Matthew Swishman – The Concordian

Last week’s article looked at hip-hop’s beginnings, and we now dive into the genre’s corporate soul

(A continuation from last week’s piece on the issue)

Call me skeptical, but anybody who thinks that the interests of black America will take priority over the interests of corporate America probably has a very optimistic understanding of capitalism. Although some puritans will debate the exact moment corporate America decided, “Hey! We can package and sell this!” hip-hop’s commercialization arguably began in 1986; the first year rap albums started appearing on the Billboards. From then onwards, hip-hop was to be considered as much of a commodity as it was an art form, a class of brandable merchandise whose primary goal was to capture market share by delivering consistent quality and digestible programming.

Unsurprisingly, the music’s capacity to provide insightful cultural commentary took a backseat role. Rap musicians were now contributing to somebody’s bottom line, and maybe if they felt like it, also chose to paint that all-too familiar image of the black American experience in their music. Whatever the case, the profitability of specific musicians and topics would dictate who or what was to be pushed to the majority. Here we are in 2015, and whether or not those same practices remain detrimental to hip-hop culture—and by extension, the black community— has become largely irrelevant. If the financial interests of the music industry were dependent on an artist’s profitability, why change a recipe that has been so historically bankable? For hip-hop to be lucrative in the United States, it must remain familiar to the 63 per cent of people who compose the majority of its population: white America.

The thing is, white America has been listening to hip-hop music for quite a while, now. That is hardly news to anybody. Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes, a documentary directed by Byron Hurt, stated it plainly: white people consume 70 per cent of “all hip-hop produced” (the exact implications of that remain unclear), they have also been making hip-hop music for quite a while, and with great success. The Beastie Boys’ License to Ill became the first hip-hop album to hit the Billboards in 1986. But as we have come to understand, hip-hop music’s original source of inspiration were the laments of the disadvantaged, frustrated and marginalized; the realities that blacks faced in the United States, which was, if we can be blunt, historically the consequence of white people. Macklemore, probably one of the most controversial white people in music right now, provided very germane perspective during his interview on Hot 97, where he affirmed that as a culture that came “from pain, that came from white oppression,” he will not “disregard… [his] place in [hip-hop] as a white [person.]” Indeed, some very constructive dialogue at such a fragile period for race relations in hip-hop culture, and in America.

I’ll take a hot minute to drop a quick PSA for you, humble reader: this is not an article calling for the banishment of white people from hip-hop. White people have been contributing positively to the culture for decades. On top of that, it would be downright insulting towards pretty much every race to equate all of white America with corporate America. Maybe 2014 being the music industry’s most unprofitable year to date (according to Forbes) is just a symptom of how truly out of touch the industry has become with hip-hop culture. Let the eruption of online discussion revolving around Macklemore’s victory over Kendrick Lamar at the 2014 Grammys act as substantial proof of that disconnect. There have undoubtedly been upsets at the Grammys before, but what made this upset particularly remarkable is realizing how people were more agitated by the transparency of the decision-making process than anything else; today, the Grammys are more comparable to a showroom than an art gallery. It serves as nothing more than a presentation of the music industry’s “most popular products,” in much the same way that the Billboards do. Corporate America is focused on delivering prepackaged hip-hop content that caters to a national audience, where two out of three people are Caucasian. So no wonder that we are seeing less and less black hip-hop artists receiving accolades.

I guess we have come to realize that the influence exercised by corporate America over hip-hop is beginning to jeopardize the legitimacy of the genre as an art form. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that when art becomes product, the narrative of its creation is rarely dictated by what the artist thinks you need as a viewer. Instead, it is dictated by what the industry thinks you want as a customer. Neither the people, nor the sounds of hip-hop continue to serve its modus operandi. People are struggling with the definition of hip-hop because the industry’s presentation and acknowledgement of what truly constitutes hip-hop can no longer be fully corroborated by the black experience in America. It is for this reason alone, that hip-hop is in danger.

With the rise of hip hop as a money making institution, the genre may be losing touch with its roots.

If you were not already aware, afford me the opportunity of informing you that 2014 was a pretty terrible year for race relations in the USA. Now, I’m not here to debate or scrutinize the painfully familiar cases that have stained our memories; you have undoubtedly heard somebody else talk about them, because nobody lives in a hole that deep in the ground. But what I do want to talk to you about is the ever-changing landscape of the black experience in America, and how the largest institution of race relations in the country is reflecting these changes. This is an institution that, according to Jay-Z’s interview on Oprah’s Master Class, has “done more than any cultural icon.” An institution that Forbes says generates more than $10 billion in revenue annually. That institution is hip-hop. Now, being a white boy from a predominantly Jewish Montreal suburb, this is a tough question to answer… but does hip-hop truly represent the black experience in America anymore? Lately, it seems like the whole world has been arguing over what hip-hop is. And more importantly, what it is not.

A hip-hop song, like every other genre of music, is the result of an artist’s perspective. The imagery that hip-hop evokes continues to be shaped by the trials, tribulations and triumphs of a culture whose history in the United States has been resoundingly disadvantageous. Historically, hip-hop music has earned a strong reputation for illustrating themes of poverty, violence and drug trafficking; Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest recently clarified the definition of hip-hop on Twitter as an “artistic and socio-political movement/culture that sprang from the disparate ghettos” of New York in the ‘70s. It was for this reason that we have legitimized hip-hop as an art form: at some point, it captured the realities faced by black America.

Now, recently there’s been a growing dialogue as to whether that’s still the case. I can name at least five different interviews in the past couple months off the top of my head that have touched on the burgeoning racial tension in hip-hop. These conversations have brought particular attention to corporate America, and how the sound of hip-hop has been affected by its effort to continually monetize its most prominent figures and themes. If hip-hop’s legitimacy as an art form is assured by its capacity to portray the black experience, then I think it’s logical to make an assumption that the sound of hip-hop should have undergone some sort of audible transfiguration in its response to the bruising that the black body is currently suffering. I wonder if people—like Macklemore, or Azealia Banks, or J. Cole—have arrived at the same, depressing conclusions that I have after I asked myself this next question: can we even expect hip-hop to capture the experiences of Black America as an art form if it is subject to corporate America’s presentation of it as a product? Because I am so damn curious.

No form of music can be defined beyond who is performing, and how they perform it. Traditionally, hip-hop was defined by black people performing about, well, mostly black situations. As we have come to acknowledge, hip-hop was an emotional release, cathartic in its illustrations of gun violence and poverty, symptoms of the grim economic circumstances that plagued several corners of the black community from which the genre eventually emerged. But does the prevalence of these themes in commercial hip-hop music continue to reflect the black American experience today? J. Cole voiced his concerns in an interview with Power 105: “If you really take another listen to what’s being played right now, what’s being said, it don’t represent us no more … or I don’t know if it ever did … or if it just really represented what could be sold, and what could be marketed and what could be pushed.”

Considering that Neighborhood Scout placed the three most deadly neighbourhoods in America in 2013 in Detroit, where 80 per cent of its residents are black, or in Chicago, where the police department’s official online records estimate that three out of four homicide victims are black, it’s just frankly untrue of Cole to think that the discussion of gun violence in hip-hop music no longer provides even a marginal portrayal of the modern Black American experience. And if hip-hop never represented black people in America, as Cole described, why do so many listeners consider the political outspokenness of musicians like KRS – One or Public Enemy, both of whom enjoyed great commercial success, as one of the quintessential features defining hip-hop’s golden era? Forest Hills Drive, J. Cole’s third studio album, went gold within two weeks of its release. And while he is complaining about how there should be more artists in the commercial hip-hop scene who rap like him, the obnoxiousness of Cole’s message is eclipsed by the nobility of his theories and ideas on why the commercial hip-hop scene is lacking a brand of lyricism that paints different pictures of the black experience in America. Pictures that stand for a significantly greater share of the black community, beyond the likeness of what we have come to expect from Chief Keef’s or Bobby Shmurda’s music.

What J. Cole brings to our attention is how familiar these topics within the commercial hip-hop scene really are, how accustomed to this dialogue that we, as an audience, have grown, and what role, if any, the music industry has played in perpetuating these themes of destruction.

Stay tuned for part II of this discussion in next week’s paper.