While the world pays attention to the antics of Drake v. Meek Mill, Hip Hop is seemingly ignoring the writing on the wall: that there are aspects of culture at large that have seemingly left it behind. So the distraction provided by three lukewarm diss tracks and one performance as straight up bashing are cool and all. But people are being gunned down in the streets, here. And, as the U.S. and the world stands on the precipice of a major social event, with #BlackLivesMatter protesters and organizers being tracked by surveillance companies, and the first black president in the history of the western world having his tenure comes to an end, just where is the music that can be attached to this particular time and place in history? Where’s the history?
Kendrick Lamar aside, whose trip to Africa sparked a renaissance in his own thinking, there have been only a pitter-patter of tiny rap feet on the front lines of this other renaissance. Because for all the heat the millennial generation has taken about being apathetic and overly concerned with material comforts, there is an uprising of the mind happening. Now, and once again, the main protagonists are all shades of brown folks because the bodies being predated on with unusually deadly force are brown bodies. But it does not at all lessen the impact of a floundering economy, a lopsided Euro and banks that are too big to fail. It’s the perfect time. Student loan debt is above a trillion dollars, the police are at the napes of our necks, and the tumult has created an engine of “no more,” of not again. So we take up arms. We flood our timelines with hashtags and ideas and perspectives that are not, in this society, normative and so they are deeply radical. Women’s rights. Gay rights. Civil rights. That is just the beginning. We usher over the largest environmental crisis in the modern world’s history, and one of the largest economic crises in the modern world, as well. So why does Hip Hop stay silent?
It’s maddening. Of course, you cannot tell people what to make. And you especially cannot tell people what to make at a time when the difference between a hit and a dud may be eating, literally. But there’s an actual possibility that we are, as a people — I mean as humanity, here — standing in the valley of the sixth great wave of extinction in the history of the planet Earth. And it is quite possible that we are the cause of all this. So with the tumult of information hurtling out into space just to be bounced back at rapid speeds consistently outraging us, why is our music not outraged? It is almost, now, escapist at its core. From the Atlanta post-Hipster crowd to Earl Sweatshirt and crew to the west coast, and the now five-person show that is New York Hip Hop, not to mention the midwest’s love of Tech N9ne, Danny Brown, Stalley and the like are mostly creating music for the radio, with the goal being the game of rising to the top of the charts instead of attacking the systematic upheaval of, say, the Voting Rights Act.
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And as Hip Hop has thrown itself headlong into pop and into R&B, it needn’t forget another aspect of Hip Hop culture that has, since the beginning, continued to reinvent itself. That is the culture of dissent. It is in the very DNA of Hip Hop. And, not to be alarmist, but we could probably use some now, more than ever.
Andre Grant is an NYC native turned L.A. transplant that has contributed to a few different properties on the web and is now the Features Editor for HipHopDX. He’s also trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot. Follow him on Twitter @drejones.
