Notes on the Beat

This one kid I know recently claimed in one of those infamous dining hall hip hop conversations that we are currently in the "Golden Age of hip hop." "There's so much variety," he said ever-so-dreamily, "so much experimentation, so many opportunities to get involved in the rapidly growing industry...." I just sat and smiled, waiting for the heated response I knew would come from one of my boys. You should have been there for the screams and shouts--and my peripheral laughter. But on the real, all jokes aside, my man dropped science. I'll try to paraphrase the discussion:

Basically, my boy argued that now that it has caught the world's limelight as the definitive music and culture of our generation, hip hop is not at a cultural peak but is instead marked for death. Since hip hop started as an urban counterculture of sorts, its current worldwide appeal has rid it of its most essential element, its countercultural defiance. It's now a genre up for grabs, a space for marketing frenzies. Consequently, its prominent products comprise not much more than mediocre commercial formulas devoid of the creative zeal of yesteryear, aimed instead at providing new images for advertising agencies or at escalating the Billboard mountain. According to my boy, the recent Time "Hip Hop Nation" cover and Eminem's success story are symptoms of the culture's sad commercial zenith, comparable to the beginnings of the demise of every other form of black music of this century. It's all downhill from here.

My man's interlocutor, the Golden Age advocate, responded that there are still quality rap acts today that wouldn't be able to gain as much exposure as they do if hip hop culture did not garner such global fascination. Good point. If there's anything I would like to see happen in the industry as it stands now, it's that groups like Black Star and The Roots go at least platinum. (By the way, I can't believe Things Fall Apart is only gold! And Black Star has barely hit the 200,000 copies mark....Shame on you, readers and consumers!).

So then my man replied that the acts could very well have existed without Lauryn Hill on every cover of every magazine, and that that's enough for him. Who needs a public eye larger than the pockets of "real heads" in the urban centers of the world? When the culture's audience and participants grow, so does the culture's production of nonsense in order to satisfy the new buyers who never knew that Stetsasonic predates The Roots' hip hop band idea, or that the Jungle Brothers were once dope. The culture is only hurt by fans who get schooled about the music by the simplistic sampling techniques of Puffy and the Trackmasters.

Before my boy's obvious old school knowledge, the other cat's golden age stance was silenced. Instead he changed the subject to whether Slick Rick's British accent was authentic or not.

In such diatribes, I like to just sit, listen and learn. I'm one to side with my boy, and not just for parrochial reasons--I enjoy certain people's company (like Golden Age Man) precisely because they say some outlandish and thus inspiring stuff. But bottom line, I think I've sensed somber days for hip hop much more often than glorious ones: pretty much every time I leaf through rap magazines, or when I think about the fact that the dopest tracks that have dropped in the past couple years will probably never go beyond vinyl singles played on college radio shows like Harvard's own Saturday Solutions (Sat. 9-11 p.m., 95.3 FM; sorry, shameless plug).

However, I wouldn't go so far as to say that hip hop is sure to die. At least not anytime soon. They might be few, but there are moments when hip hop actually pays off.

Take deejay battles. Turntablists stand before two Technics and a mixer to vie against their opponents by cutting samples, juggling beats and hyping up the crowd with antics like scratching as they give their opponents the finger. Standing in a crowd before such a spectacle is especially dope because everyone else around you shares your aesthetic sensibilities. It's as if you hear echoes of your own thoughts: "Yo that shit is RIDICULOUS!!!"

Or take breakdancing battles. The competitive play between the certified gymnasts that b-boys and -girls are stays at a cordial level, as if they all recognize that although they are in competition, it's all love. Plus, breaking events always attract the flyest slims: the backpack, skullie, rolled-up jeans, Adidas-Karan-Fubu-Nike gear, impeccable make-up crews of women across the racial spectrum who hate rap shows because "fools always be acting up in them."

And, of course, remember open mics. It's great feeling to kick some stuff you've written in a small setting with people that are there to do the same, or to simply enjoy those of us who like to talk over beats (or what's better, to look for new acts). It might be at open mics where I feel hip hop to be the most alive: ciphers spring up everywhere with the occasional random battle, aided by the DJ spinning the illest new records between ameteur sets.

Sadly, however, the venue in which most of the world's hip hop listeners live the music is at the shows where signed artists come to a town near you to perform their album material. Put simply, next to the cozier, more covert settings of what we can loosely term the "underground," such shows are just weak-wack. Typical rap artists either stand on stage with nothing entertaining to deliver except the mere presence of their stardom (e.g., Jay-Z), or they riddle their acts with gimmicky stage props or too many cohorts (e.g., Nas, Wu-Tang). Or they repeat their tracks with genuine energy, but without anything you couldn't find in their albums (e.g., almost every other act you know). Futhermore, the crowd is forever a 5,000-one male/female ratio, and if the show's not on a college campus (or sometimes even so), somebody's bound to have beef with somebody else--maybe even you, if you're scrawny enough or you're flossing too much.

The few rap artists who actually have good shows inevitably become legendary. Everybody and their moms have gone to at least one Roots show; even vaster multitudes lovingly remember Run DMC shows; Goodie Mob's originality on stage is no secret; supposedly Ice Cube can move crowds; Common and Black Star seem to be starting a buzz; and, almost unanimously, heads across the planet rant and rave about KRS-ONE's act as simply the illest of all time.

So, in spite of my growing distaste for the more obviously commercial side of hip hop performance, I couldn't pass on the opportunity of seeing the almighty Kris Parker make his Knowledge Reign Supreme in club Liquid in Boston last Friday night, particularly because Biz Markie was supposed to be there as well. Plus I got in for free.

Despite the horrible club space, the unexpectedly poppish club deejays and the fact that KRS performed for only half an hour, the show was cool. Biz Mark got on the tables to play some breaks and some of his own instrumentals, beat-boxing and rhyming into the deejay mic at times to get everybody amped. The Diabolical has enough classics with thumping beats and memorable flows to satisfy any hip hop crowd. Much later, the Blastmaster KRS stepped to the mic to deliver a dope though way too short show. He kicked no more than a verse of each of about ten or 12 joints, all with the BDP and KRS beats and rhymes we love--and get to love even more when The MC makes us jump and pump fists to them.

I won't say I came out of club Liquid utterly open, but it was cool regardless. And it certainly did not make me think hip hop was about to die. In fact, it didn't make me think of anything with regard to the future of hip hop, other than my hope that I'll get to see a real, full-length KRS show. I don't think KRS would be any lesser or better an emcee if we still lived in the days when everybody listened to same hip hop music and when questions of hip hop's "Golden Age" or demise would be irrelevant. To my boy, myself and probably our Golden Age cohort, KRS is just illy. Who cares if others swallow up the limelight and clutter up the airwaves with garbage? As long as there's enough of us who want quality music, it will be made--maybe even by us ourselves. True, the day may come when artists give up on the industry, in the face of a seemingly insurmountable set of Mainstream aesthetics, thereby occasioning a "death of hip hop." I say, in the meantime, let's all go to as many battles and open mics and, yes, shows, as possible, with as many people as possible, so as to have as dope a time as possible for as long as possible. Then the "Golden Age" of hip hop will be as it has been for me: the culture's entire life span, which is to say, my own.