(Via: The Rap Up)
The issue of music and race has been quite the hot-button issue lately (if by lately you mean "since the dawn of music"). With hip-hop routinely topping the charts these days, the issue du jour is the appeal of the genre to the American masses, i.e., white kids in the suburbs.
Author Bakari Kitwana (left) will tackle this issue in a lecture at Southern Illinois University tonight, but this article for the school's newspaper lets us non-Salukis in on the debate.
Kitwana basically posits that hip-hop's capacity for political dialogue is the draw for many youth today, adding that he's "trying to convey to young people that they have the power to change this society and shape it into what they want it to be, and hip hop right now, more than any other force on the national scene, is offering hope and possibility."
While he touches on the idea that popular hip-hop doesn't always live up to this standard, it's no stretch to say that the hip-hop artists getting play on MTV and your local radio station these days bear absolutely no resemblance to the hip-hop stars of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
To be fair, emcees like Too Short and MC Hammer were a little light in the fight-the-power department, but there is no way that an album like Fear of a Black Planet would move five million units today. Even emcees vilified for glorifying violence like Ice Cube were dropping names like Latasha Harlins in their rhymes; has anyone heard 50 Cent mention Amadou Diallo lately?
We're certainly not taking shots at Kitwana here. He's right about the power of hip-hop, what draws many people to it and the idea that it's something that rightfully transcends the boundaries of class and race. We're simply saying that if The Coup can't even crack the Billboard 200, we've got a long way to go.
But you've gotta start somewhere.
Killer Mike: "That's Life" [2006]