|
here's what really bugs me about the hip hop choice: the movement--diffuse as it is/was--was primarily about empowerment both at the levels of cultural production and economics. the cultural production part was about getting the particular forms of expression associated with the music--turntablism, rhyming, dance--and others on the order of graffiti and clothing design etc.---taken seriously enough to enable folk to adopt and change them as means of artistic expression. the lyrics are really only part of it, and why different people make the choices they do as to which subject matter to treat and which language to use to do it is not a particular indicator of wider attitudes. that some aspects of hip hop have become entirely integrated into the mainstream cultural machine really doesn't say a whole lot about what the ideas behind hip hop were or are.
it came out of the south bronx initially--a quite poor, quite rough largely african-american area. it came out of dance parties, rent parties...one of the reasons to emphasize empowerment was in opposition to a context that was largely conditioned by the history of institutionalized racism in the states.
so it's a bizarre choice.
you want to talk about the way the music has been made into commodity form, so made into something repeated and repetitive--that's different---then there are questions as to who's making the choices, how much control different artists have over what they put out--it's a different topic though. feeding back imagery that you decide you don't like carried out by marketing people and/or producers and/or labels is not the same problem that you try to raise.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|