Droppin' It - Essential Hip-hop Criticism
Essayist Greg Tate journeys to the deep like subterranean.
Veteran hip-hop essayist Greg Tate lays down the law like Chuck Heston clutching a pair of rocks in this week's Village Voice. Though his article carries the pedestrian headline "Hip-hop Turns 30," the accompanying screed explodes like a Molotov cocktail lurking underneath a brown bag. Oh yeah, this is fire.
Concise, focused and provocative, Tate's unflinching, steel-eyed analysis examines the entrenchment of hip-hop as both a cultural, social and economical force, and laments the exchange of its political capabilities for successful branding.
Check it right here and prepare to have your rods and cones scorched. Here's a smattering of talking points, questions and miscellany that came to me while reading the essay.
- Hip-hop was created and initially sustained by marginalized individuals: the overwhelmingly minority and economically depressed residing in a localized area. Because the artistic expression of the marginalized is realized through overcoming these and other institutional obstacles, does hip-hop have a social responsibility to address the circumstances that guided it from the beginning?
- Is the political component of hip-hop overstated? Wasn't hip-hop then, and continues to be, about rocking the party, getting loose, having a good time, etc.?
- To what extent, if any, is hip-hop driven and sustained by marginalization? Consider marginalization as including racism, political disenfranchisement, cultural discrimination and other barriers.
- With the blurring of lines separating hip-hop and pop music, is hip-hop marginalized at all?
- Despite its current aesthetic and content, is hip-hop inherently political?
- Remember when Public Enemy was yelling out "No sell out"? Maybe nobody was buying back then. Hard to imagine anyone saying that with a straight face now.
- Hip-hop has money, but does it have power? Does it even want power? WTF? Clear Channel was involved with Vote or Die?!?
- Where/when is the work that breaks down America's uneasy relationship towards the NBA and hip-hop? Why don't I do this?
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