanoo architecture. The closest thing to a musical style that does double-duty as an overarching aesthetic is punk, and that doesn\u2019t have the same strict racial coding. On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop\u2019s success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion. The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range \u2014 social contract, anyone? \u2014 but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black starliner. Containers on the container ship are taken from here to there \u2014 and never mind the fact that they may be empty containers. Keep on pushin\u2019 and all that, but what are you pushing against? As it has become the field rather than the object, hip-hop has lost some of its pertinent sting. And then there\u2019s the question of where hip-hop has arrived commercially, or how fast it\u2019s departing. The music industry in general is sliding, and hip-hop is sliding maybe faster than that. The largest earners earn large, but not at the rate they once did. And everyone beneath that upper level is fading fast.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">The other day, we ran into an old man who is also an old fan. He loves the Roots and what we do. Someone mentioned the changing nature of the pop-culture game, and it made him nostalgic for the soul music of his youth. \u201cIt\u2019ll be back,\u201d he said. \u201cThings go in cycles.\u201d But do they? If you really track the ways that music has changed over the past 200 years, the only thing that goes in cycles is old men talking about how things go in cycles. History is more interested in getting its nut off. There are patterns, of course, boom and bust and ways in which certain resources are exhausted. There are foundational truths that are stitched into the human DNA. But the art forms used to express those truths change without recurring. They go away and don\u2019t come back. When hip-hop doesn\u2019t occupy an interesting place on the pop-culture terrain, when it is much of the terrain and loses interest even in itself, then what?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Back to John Bradford for a moment: I\u2019m lucky to be here. That goes without saying, but I\u2019ll say it. Still, as the Roots round into our third decade, we shoulder a strange burden, which is that people expect us to be both meaningful and popular. We expect that. But those things don\u2019t necessarily work together, especially in the hip-hop world of today. The winners, the top dogs, make art mostly about their own victories and the victory of their genre, but that triumphalist pose leaves little room for anything else. Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive. People who want to challenge this theory point to Kendrick Lamar, and the way that his music, at least so far, has some sense of the social contract, some sense of character. But is he just the exception that proves the rule? Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&gt;via:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/2014\/04\/questlove-on-how-hip-hop-failed-black-america.html\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/2014\/04\/questlove-on-how-hip-hop-failed-black-america.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>April 22, 2014 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America By\u00a0Questlove This is the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop&#8217;s recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future. There are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[6],"tags":[4,12,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176435563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176435563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176435563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176435566,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176435563\/revisions\/176435566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176435563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176435563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176435563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}