Newsflash: we ALL murdered Jam Master Jay!

Uhm, does this person live in a cave (albeit a cave apparently fully stocked with Paris, Common, Kam, and Public Enemy albums...)?

Maybe hip-hop had potential to be a political ideal. Something that represented a community striving to escape the condition it found itself in. And then it went in a very different direction. Celebrating individual escape and success, and "fuck you" to all the haters left behind.

How come that happened? All the artists just got selfish? Sure, that too. But the audience rewarded the depoliticisation of rap; encouraged it through what they bought. (Or did all the college kids pretend to be gangstas out of some weird synchronicity?)

Just like you can't understand or explain prostitution without looking at the punters as a causal factor; so you can't really understand or explain how generations of kids are looking up to, and copycatting the violence, without seeing the admiring audience which urges them on.

Se@n, it was the same foe that took down Mama Cass.

http://www.compass-group.nl/images/donuts.jpg

Seeing as how the piece opens with "We all murdered Jam Master Jay that night", I wouldn't exactly call them 'minor details'.

Shemia: please present your "hip-hop has fallen off" argument in a new and interesting way, preferably one that doesn't rely on insidious little tricks to tear-jerkingly implicate us all in a hamfisted "you buy drugs = you support the taliban" stylee.

(nb: I like a lot of their records.)

2) There IS a political/socially conscious wing of rap - she even lists examples - she's just bitchy that they aren't as popular or as much a focus of the industry as the gangsta/bling bling stuff. So she wishes more people listened to Common instead of Nelly - isn't this a question of personal taste?

3) Which brings us to the issue of causality - if more people listened to Common than Nelly, her implication is that the black community would be better off, less violent, less poor, less trapped in an endless downward spiral...? This is a ridiculously simplistic view of the social forces at work in the black community.

(BTW, "political" themes in jazz started with be-bop, free jazz just took it further [which, given that the latter really took off in the 1960s, makes sense].)

Why does she capitalize the "b" in "black," is my question

Convenient how she's absolved Jay of all agency, hrm? If the rumours are true (stress: if) and it was a drug-related crime, then (by her own logic, even) wouldn't it be more accurate to suggest that Jam Master Jay killed Jam Master Jay?

I would guess that she's trying to signify that the context she means is "African-American Culture," not "a color." Not to get too nitpicky, but it annoys me when newspapers and other such printed media don't capitalize "black" in reference to an "African-American" person or -related thing/cultural product/whatsoever, but capitalize any other ethnic, religious or racial group.

TMFTML

Shakey, I take your point about other music styles. I guess what's different about rap is how much we are sold the idea that it's autobiographical for the performers. Or, at least, we are so unfamiliar with other aspects of the Black culture that we kind of assume it to be. Allegedly all gangsta/playa rappers live gangsta / playa lives, in a way which we know middle class white rockers or punks clearly don't.

As to the point about causality being simplistic. It is, but I'd suggest, marginally less simplistic than the assumption that there is NO causality. That's why I stand by my comment about prostitution.
The market exists and an industry services it by turned women into prostitutes.

As a market exists for gangsta / playa fantasies, the record companies turn talented musicians and performers into fake thugs for the pleasure of the audience. In both cases women / musicians collude because it's the best offer going. That doesn't mean all responsibility belongs to the women or rappers.

Not to try to derail the thread here, but, h, does seeing "white" instead of "White" bother you, too? I'm not trying to be snarky. This is an interesting point, and I'm earnest and curious.

As for the article, well, the writer obviously has had this axe to grind for quite a while, and JMJ's death seemed to be the closest recent "shocking" event that could pass as a flimsy rope bridge over to the soapbox. However, the article raises some cogent points, regardless of how out of context the hook is.

Now, let's go back to the Murder on the Hip-Hop Express. I don't buy the argument that entertainers are responsible for what consumers of their art/product do. Everyone has free will, a sense of right and wrong and the ability to distinguish fact from fiction, thus everyone should be held responsible for their own actions. (Cogent arguments can be made for when young children are involved, but as far as I'm concerned no one over the age of seven has a reasonable excuse for not knowing right from wrong.)

I didn't think so ...

In this day and age where you can download pretty much ANYTHING, I would think it would be much easier to explore non-top 40 music if you were so inclined. But, as I said before, this has absolutely nothing to do with my original point, which is that artists aren't responsible for the actions of their audience.

I totally agree with you on the artists (in principle) not having responsibility for how people interpret their music. And it's funny how it is only musicians who get blamed for the seven plagues: What about our friendly neighborhood cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, from the movies? Or literature's Bret Easton Ellis? Nobody accuses them for inspiring murder, terror and havoc (not that I think that they should be!).

Obviously the whole mistake goes back to the critics' inability to distinguish the storyteller in the music from the real person who's actually singing (or rapping). It's gotta be possible to tell the story about a 'Cop Killer' without actually being accused of being one yourself.

Once again, sorry for the mistake,
I bow down i humility
J.

I should've been more specific: I meant politics in music in terms of the Civil Rights Movement, which didn't really exist until the 1940s. Still, FUCK YOU anyways, you twat.

But you can't tell me that the blues (or jazz or early r&b/rock or disco or hip hop) is overtly and explicitly concerned with traditional social and political issues - that's just bullshit. They may have dealt with politics in a subtler, less direct manner, but you can't seriously tell me that the dominant themes of jazz or the blues or disco were the social/political issues of the day. Any overview of any of the genres will reveal that.

Also, if you are so stupid that you can't understand that:

Hahahahaha, songs about getting drunk, killing your woman, being poor and homeless, and doing the nasty are politically responsible!

and

But if either of you think some drug-damaged guy mumbling "Martin Luther King, dum dum dum" is more political and more meaningfully political than singing happy songs about the sinking of the Titanic, about John Henry, or about crossing the Jordan river, well, you're wrong.

basically say the same thing, then fuck you again anyway, twerp.

I just tried to keep things simple by clarifying what kind of politics were being addressed here - both by myself and the columnist in the original article. You may be right that singing happy songs about the sinking of the Titanic is political (and hstencil's correct to refer to his previous post, which I understand completely) - but that's NOT the kind of politics the columnist was talking about when decrying the current apolitical state of hip-hop.

Hands bloodied, the lot of us.

Mo: When it's not safe to say "fuck the white oppressors!" because they'll kill you, and a song about the Titanic or a black railroad worker communicates exactly that politcally dangerous idea very very clearly to your intended audience, then yeah, those are the sort of politics being talked about in the article.

Mmmm, I don't think so. Especially given that in hip-hop you CAN literally say "fuck the white oppressors" (cf. Ice Cube, Paris, the Coup, as nauseam), I think the columnist is concerned that more acts DON'T say these things explicitly. She doesn't seem interested in ferreting out the subtler political undertones of, say, a N.E.R.D. song, I think she'd rather have the hamfisted rhetoric. Especially judging by the examples she cites (Paris, Dead Prez, Public Enemy).

The "hahahahaha" is the laughter at Shakey's naivete in thinking that, duh, songs with subject matter that seem apolitical are necessarily so. Hell, I would say COVERT (and that's the key word) political statements in African-American music begin with Slave-era Spirituals. My point was about OVERT politics in African-American music, and YES I do believe there was no OVERT politics in African-American music before bebop. If I'm wrong, please point this out to me (you haven't yet), and if I'm right, please try to COMPREHEND what I've been writing all this time.

Also, no one on this thread so far has made this claim:

isn't it similarly short-sighted to say that there never have been politics in black music?

that you're ascribing to both myself and Shakey, so please stop it if you want to be taken seriously.

I never said this. My point has been and still is that hamfisted political rhetoric - the kind the columnist seems to favor - has never been a dominent theme in black music, with the aforementioned exception of the Civil Rights era, when really obvious "message" tunes became fashionable ("(Say it Loud) I'm Black and I'm Proud", the Staple Singers, etc.)

stencil: I corrected myself and you ought to have seen that if you'd been reading. Anyway, "Strange Fruit", for one of thousands. And kiss my ass.

When was "Strange Fruit" written and recorded? And how does your one example prove that there were "thousands" of overtly political jazz songs?

I'm done.