what happened to hip hop?

i may be slow, but i realized something was amiss when i recently attended a free lyrics born show at the santa monica pier. his material was exactly the same as it's been over the past three years, and there's something wrong when an incredibly innovative artist in one of the most innovative and politically charged musical genres has stopped innovating.

i did a little cursory internet research on what the hell has happened to hip hop and the popular opinion seems to be that monetary interests have won out over art and politics. that's undoubtedly part of the problem, but i think the answer is deeper and more complex, and here's what i think it is.

hip hop was and is a black art form. it was born both an organic expression of and response to the condition of being a minority in the US. but what i'll call true hip hop artists -- the ones who remember that the roots of the genre are political -- changed at a certain moment. they ceased to be centered around expression and became centered around mission, a mission of being the consciousness for a black community with unfulfilled potential and what they saw as confused priorities. look at the difference between De La Soul and artists like Mos Def and Lauryn Hill. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is basically a blatant, unshy effort at making black people think they have brains, through music. it's not bad -- it's a great album -- but in a way it's kind of laughable when compared with artists that preceded her, who simply let the music flow out of their own conditions, rather than dictating to others what their conditions ought to be. it's no big surprise that the album was so popular among white people, and less so among black people.

watching the progression of political hip hop is watching a black genre gradually being disowned by its original creators and embraced by everyone else. i went to hear The Roots at this forum where they were interviewed by Malcolm Gladwell, and the ratio of white to black people in the audience was about 30 to 1, and no shit, they were pissed off about who their audience is. the mass black audience for hip hop has moved to a completely different brand of hip hop from what those guys put out, and that brand is the pussy, bling, party whatever brand. it's shallow and economically motivated, but in a weird way it's more appealling, and maybe, in another weird way, it's a black musical form that rejects true accessibility by non-blacks.

like Lauryn Hill's dictations/observations, a lot of hip hop artists who have seen the way things have progressed for the genre have talked about what's wrong with it. many -- admittedly excellent -- hip hop albums talk about "being real," not wanting to be judged by money or whatever it may be. i quote the Black Eyed Peas' first and only stellar album, Behind The Front, "I see you try to dis our function by stating that we can't rap/Is it cuz we don't wear Tommy Hilfiger or baseball caps/We don't use dollars to represent." that statement is stale. stale stale stale. i don't fault politically motivated hip hop artists for pointing those things out, but they got hung up on it. they got hung up on looking from the outside in, rather than expressing from the inside out.

the moment when things started to change was when the vultures of commerce recognized the awesome pureness of hip hop and began circling, looking for a way to profit from and exploit brilliance. the problem was that politically charged hip hop began to be guided by reactions to the changes, rather than by continuing to be what it always was. of course, being a white person and critical of all that is messed up, not only because i'm technically an outsider, but also because those reactions have created albums that i adore. but hip hop wasn't created for me, and hip hop artists need to get back to their roots.