Maybe We Should All Just Start Listening to Dancehall?

I received this link from two different friends in the past 24 hours. Nice essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates talking about what I like to call "the Gen X black man's midlife crisis". We crossed 25 and ALL had to come to terms with some of the things happening to the music form that had nurtured us. I accepted several years ago that I was no longer the target audience for 90% of hip-hop music. Hell, how could a black man who attends live shows scan the audience and NOT come to that conclusion? I'm not just talking about the music that is played on the radio either. I cannot count how many times on the Venice boardwalk I've seen backpack-clad brothers stopping every white tourist they see in an attempt to sell them what would once have been called "underground" rap. We stopped being the market for rap long ago.

In my own personal opinion, all rap music falls into one of two eras, B.C. (before Chronic) and A.C. (after Chronic, or anno chronicky "in the year of our hip-hop lord"). That seminal debut album by Dr. Dre was released in 1993, when I was a student at Howard University. It came hot on the heels of director Bill Duke's 1992 ghetto gangster opus Deep Cover, the soundtrack of which introduced the world to the duo of Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg. As good as the film and song were, the release of The Chronic took the campus by storm. What we didn't realize was that it was also taking the entire country by storm. That was right around the time that documentaries like "Bangin' in Little Rock" were being made that examined the penetration of black gang culture in predominantly white suburbs across America. The Chronic was also the soundtrack of those white youth, who said it spoke to their life experiences as much as anyone else. The burly sales numbers for the album made record execs stand up and take notice too. That was the point at which rap, to me at least, became divided into mainstream (radio) and underground (backpacker music), with racially divided segments of both. But even I wouldn't have expected both forms (and all segments) to have so completely crossed over in less than a decade. I challenge anyone who says that they actually predicted that New Orleans' Bounce would one day be played at bat mitzvahs.

The dismay in Coates' piece is palpable to me because it has been a long running issue among lots of us for quite a while now, and I agree that at times the situation can be depressing. Is there any black person in America who hasn't been in a bar and felt the sudden urge to get up and leave when Fitty's "In Da Club" comes on and the lawyers/accountants/stockbrokers in attendance start chanting "go shorty, it's your birthday"? Yes, black folks have been making a mass exodus from hip-hop for a few years now, sorry to say. I wonder, is this how the jazz generation felt? Luckily, I've always had a more diverse music library than most. Hip-hop was the foundation, but there was always something else there to complete my music world view. At the same time I rocked Kurtis Blow, I was listening to Kraftwerk. At the same time I jammed to Eric B. & Rakim and Run DMC, I loved Depeche Mode and The Ramones. And no matter how disenchanted I become with hip-hop (with now being a low point), there are always at least one or two artists I enjoy.

But what that essay really got me thinking about was the writers of the hip-hop generation. I've always encouraged all writers to write about the things they love, regardless of race. Coates obviously has a passion for forms of music that aren't hip-hop, and a strong background as a writer, but I could only imagine the cross looks he (or any black writer) would probably receive if he ever pitched a book on the White Stripes or Bjork. If being "on the outside," so to speak, gives others the intellectual credibility to examine hip-hop, why have so few black writers been able to lend their outsider perspective to rock? Maybe because as writers, whether we like it or not, hip-hop will always be our burden as much as it has been our foundation.