John McWhorter is at it again. He’s continuing his crusade against hip-hop, this time pointing out the limitations of so-called conscious hip-hop. His main point is ostensibly that even “conscious” hip-hop does very little to tangibly improve anybody’s life. Duh. His real main point is, as it always has, that he doesn’t like hip-hop. Bearing that in mind, anything he has to say about it will be to denigrate it, or to give him a more fair hearing, to “correct” those who believe that hip-hop actually has the potential to change things.
The funny thing is that I’ve stopped believing in hip-hop as anything but a musical genre. I stopped thinking anything significant was gonna come of it a long time ago. I think the potential might have been there…possibly, although I’m not really sold on that anymore. Yahmeen, it would be nice to think that there was some genre of music that could move the masses to political action, but the truth is, that was never hip-hop’s main mission. Sure there was some tangential political aspect to it, but it is, and always has been a genre of music. The people who claimed that it was some secret code of communication, or as the great Chuck D once said, the “CNN of the Black community” greatly overstated their case. And this is me talkin: it was Chuck D that first stimulated overtly Black political thought in my mind in the first place. So while hip-hop got me thinkin, I’m still here to tell you that it’s nothing but a genre of music.
Having said that, I’m always kinda dismayed by both sides of this argument. On the one hand, there are the McWhorters and Stanley Crouches who seem to have a hard-on for “debunking” the myths surrounding hip-hop’s political possibilities. They’re quick to talk about what she can’t or won’t do, usually managing a dig at the legitimacy of the form in the process. In the other corner is the “hip-hop-can-save-the-world” crowd. If, the argument goes, hip-hop could just be rescued from its self-destructive tendencies, if we could recapture the energy of the halcyon days of 88-92, when rappers had something to say, THEN we would see something. But that’s not gonna happen. It didn’t happen then, and it’s not gonna happen now.
Overall, I think McWhorter is right in his assessment of the limitations of “conscious” hip-hop. I’m always mystified when I see people who make their living as entertainers preach at me about how bad it is. Yeah, there are some things that go on that are pretty much out of our control. Police brutality is still a problem, and rappers do right to talk about it. At the same time, it’s flat-out disingenuous to act as if the majority of the problems in the Black community are the result of external influences. What we do to us is has a much greater impact than what they do. Having said that, it’s hard for me to co-sign McWhorter’s argument because it’s his argument. I can probably count the number of articles he’s written that hold hip-hop in an even neutral light. He’s never been particularly fond of hip-hop, so unfortunately even his legitimate arguments come off like the studious kid who’s always pointing out why the popular kid doesn’t deserve the attention.
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