So this Reuters article isn’t the first to drop the d-word–”disco”–in reference to hip-hop’s shrinking sales (a 15 percent dip from last year). As in “a flagging musical genre that may go the way of disco.”
I know it’s just a hack-y, shorthand rhetorical flourish, and I know critics have been pointing out the similarities between the last days of disco and modern hip-hop’s slouch toward possible/eventual irrelevance in greater detail for some time now. But the laziness still irks me, paving over the differences so readily apparent when you look at hip-hop’s three decades of ever-rising and ever-falling success and (aside from perhaps oversaturation) the quite different failings bewtween the genres as well. Not to mention fact that the digital-era crisis goes beyond genre, and that this article was written as four, maybe five hip-hop singles sit in this week’s Top 10–possibly more if we play with the definition. At least Reuters isn’t flogging the now-standard “hip-hop is the new hair metal” line trotted out by angry critics and indie rappers alike.
Kanye West And 50 Cent Put Waning Hip-Hop In The Spotlight [Yahoo via Reuters]
So basically rap’s going to suffer from complete major-label financial collapse and pop-culture mockery, followed by underground/art-hip cross-genre pollination (see: ESG), subtle reintroductions back into the mainstream under different guises (see: “Billie Jean”)and an eventual mutation into a giant renamed hydra poly-genre that’ll last for at least two decades and counting (see: house)? Because that wouldn’t be entirely terrible.
I have trouble believing that hip-hop is dying after watching the VMAs on Sunday. I can count the number of non-hip-hop appearances on one hand.
Not that MTV is any good indicator of the future, but it certainly says to me that rap and R&B are alive and well at the moment.
Who knows, maybe there will be a “Hip-hop Demolition Night” at a White Sox game this year. But seriously, the genre’s record sales are still strong despite the decline and I always see teens who know nothing but hip-hop. I believe that it’s artistic vitality that is largely gone from mainstream hip-hop – the “golden age” of the late 80′s and early 90′s are long over, and hip-hop turntablism pretty much declared itself to be dead four years ago.
The thinly veiled anti-rap cheerleading posing as industry reportage I see all the time continues to amaze me. Everybody’s using the overall downturn in music sales as a stalking horse for their own agendas, and the downfall of hip-hop is by far the most popular agenda.
Middle-aged white reporters who secretly hate rap and its cultural dominance can’t say so openly, lest they be seen as out of touch or borderline-racist. So the minute they get some data showing a blip in rap sales, they go to town with the numbers, treating it as straight reportage and exceptional news — when in fact the last genres to see sales erosion this decade have been rap and country (the two genres beloved by poor blacks and poor whites, respectively — the last two socioeconomic groups to get broadband and iPods. I mean, duh!).
@natepatrin: Seriously. I don’t know how anyone can look at the career of Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, or Rihanna and say that disco is dead. It didn’t die just because some white guys with guitars said so… it merely blended with hip-hop (something that it did since the beginning).
a friend of mine (big hip-hop fan) declared rap dead when “8 mile” came out.
but more seriously, i think the cycle for the relevance of hip-hop is declining, just as it did for disco. disco certainly never “died”, but neither did acid-rock or stadium anthems. but they have all receded, just as hip-hop inevitably will. music doesn’t die, but new genres and mixtures come along that capture a period in time. there is still a generation of men with porkchop sideburns because of elvis out there. is elvis really relevant? no. he lives on, but just isn’t in the forefront of music anymore. disco isn’t in the forefront either. it’s been coopted for other sounds. the disco of the late 70s simply isn’t part of the musical conversation. different forms of it are, but not what defined that era.
so what if hip-hop is going that way too? and so what if music critics have agendas against it? they can’t kill it or marginalise it. listeners always triumph in the end. and somewhere out there, someone in a home studio is making the next zeitgeist-capturing sound. no biggie.
Hip-hop’s not dead. It’s just brain-dead. It’s like the Terry Schiavo of pop culture – and irrelevant old white jagoffs like to project their various agendas onto the still-warm body, but all the intelligence, emotion and human warmth left the building a long time ago.
It’s amazing how rap still offends the elders after 30 years. It’s like if, in 1987, you looked at the rise of hair metal and decided that rock & roll was “going the way of disco.” Come on, not one fortysomething reporter out there who obsessed over Three Feet High And Rising or The Low End Theory in 1988?
How come nobody ever says that hip-hop is the new ska?
“no biggie” – hah! unintentional pun.
@mike a: Probably not, since any reporter who geeked over those albums in 1988 was then immediately kidnapped by the CIA and forced to undergo testing to tap their psychic abilities. [/pedant]
@mike a: My guess is that anyone who lived through hip-hop’s golden age with any real investment in the culture is now just deeply, deeply dissappointed in how lame everything turned out in the long run. You gotta figure that alot of folks checked out even before Tip started shilling for Budwiser.
le hip-hop, c’est mort. vive le hip-hop!
@natepatrin: Ha! Good catch! I can always date 3 Feet High as the soundtrack to the summer of my freshman year of college. People’s Instinctive Travels was the soundtrack to summer 1990 (or the summer of ecstasy) … and I don’t remember much after that…
@Clevertrousers: amen. i still keep up with my faves from that time who are still producing new material, but i have no excitement for the chingys and chamillionaires of this world.
@supastah: I see your point here and it’s well-intentioned, but I think you’re comparing apples at least with pears, if not oranges.
Yes, like disco, hip-hop is merging with other genres. Yes, its period of cultural dominance may recede, like disco’s did, or acid rock’s.
But think of the “period” we’re talking about. Disco (which I love, by the way, and agree never really totally went away) dominated pop music for roughly five years. Hip-hop has arguably been at the epicenter of pop for some two decades, out of the three it’s been in existence.
Hip-hop is arguably closer to the advent of “rock” in its Big Bang-ness, in that it (forgive my hyperbole) changed everything. The reason we define 20th century music by whether it’s, say, “pre-rock” or “post-rock,” or refer to the pop charts during “the Rock Era,” is that rock invented an entire language and a new consumer medium. Rap did virtually the same thing, and like rock, it’s shaped multiple mini-genres that have come before, after and under it.
Saying, “Well, the rap era is over, but that’s okay, it’s like what happened to disco,” would be like folks in Hollywood saying, “Well, the era of the summer blockbuster is over, but that’s okay, it’s like what happened to John Hughes teen comedies.” The latter genre was a pleasurable, influential but short-lived cultural happening; the former has reshaped the very way we approach the entire medium. And like summer blockbusters, critics of a certain age hate rap, and so they’ll take any opportunity to sort through selective data and declare it Over (like they all did in ’05 when Hollywood had a bad summer), when in fact it will never really fully go away.
i have a “tag” suggestion for these articles, as well as the articles bemoaning the state of the music industry generallly. that would be “whither hip hop” and for music industry articles “whither music industry” or “whither the music industry”.
In this case the use of the term “whither” amply captures the unoriginal handwringing that frequently goes on in every single one of these articles, while also mocking the genre itself.
@supastah: I think the last “new” hip-hop artist I was vaguely interested in was Lil’ Jon – and that’s mostly because I interviewed him and discovered he was as big a roots and dancehall reggae fanatic as I was…
Clevertrousers: indeed. I was a fan of hiphop’s golden age in real time, and can still listen to those aforementioned records and get something new out of them. But other than the predictable white-guy favorites (Ghostface Killah, et al.), I can’t get excited about most modern-day rap. I chalk it up to the demise of sampling and the willingness to dumb it all down.
But then again, I can’t get excited about Nickelback either. That doesn’t mean rock’s dead, and even if it is, people aren’t quite rooting for its demise in the same way.
Clevertrousers, FTW. Though I try to like newer artists, I’m a million times more excited by the Cold Chillin’ 2-disc remasters coming out than I am by, well, just about any hip-hop released in the last ten years.
The supposed death of disco is a complete misconception. It was dethroned but definitely keepin’ on albeit in altered forms in the early 80s. Megatone Records? Italo-Disco? etc.
It’s lame enough to invent a premise that hip hop is going to die (again, as oppose to withdraw a bit). It’s doubly lame to use this premise as a springboard for an outdated mythical analogy.
But hey, if this means that Timbaland is going to soundtrack Scarface 2013, then, um, bring on the “death”
Not sure what it means for a musical genre to “go away.” There are still “early music” (i.e. medieval) groups doing well on the modern-art-music-is-too-challenging circuit. Nothing seems to be able to kill classical, even classical-lite.
Maybe rap sells records now because all genres do, but I thought it was a general truism that commercial success is not directly equivalent to “importance.” When Rhino is releasing boxsets of idolatory (sorry) to this stuff in twenty years, do you really think an Eminem greatest hit* EP filled out by the EPK of 8 Mile is going to win out over Public Enemy or de la soul?
*All his songs are either 1) remakes of “My name is” or 2) instantly forgettable. Except maybe Stan, but the only thing that that ever proved is that Elton John is senile. Poor guy.
@Clevertrousers: Although really, that should probably involve a severe beating of the Chemical Brothers. Shouldn’t be hard to find them, as you just need to look for the gigantic pile of money. (Hey, it’s tough love.)
Seriously, if you think hiphop is dying, or not as good as it was, then LISTEN TO HIPHOP FROM OTHER COUNTRIES!
I can’t stress this enough!
Why aren’t my posts appearing :(