Hip Hop: Rests in Pieces...?

...So is Hip Hop really dead?... go ahead, ask yourself, if you listen to the music at all...I mean really think about it, don't just blurt an answer...I'll wait...well, is it? In some ways it is to me...I lost touch with it totally right around the time Biggie Smalls and Tupac got smoked...I was disgusted with where the whole genre had been taken to by forces that said genre was created to in order to work-around in the first place...people love drama, I guess..

I know it's been spoken about before but an article I read last night made me revisit the enigma that's permeating the mainstream media brain trust...it was written by DavyD who sheds a little insight on why Nas said HHID and then put out an album with that declarative as it's title...too, in the article, ?uestlove is quoted.

"During a separate conversation, Questlove of the Roots supported Porter's allegation with his own story about the process behind the group's Grammy-winning hit with Erykah Badu, "You Got Me.'' He said the Roots had to pony up close to "a million dollars'' to a middle man who "worked his magic'' at radio stations."



I don't know if all of the culprits listed are equally to blame but I do know that the only thing I listen to Hip Hop-related was cut back in the early days, a decade-and-change before a lot of the "Hip Hop Nation" got here but I'm not going to totally give up on it, I believe in the cyclical nature of things and in music, especially the more popular genres, when a format reaches critical mass; it's saturation point, along comes a bunch of trail blazers to bring the masses back to the basics

...I've written about examples of the latter many times before like when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie niced-it-up when dancified, watered down big bands started over-simplifying jazz to keep the club crowd happy, they created be-bop...or James Brown, when the record companies told him to cut love ballads, he redirected the proceeds from his first hit single to cutting more funktified (albeit scratchily recorded) stuff on his own dime to show them what he was thinking of..they soon wised up and you know the rest...Artist innovations like that last one gives me hope for Hip Hop and though it seems to wear thin when I see those ass-on-the-glass, Cristal-fests getting beamed by cathode rays out of the nearest TV, I know there are a few artists out there working it on the low, biding their time-- just be prepared for the new when the bum rush jumps off and fresh, new ciphers start coming at you in a bigger and deffer format...it'll be soon, yo...remember how boring Rock had gotten just before Nirvana marched forward? Here's DavyD's article