Fan's Lament Hip Hop's Coma
By: Cary Darling (McClatchy Newspapers)
"Reminiscin' when it wasn't all business
They forgot where it started
So we all gather here for the dearly departed."
-Nas, Hip-Hop Is Dead
The plea hit YouTube two weeks ago like an IED.
Ghostface Killah, one of the rappers from the acclaimed and groundbreaking rap crew Wu-Tang Clan, took three minutes to rip into fans who had downloaded his latest solo release, The Big Doe Rehab, for free instead of slamming down hard-earned dollars for it.
"I thought y'all fuckin' loved me, man. I go all out for y'all, man, and I love y'all, man, but y'all niggas be hurting me, kid," Ghostface moans, sounding genuinely hurt. "We spend a lot of time in the studio and putting this work in, to come out with no results when we drop our album. (I've got) 115,000 friends on MySpace and I get 30,000 (in sales) or something like that in the first week. That's not good, man ... this is the real talk, coming from your homie, man. Y'all niggas are going to make me leave the game."
On Web sites like worldstarhiphop.com, blowback was swift and harsh. "Retire and see who cares!" scolded one fan. "U got more than enough money," growled another. And there was the always pithy, "Stop whining."
While Ghostface was only speaking for himself, his outburst was emblematic of something bigger than one rapper's shock at lethargic sales. While the music industry is in a slump overall, hip-hop has been especially hard hit.
At the start of the new century, hip-hop sales peaked at close to 100 million albums a year. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, sales are off by 30 percent, with the genre selling just under 60 million albums in 2006 and, through the first half of 2007, only 26 million albums. (Across all genres, record sales are down roughly 20 percent since 2000.)
Despite that, hip-hop is still a favorite on Top 40 and urban radio and generates some $600 million annually in ringtone sales.
It's this combination of sagging album sales and increased emphasis on the throw-away, easy hooks required by Top 40 radio and the ringtone industry that has some people speculating that hip-hop - a music born in the '70s out of the ambitions, frustrations and politics of African-Americans from the rough-and-tumble streets of the South Bronx and considered one of the most important cultural movements of the 20th century - is rendering itself insignificant.
Combined with what has been dubbed the "minstrelization" of the music - the emphasis on sex, violence and partying - some fear for the genre's future. Socially conscious rapper Nas released an album two years ago titled Hip-Hop Is Dead and, more recently, the critically lauded Lupe Fiasco - one of the past year's major hip-hop breakthroughs - complained, in the scolding Dumb It Down, that contemporary rappers pander to the lowest common denominator.
But is hip-hop dead or merely taking a long nap?
"It's undergoing a metamorphosis," says Andrew Ryan, a faculty member at the University of the District of Columbia and George Mason University, editor of The Journal of Hip-Hop and author of the upcoming book The Responsible Use of Hip-Hop in the Classroom. "You can look at the (beginning) period from 1979 to 1986; 1986 to 1994 was the (socially) conscious stuff; from 1994 to 2000 it got more glamorous; and now we're at the end of the bling-bling, look-at-me era."
He points out that many of his students have tired of the disposability of modern hip-hop. "They say, 'I want some substance,' " he says. "There's a renewed interest in giving me something my kids can listen to."
"When hip-hop blew up in the '90s, it had a lot to do with the videos," says Charles Aaron, music editor at Spin magazine. "They were projecting this particularly outsized image. It was glamorous, decadent and kids loved it. You couldn't get away from it, and it was a nonstop strip club. Rappers were throwing money at the camera, women were waving their butts at the camera, and there was a catchphrase you could remember if you were 12. That is completely gone. Forget about that."
In its place is what some see as a series of potential one- or two-hit wonders - such as Soulja Boy and his inescapable Crank That (Soulja Boy) - short-lived dance crazes and ringtones.
The quick-hit mentality means there are fewer long-term bankable stars, while the veterans - Snoop Dogg, Eminem, L.L. Cool J, Ice Cube, Wu-Tang's Method Man - grow long in the tooth or try to become movie stars.
The combination of the fast career turnover and hip-hop's young audience means that, unlike with rock 'n' roll, there's less of a sense of history among many fans. While young rock fans might know of Led Zeppelin, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, their hip-hop equivalents may be totally unaware of such pioneers as KRS-One, Public Enemy or A Tribe Called Quest.
In fact, so-called underground hip-hop - often echoing the socio-political groove of early hip-hop and marrying it with more mature, nonsexist lyrics and a freewheeling musical spirit that may touch upon rock, classic soul and jazz - has provided many of the style's high points in the past few years. Releases from the likes of Common, El-P, Talib Kweli and, of course, OutKast have found an increasingly larger audience. Common's most recent disc, Finding Forever, debuted on Billboard's Top 200 at No. 1 last summer.
