The key to the genre’s continual rise has been its insistence on being, decade after decade, outrageously entertaining. In fact, hip-hop has not always told the truth often, the practice of rapping has seemed less like reporting and more like bullshitting. But as an analysis of the music, it is not particularly insightful, not least because it doesn’t make hip-hop sound like much fun. “The only thing that gives the straight-up facts on how the black youth feels is a rap record.”Īs a defence of hip-hop, this may be effective – a way to push back against all the people who say that rap records were worthless, or even harmful. “Rap is black America’s TV station,” Chuck D told Spin magazine in 1988. Just as Bob Dylan helped popularise the idea that singers should be truth tellers, Public Enemy helped popularise the idea that rappers should be revolutionaries.Ĭhuck D, from Public Enemy, encouraged listeners to think of hip-hop as an authentic reflection of life in some of the US’s toughest neighbourhoods, and as an indispensable chronicle of the African American experience. Starting in the late 80s, Public Enemy honed a form of hip-hop that was militant and incandescently righteous – the group’s records made rapping seem like serious business. The fake protesters who interrupted the Black Sheep album, complaining about the “ho zone”, reflected the influence of one hip-hop act in particular. “Rap music don’t have to teach you anything.” Hip-hop is entertainment, but more than other genres – more than country, or R&B, or even rock’n’roll – hip-hop has often been asked to provide something greater than mere entertainment. “Nobody else has stereotyped any other particular music as being something that has to teach,” he said. In 1992, in an interview with the Source, for years hip-hop’s most important magazine, Mista Lawnge, the Black Sheep’s resident producer, complained that too many hip-hop acts were rushing to meet the demand for “message”-oriented music. For similar reasons, rappers are eager to engage with their detractors – more than singers, they must worry about social standing, because that standing is what gives them the right, and the credibility, to speak and to be believed. And so rappers spend lots of time explaining who they are, what they’re doing and why they deserve your attention. But rappers are more exposed than singers, because their form of expression is more similar to speech. Singers can hide their words – no matter how formulaic or spurious – beneath a tune. Examples would include Belchers Anonymous (at all the other meetings listed here, they serve you tasty carbonated drinks, but at this meeting, you only get non-fizzy libation so that you won't start burping!), Bellyachers Anonymous, Colliders Anonymous (for folks who often clumsily blunder into objects/people), Foot-steppers Anonymous (again, this would be for those of you who don't adequately watch where you're walking, and so you accidentally tread on others' toes a lot), Groaners Anonymous (they seat you in chairs with heating-pads and offer you pain-relievers), Grumblers Anonymous, Stumblers Anonymous, Whiners Anonymous, Yawners Anonymous (at all the other meetings they let you sit on comfy upholstered chairs, but here they make you sit on hard wooden benches so that you don't get too relaxed and then start sleepily displaying your tonsils), etc.Black Sheep in Brooklyn in 1994. Refers to the more light-hearted/trivial-affliction-related (i.e., non-substance-abuse or other serious-addiction-type condition) gatherings of sufferers where everyone shares life-stories and fellowship, and tries to assist each other in reducing/alleviating said unfortunate conditions/infirmities.
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