When will hip-hop hurry up and die?!!
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- slagface
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A month or so ago New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a column about the state of rap, starting with the proposition ("proclamation" would be too bombastic a word) that 2009 was, in fact, the year of hip-hop's death. I read it and couldn't find a thing to disagree with. My only quibble was that he might have called it earlier. Perhaps 2006, when Nas released Hip Hop Is Dead. Or even 2004, when Timbaland "repeatedly voiced … a frustration with pop music, particularly the hip-hop end of it" (according to his New York Times interviewer, one Sasha Frere-Jones) and further declared: ''It's time for me to retire, because it ain't the same … I'm tired of stuff now, even stuff that I do." (He also, said, mindblowingly, that "Coldplay and Radiohead are the illest groups to me. That's music".) That same year, 2004, Jay-Z also confessed – on the eve of his (ha ha) retirement and moving on to bigger, more challenging fields of endeavour – that he too was "bored" with hip-hop. Rap had become "corny", he said, and accordingly he no longer felt peer pressure to raise his game.
Judging by its output in recent years, it's become a deadening force: as a listening experience, but also as something that maintains a deadlock on the musical imagination of Black American youth. I doubt very much that this demographic has no more surprises up its sleeves in terms of sound and style, judging by past form(s) (jazz, rhythm and blues, funk, house, et al ). But that New Thing won't come until they tire of hip-hop themselves and turn against it.
Judging by its output in recent years, it's become a deadening force: as a listening experience, but also as something that maintains a deadlock on the musical imagination of Black American youth. I doubt very much that this demographic has no more surprises up its sleeves in terms of sound and style, judging by past form(s) (jazz, rhythm and blues, funk, house, et al ). But that New Thing won't come until they tire of hip-hop themselves and turn against it.
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