What Happened to Hip Hop

Corey Ashe-Bradford

11/27/07

Essay

Hip Hop is a culture and rap is the music of that culture. Hip Hop was originally voices that expressed their political and social views and, also, of those trapped in the ghetto trying to get out. Hip hop was a black art form. It was born both as an expression of, and response to, the condition of being a minority in the United States. The lighter side of it was about expressing yourself, love, and having a good time. Hip Hop music had more substance back in its prime. It was well thought out; it always kept your body moving, your hands waving from side to side or your head nodding. What is now called Hip Hop is a combination of people talking about how much money they have, killing, how big of a hustler they are, how much girls they can have sex with and just plain stupid things; all of which is being accompanied by really crappy and simple music.

Today’s “Hip Hop” is more commercial than ever. Every other song that comes out seems to have some kind of dance move to go along with it. It seems like the only reason the song does good is because you can do some kind of stupid dance move to it (like the shoulder lean by Young Dro and The motorcycle dance made famous by Young Joc). The people pulling all the strings have got us brainwashed to the point that when good songs that actually have a message comes out we automatically dismiss it. That’s why artist that want to rap with meaning don’t, because their sales would suffer. That’s why people never decide to rap with meaning because that path doesn’t “bring home the bacon”.

Most of the music (not rapping) today has no substance to it, yet, people seem to love it. I heard great songs where the musicianship was excellent and it did “O.K.”, where as I will here a song like, “Laffy Taffy”, where it consist of four different notes played over and over, and it will be number one on BET’s top ten countdown. Back when I was in high school I did an experiment with some people from my school. I played for them a song I wrote on the piano that had previously gotten me into a hard to get into music school and they all said it was O.K. but nobody said to music more than that. Then, I played another song I made up consisting of me just playing A, B and C over and over. When I played this everybody started jumping up and down and dancing saying stuff like, “Yo, this sh_t is tight”, which kind of gave mean insight on just how much Hip Hop as deteriorated.

The ironic thing about the whole “Hip Hop is dying” thing and the “money, cash, and hoes” attitude is that it started back in the days of real,