the interweb journals of oliver phillip nicholas.

So I was reading this comment on Digg under a story titled "No, seriously; what really killed hip hop?", and I saw some mildly stupid shit that really annoyed me; I felt honor-bound to respond. It turned into a bit of a treatise. If you want to read the whole thread it's here (http://digg.com/music/No_seriously_what_really_killed_hip_hop?t=21145746#c21147409), but the operative information is that the parent answered the question by saying that "ebonics" was to blame and seemed to think that ebonics was a blanket term for the subject matter of rap. My response:

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"Ebonics" is a form of language, a scientifically recognized dialect more properly known as Black English Vernacular (or African American Vernacular English, according to the W: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English). It has nothing to do with subject matter. The last paragraph of your comment makes you sound like a racist idiot. The form of "ebonics" is just as structured as whatever they spoke in your home when you grew up, and it's offensive for you to infer that because it breaks the rules you think make up English, it lacks sophistication.

Respectively,
- Just because you didn't grow up in the ghetto, doesn't mean it's not important to the people who did.
- Just because you never got any, doesn't mean getting pussy isn't important to other people.
- Just because you've always had money doesn't mean getting it isn't important to people who weren't born with much.
- Just because your sex drive is suppressed by watching internet porn and smoking pot doesn't mean other men don't still have theirs
- Just because the biggest crime you've ever committed is music piracy doesn't mean there aren't people out there doing much more real shit.

Look, I'm not saying rap is in a good place. But I think you're barking up the completely wrong tree; you've dated your tastes to the *very* beginning of the genre, and you can't just stop there and say "everything else is bullshit." I grew up with Tribe, Biggie, Nas, Outkast, Mos Def, Tupac, Jay-Z (to name the big names), and if you're gonna stand there and tell me that these people didn't lead illustrious careers and produce in-fucking-credible music demonstrating pinnacles of ghetto poetry then I state categorically that you stopped actually listening way too long ago. I mean even the new class has some standouts.

If you want to know what killed the genre, in my somewhat humble opinion, DJ Shadow said it straight-up over a decade ago - remember that 40 second track on Endtroducing "Why Hip-Hop Sucks In '96" (if you don't know,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2VG53RIJ50). Hip-Hop died because we bought the bad stuff. It died because dudes started getting rich, and so other dudes started thinking "well fuck I can do that too" - but of course, they couldn't...well, not like the good rappers - and they started producing shitty music that the labels rammed down our throats, vomited over the airwaves and drowned our clubs in. Hip-Hop didn't die because rappers started talking about crime and women - those are the central topics of some of the best rap - and really, the best *music* - ever produced. Hip-Hop died (has been dying, is dying, really) in the exact same way that pop music died with brittany spears and metal (the version from the 80's) died with the later Metallica albums.

You wanna know what really killed hip-hop? Clear Channel Communications, Inc. They and their ilk know full-well the adage drawn so eloquently by Steve Jobs, that "a lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." They figured out the best, most addictive formulas, and through ruthless consolidation they took control of the means of distribution and saturated our children's ears with the cheapest, ugliest music that produced the most repeat buyers. At 25 I consider myself lucky to have just barely escaped the full force of this corporate onslaught.

In the end, if we want to know what killed hip-hop, truly, we need look no further than ourselves. We allowed this to happen when we stopped buying the good stuff. We allowed it to happen when we didn't call up the radio station the first time they started playing music during rush hour that really just belonged in the club. We allowed it to happen when our entire youth culture shifted towards dreams of instant riches. Maybe it was those early greats that did it; maybe they improperly shaped the dreams of the next generation. But somewhere along the way we dropped the ball in educating our youth and the whole thing went to hell.

Let's be real. This isn't just a problem with hip-hop. Hip-hop is a direct reflection of the culture, and our culture has been bleeding off its artistic substance for some time now.