Generation Gaps

What's good people!  Hope everyone had a great Labor Day and enjoyed your three-four day weekend.  This piece will concern something that a few of my friends and I often have heavy discussions about, and that's the evolution (or de-evolution) of hip-hop over the years.  As us hip-hop fans get older, we often times criticize generations that come after us.  I ended up doing the same thing as I got older.  I came up in an era where hip-hop was the most brilliant piece of music since Jazz.  During the early eighties, pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, Run-DMC, and LL Cool J introduced the masses to hip-hop and it was so fresh (not the slang terminology) and artists were hungry to establish longevity and immortal respect.

Let's fast forward to the early nineties, where more legends emerge such as Nas, UGK, Biggie Smalls, Wu-Tang Clan, and Outkast to completely reshape the structure of the game.  There were little rumblings that some of the older cats occasionally frowned on artists that would consistently promote violence and mysogany, however they would still give these same emcees props for remarkable talent.  many would say the besides the eighties, the nineties were the most successful and critically impactful period in all of hip-hop's history.  While the eighties brought us iconic albums like Raising Hell, Strictly Business, Long Live The Kane, and Paid In Full (which was my first forty-five inch record), the nineties presented us with monumental masterpieces such as Illmatic, Ready To Die, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, and The Chronic.  All these and quite a few more showed the exquisite nature of how talented these artists are.

However, as time passed on, the music became more about the radio and hits rather than talent.  At this point, the game became highly commercialized and watered down.  Talent, longevity, and respect became an afterthought.  We started being exposed to stuff like "My Baby Daddy", "Because I Got High", and other bouts of foolishness that started to make a lot of hip-hop's elders and forefathers cringe.  This was all around the late nineties and early thousands.  Iconic albums and artists started to come few and far between.  For every seminal album like Madvillainy, there were plenty of duds that started coming out around the same time as well.  Seemingly the music only got worse as time went along.  Artists (and I use that term loosely) became fixated with dance crazes and one-hit singles rather than immortality.  From Cali Swag District to Soulja Boy Tell 'Em, rappers wanting to be instant stars started discrediting the art form.  It became more about money and prostituting themselves for labels rather than being innovators and future legends.

Here's a timeless cut from ridiculously underrated emcee, O.C., that sums up what today's generation of radio-friendly, degenerative rappers need to start doing.  Check out the classic, "Time's Up."





 

 In today's climate of hip-hop, more artists are opting for independent routes rather than the pimp-and-ho game of the industry of major labels today.  More artists want more of their own creative visions and their own ways of expressing their art.  When listening to mainstream and commercial radio, people within my age bracket or older don't criticize the youthful enthusiasm and energy to create new movements.  We tend to have alts against some of the stylings of people like Young Thug, K Camp, and Chief Keef, who all represent a youthful period of drugs, mysogany, and violence in ways that aren't breaking any new ground, and in fact play into exactly what these greedy corporate A&R's are banking from.  Before we start accusing the South of all of this stuff, let's not forget the influence of the South with their own legends in the aforementioned UGK, Scarface, Eightball & MJG, Luke, and later icons such as Ludacris, T.I., and Jeezy.

It's imperative that the youth in today's hip-hop climate keep the game going, but please don't forget the roots of the art form.  Coming up, people like Nelly were seen as one-hits and didn't want longevity, however after his debut, Country Grammar, sold diamond units (that's over ten million units), it was clear he had a movement of his own and he wanted to get taken seriously.  In hindsight, purists like KRS-One frowned upon Nelly, but now Nelly has frowned upon this current crop of young up-and-comers that aren't doing anything to revolutionize the industry.

This is not to say that all of these young gunners are not doing anything to help the business.  In fact young artists like Joey Bada$$, Tyga, Kendrick Lamar, Big K.R.I.T., Fashawn, and Bishop Nehru are examples of light in the darkness of bland, uninspiring rap.  Coming up in an era of skills, that developed into hardcore and gangsta, and then into gimmicky rap, I have become that disgruntled hip-hop critic that listeners that were older than me would complain about when it came to the generational sound after theirs.  The one thing, in spite of subject matter and themes, that the older generation would agree upon was the talent.  We seemingly have no future icons like Nas, Jay, Biggie, and Scarface in the current crop of young rappers, and that will ultimately kill the culture and continue to make a cherade and a buffoonery of the culture that Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaata sacrificed for and pioneered.

Gone are the days of the creative (Organized Konfusion), insanely lyrical (Eminem), poetic (Common), and insightful (Scarface), and now we're living in the days of "I'm A Stoner" and "Cut Her Off".  If these are the voices of the new generation, hip-hop as we know it will die a slow death , at least critically speaking.

That's all for now kiddies.  Before I go, I'm going to leave you with two different contrasts: a video of Young Thug and a video of criminally underrated duo The Underachievers.  You be the judge of where our culture needs to go.  Until next time!