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Questlove on "How Hip Hop failed Black America"

Except he's not saying that at all. Why would he cite "My Adidas" is he's saying rap wasn't materialist and braggadocious?
 
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PhDeac said:
Except he's not saying that at all. Why would he cite "My Adidas" is he's saying rap wasn't materialist and braggadocious?
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There's plenty in that long ass essay that supports my interpretation, and his citation of a Run DMC song about shoes doesn't cancel out his calling current popular rap meaningless, with the exception of Kendrick Lamar. He specifically brought up the time frame of Puff Daddy's popularity height as the time that rap music changed
 
Did you read it? Your interpretation is completely wrong.

I’d argue that when people think of hip-hop, pretty quickly they think of bling, of watches or cars or jewels or private jets. They think of success and its fruits, and the triumphant figures who are picking that fruit. This linkage isn’t limited to hip-hop — all of American celebrity, to some degree, is based on showing what you can buy — but it’s stronger there. The reasons are complex, of course, but the aspirational strain in African-American culture runs all the way back to slavery days. Slaves couldn’t own property because they were property. When freed, they were able to exist politically, and also economically. Owning things was a way of proving that you existed — and so, by extension, owning many things was a way of proving that you existed emphatically. Hip-hop is about having things to prove you’re not a have-not; it works against the notion that you might have so little economic control that you would simply disappear.​
But what are the haves that you might have? And are they the same haves that people had 10 years ago, or 20? You only have to wind the clock back a few decades to see how drastically this dynamic has changed.​
​
 
PhDeac said:
Did you read it? Your interpretation is completely wrong.
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:rolleyes: Thanks for the heads up, Quest. "Did you read it"? Stop being an asshole and state your opinion in the form of an opinion.

"...The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion. The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range — social contract, anyone? — but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black starliner. Containers on the container ship are taken from here to there — and never mind the fact that they may be empty containers. Keep on pushin’ and all that, but what are you pushing against? As it has become the field rather than the object, hip-hop has lost some of its pertinent sting. And then there’s the question of where hip-hop has arrived commercially, or how fast it’s departing."

"What has changed? Well, back in Run-DMC’s day, hip-hop had winners and others, on a sliding scale, all the way down to artists who were making more modest local impact. Now, because of the radical contraction of the market and the reluctance of companies to invest in anything that’s not a sure bet, hip-hop has become almost exclusively about winners, big sellers who have already proven their muscle..."

"Whereas “My Adidas” highlighted consumer items, “Picasso Baby” is all about unattainable luxury, fantasy acquisitions. Within the first ten words of the song, Jay Z ensures that no one in his audience can identify with the experience that he’s rapping about. He would never want to be in a club that would have you as a member. But this doesn’t offend his audiences. They love it. They want to be just like him so they can exclude people just like them."

"...For starters, it means that hip-hop has become complicit in the process by which winners are increasingly isolated from the populations they are supposed to inspire and engage — which are also, in theory, the populations that are supposed to furnish the next crop of winners. This isn’t a black thing or even a hip-hop thing exclusively. American politics functions the same way. But it’s a significant turnaround and comedown for a music that was, only a little while back, devoted to reflecting the experience of real people and, through that reflection, challenging the power structure that produces inequality and disenfranchisement.
Who’s to blame? It’s hard to say. Certainly, Puff Daddy’s work with the Notorious B.I.G. in the early '90s did plenty to cement the idea of hip-hop as a genre of conspicuous consumption. Before those videos, wealth was evident, but it was also contextualized, given specific character that harmonized with the backgrounds of the artists. Run-DMC had East Coast cool and cachet; Dr. Dre had West Coast cool and cachet. But Puffy had — and wanted to tell everyone he had — a different idea of power, an abstract capitalist cachet. His videos, and the image they projected, played as well in California as in New York, as well in Chicago as in Florida. It was a cartoon idea of wealth, to the point that specific reality no longer mattered. In literary terms, it was pure signifier. It would take him a little while to formulate that into a manifesto, but when he did, he hit it on the nose. “Bad Boy for Life,” in 2001, contained a line that says all that anyone needs to know about this strain of hip-hop: "Don’t worry if I write rhymes / I write checks.” Picasso, baby."
 
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Dude, if you can't see how what you just posted isn't "rap has devolved into pure materialistic braggadicio, as if it started as something higher minded," I can't help you. He's pretty specific in saying that the materialism hasn't changed. The scale of the materialism has changed and hip-hop is part of the reason why.

His argument at this point isn't anything more than saying hip-hop is a microcosm of larger issues of inequality in society, so I hope he places it in context rather than claiming hip-hop is unique in this respect.


 
PhDeac said:
Dude, if you can't see how what you just posted isn't "rap has devolved into pure materialistic braggadicio, as if it started as something higher minded," I can't help you. He's pretty specific in saying that the materialism hasn't changed. The scale of the materialism has changed and hip-hop is part of the reason why.

His argument at this point isn't anything more than saying hip-hop is a microcosm of larger issues of inequality in society, so I hope he places it in context rather than claiming hip-hop is unique in this respect.


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You must be ignoring the sentences I underlined for you, where he said modern hip hop has become meaningless, where it once had purpose and meaning, and that the braggadicio has lost its context, and that that specific change generally started with puff daddy. As I said in my original post, I think the song structure of popular rap music has changed so that storytelling (context for braggadicio) had been eliminated, thus making newer music seem more shallow and meaningless than older rap music.
 
I didn't ignore them. I pointed out how they didn't support your point. Again, Questlove isn't saying there wasn't materialism in hip-hop's origins and it just magically started with Puff.
 
So what's the bottom line here? 43 year old white dude who likes 90's hip hop and loves ?uestlove and The Roots. I like drinking Ciroq. Should I boycott Ciroq?
 
PhDeac said:
I didn't ignore them. I pointed out how they didn't support your point. Again, Questlove isn't saying there wasn't materialism in hip-hop's origins and it just magically started with Puff.
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If you can't get past the broad semantics of a single sentence from my OP then there's no use in responding to you; You aren't grading a research paper. Quest specifically stated that hip hop has become meaningless and like a hollow shipping container, when it used to mean something and represent something, and then he directly identified that change as the loss of context and substance in rap music. The loss of context and scale IS the de-evolution.
 
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Random story, how Jimmy Fallon recruited the Roots:

17. Here’s how he got the Roots to be his band: In the planning stages for Late Night, Fallon’s friend Neal Brennan, who produced Chappelle’s Show, asked him what he was going to do for music. “[Brennan] goes, ‘You should ask the Roots,’” says Fallon. “I go, ‘You think the Roots would do my show?!’ He goes, “No, no, no, they won’t do it, but they know a lot of musicians from Philly that can come up.’” But Fallon couldn’t get the idea out of his head. He went backstage at a concert in L.A., did a cheerleader pyramid with the guys (“Questlove was not on the pyramid”), and pitched them the idea. Then he sent an email to their manager and didn’t hear back for a month, which he took as a no; it turns out they were just in Europe. Fallon met with them in Lorne Michaels’ office because he wanted to impress them, and gave them his spiel. “I remember Questlove was like, ‘Alright, I have two questions for you,’” Fallon says. “'One, what if, like, Herbie Hancock’s in town, can he sit in with the band?' I go, ‘Yeah. Of course he can sit in with the band.’ And he goes, ‘My other question is, this is Lorne Michaels' office, why isn’t there popcorn here?’ And I’m like, Oh, he’s a comedy nerd! He knows that Lorne has this big basket of popcorn before SNL. I couldn’t believe he knew that. So I go, Oh, I like this guy. He’s a comedy nerd, and also an audiophile, which I’m a bit of. He’s an encyclopedia. I trust him over Google.”
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39 Things You Learn About Jimmy Fallon by Hanging Out With Him
 
Don't know where else to put this, but I just got keyed into this series:



 
can ph's new tagline be "hip-hop poster?"
 
i wonder which jazz drummer wrote this 50 years ago.
 
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