Nathan: Nobody's going to call Chamillionaire the second coming of Public Enemy, but I think it should be noted that his hit song "Riding Dirty" is essentially a protest song about racial profiling. That's one big difference between him and K-Fed. K-Fed couldn't do a song about racial profiling without looking like a reject from Three Times One Minus One. Heck, even without doing songs about racial profiling, he still looks like a reject from Three Times One Minus One.
I agree wholeheartedly with your assertion that the more invested you are in a genre, the more you get out of it, and the more you see in individual artists. I can't say I've ever listened to a Chamillionaire album, but I can nevertheless tell that he excels at the rapid-fire sing-song flow popularized by Midwestern acts like Bone Thugs N Harmony and Twista. That style of flow requires massive technical skill, especially if you want people to understand what you're saying.
Besides how can you feel disappointed or let down by a genre if you're so minimally invested in it? That would be like me listening to the last Killers and Bloc Party albums twice, being underwhelmed, and declaring that rock music is in a major creative slump. I share your frustration with the production-by-committee nature of most major-label hip-hop.
At the same time, I think it's fascinating when an act boasts such a strong personality that it can put an inimitable stamp on material despite working with a different producer on damn near every track. Rhymefest and Ghostface Killah both fall into that category for me. What's the difference between Rhymefest making a Just Blaze or Kanye West beat his own, and Howard Hawks twisting and contorting various cinematic genres to suit his singular sensibility?
You might look at Blue Collar and see a bunch of random producers, but I find the album's roster pretty fucking fascinating in its own right. There's Just Blaze, the drama king who has been experimenting playfully with song structure as of late, integrating lots of weird left-field touches like the Rocky and Muhammad Ali homages in Ghostface's "The Champ" or the hilarious, irreverent parody of Martin Luther King smacking down sub-par rhymers in "Dynomite ('Going Postal')." Then there's the fact that Rhymefest blatantly owns up to co-opting a stale, bare-budget Kanye West beat in "Brand New," or that Rhymefest ghost-wrote for Ol' Dirty Bastard just before his death, and Dirty repaid the favor by crooning "Build Me Up Buttercup," which Mark Ronson turned into another big pop-rock/rap mash-up. (Incidentally, if you dig Mark Ronson, you should check out the song "Oooh Wee" with Ghostface and Nate Dogg. It's a perfect fucking pop song and graces the "Saturday night in Manhattan" montage in half the films released in the past three years.) Ronson's sound and aesthetic indelibly reflects who he is and where he comes from, just as Chamillionaire's subject matter on "Riding Dirty" wouldn't sound authentic or convincing coming from anyone who didn't have to worry about the cops pulling them over because of the color of their skin. Again, the more invested you are in the music and the culture, the more you'll get out of it.
Like you, I feel like I'm fairly well-versed in a lot of genres I don't necessarily write about with any frequency, and since I'm well-schooled in The Beatles and Sex Pistols and David Bowie and The Kinks and Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, it's hard to listen to contemporary rock and not just hear watered-down versions of the all-time greats.
I think that's one of the reasons it's important to keep an open mind and open yourself up to new music even if it falls outside your comfort zone. Heck, especially if it falls outside your comfort zone. That said, I realize that in a lot of ways, I'm a hip-hop traditionalist. If you're a rockist, then I am what someone has dubbed a "Pete Rockist"-someone who'd rather listen to soulful, comforting old-school Native Tongues production than the angry, incendiary sounds of someone like El-P.
If you're looking for hip-hop auterists, you need look no further than MF Doom or Madlib, both of whom have created a prolific, formidable canon that can't be mistaken for anyone else's. There's a great big wonderful, diverse world of hip-hop out there, and I think it'd be a shame if an entire generation closed themselves off to it just because they were underwhelmed by the latest OutKast or Jurassic 5 album.
To shift the debate a little, let's address the middle-aged elephant in the room. Hip-hop is no spring chicken, and it's fascinating to see albums like Dr. Dre's 2001 or Nas' Hip-Hop Is Dead that are as haunted by the past as the Beales in Grey Gardens. Jay-Z's last album was a bit of a snoozer, but I found it weirdly brave that it's so transparently the work of an insanely wealthy middle-aged man. I'm almost surprised he didn't rap about his IRAs and the crazy fluctuations of the New York housing market.
Would you say that your estrangement from hip-hop has been gradual? Can you recall any kind of tipping point? What would hip-hop have to do to win you back?
Noel: The tipping point? Probably when I moved in with the woman I went on to marry, back in the mid-'90s. My wife likes R&B and pop and prog and indie-rock, but the harder the edge, the less she's into it. So I listen to a lot less punk and avant-garde noise than I used to, and a lot more reissues of long-forgotten folk-soul albums from the early '70s.
Of course, marrying Donna also coincided with the rise of gangsta rap and Puffy and the East Coast/West Coast wars, so maybe I would've lost interest anyway. My two favorite rap acts are still Public Enemy and Beastie Boys, the former because they're so provocative, and the latter because they're so joyous. (And both are musically innovative, which helps.) The more rap began to rely on pure exploitation—big sampled hooks, spurious true-crime stories—the less I cared.
Also, in keeping with the point you made about the genre getting old, I confess to being a little turned off by the rapid turnover of so many top rap acts. My auteurist approach to pop requires some long-term commitment to an artist's career, and hip-hop—like Britpop, another genre that frustrates me—tends to reward those who peak early. The biggest acts come blazing in with intriguing new personalities and moderately fresh sounds, and they get splashed all over MTV and magazine covers until no one ever wants to see them again, let alone hear what their second, third, and fourth albums sound like.
Which brings up another kind of quirky problem I have with hip-hop: It strikes me as wasteful. Because it's a DIY genre, and because CDs are so easy to make and distribute, the sheer number of rappers with product to pitch is staggering. (And since I can't always tell what's good and what's bad, that's especially daunting for me.) Plus, the form itself seems to prize loquaciousness over concision, which means that rappers pack their songs with lyrics, and don't always care whether they're a clean fit. A lot of rap songs do tell a story or explore a single idea, but a lot are just a torrent of clever phrases and self-aggrandizement.
I should clarify that I'm mainly talking about the mainstream when I mention self-aggrandizement. I understand that there's a big world of underground and alternative hip-hop with distinctive personalities, and while rapid burnout and word-heaviness is still a problem with the alt-crowd, they shouldn't be blamed for the rampant egotism in the genre.
Because when it comes to the mainstream, I've listened to debut albums by rappers where they're already complaining about how success brings out the haters. And that attitude has crept into all levels of popular culture. You could stick a microphone in the face of a linebacker for a undefeated championship team, and he'd still say, "People doubted us all year." There's a presumption about it all I find infuriating, this idea that the whole world is stopping to hear the latest about, say, Lil' Kim. (Then again, maybe everyone else in the world really does care what rappers, athletes, and celebrities are up to 24-7. I saw this AP headline the other day: "Paris Hilton Looks Bored At Vienna Ball." Man, stop the presses!)
So while some of my problems with hip-hop are inherent in the genre, a lot may just be trends that change over time. You ask me what hip-hop can do to win me back? Maybe tighten up some musically, and maybe look outside its own community more, for inspiration and lyrical material. Should it change? Not necessarily. By and large, I'm not really making any value judgments here, just describing why my personal taste runs the way it does. I trust that what's supposed to be good in hip-hop is actually good, and that I'm just missing out.
In fact, reading your points about collaboration makes me sure that I am. Please go on. Defend the wordiness and flash-in-the-pan-ness to me. I'm betting you've got a good take.
Nathan: Damn, Noel, my point originally was to re-ignite your passion for hip-hop, but I'm so dispirited after reading your post that I'm strongly considering abandoning hip-hop myself. As you said, rappers certainly didn't invent crass consumerism: They're merely transmitting a materialistic virus rampant throughout our society and pop culture. Again, I think it's important to look at context here. I hate to generalize, but a lot of rappers come from places of extreme poverty and hopelessness, and when you grow up in a society that tells you in a million different ways that your life doesn't matter and that you never really stopped being two-thirds of a person, then money, success, and their conspicuous display are going to matter a whole lot more than to someone who grew up upper-middle-class in Orange County.
For MC Flash In The Pan, the victory worth bragging about isn't that he's created a body of work that will stand the test of time, it's that he got from wherever the fuck he came from to having a major-label deal. Chances are it's never going to get any better than that for poor MC Flash In the Pan, so he better enjoy it while he can: He probably won't be receiving any royalties, and it's doubtful his label has any real interest in him as a long-term proposition. To me, a rapper's faux-omnipotence, like rap's misogyny, is really an expression of powerlessness: I have no real control over my career or how I'm marketed, but as long as I'm in the booth, I'll pretend I'm God. Similarly, rappers don't understand women and fear their sexual power, so they overcompensate by pretending that women are worthless sex objects. It's kinda pathetic, really. In hip-hop, as in the rest of our culture, there's a self-fulfilling aspect to supremely over-the-top bravado. 50 Cent rapped about being the King Of New York and a major competitor to Jay-Z and Nas when he was still MC Who The Fuck Are You Again? and suddenly, the media started treating him that way.
Honestly, Noel, I don't view loquaciousness as a big problem in hip-hop. Have you been pumping a lot of Aesop Rock or Busdriver as of late? As for flash-in-the-panism, I think a lot of that has to do with the way music is marketed and covered in the media. One of the nice things about doing the hip-hop issue in January was talking to three labels that have been pursuing a unique, idiosyncratic vision for at least a decade without showing any signs of artistic or creative fatigue. Then there are venerable veterans like De La Soul, which never stopped putting out good albums, though the press pretty much started ignoring the group ages ago.
I think a lot of major-label rappers suffer from the industry's unofficial one-strike-and-you're-out rule: If you don't hit it big the first time out, you're probably headed to Koch. You asked earlier what it necessarily meant to say you like Rhymefest. And here's my belated answer. It means about a hundred possible things: You saw him at Intonation and were blown away by his songs and charisma. You love the way he undercuts the social consciousness of his lyrics with goofy humor and big pop hooks. (Which I so do not see as a problem. For me, at least, sampling isn't just a legitimate art form: it's central to how I perceive music.) You think it's great that he bucked hip-hop's materialism by defiantly naming his album Blue Collar. Yet in the industry's eyes, Rhymefest is an absolute failure, a guy who couldn't translate his connection with Kanye West into any kind of sales. You can bet that Rhymefest's budget next time out won't be blue-collar, it'll be nonexistent.
There's longevity aplenty in the underground, but I think there'd be more major-label lifers if labels stopped treating rappers like disposable commodities. Noel, a lot of the reservations you voiced are shared by people within the hip-hop community. I like to think of intelligent patriotism as hating what's wrong about America just as much as you love what's right about America. Accordingly, I think the mark of an enlightened hip-hop-head is someone who hates what's fucked-up about rap just as much as he loves what's right about it. There's a verse by Phonte Maxwell on the DJ Drama mix-tape Separate But Equal called "Can't Let Her" that sums up a lot of what every middle-aged hip-hop fan feels. In it, he raps about hip-hop being "too damn young" for someone who's just "too damned grown." Toward the end, Phonte cops to being happily unhappy with contemporary hip-hop, which describes exactly how I feel as well. I love what hip-hop can be and has been, even though I'm continually mortified and saddened by its shortcomings, of which there are many. All the same, I'll never stop fighting for it to be the best genre/cultural force/lifestyle it can possibly be, so that someday I can hopefully be just plain happy with hip-hop without any of the reservations we've spent this entire Crosstalk hashing out.
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