Yes, yes y'all. It's been a while but I'm back and for good reason too. In my super busy schedule I stumbled upon a Canadian hip hop collective called THE FREEDOM WRITERS with a track called ARIZONA BAY featuring FRANZ THOMAS. In my opinion, I haven't heard a soul awakening track like this in YEARS. It brought me back to when hip hop use to also be about social awareness and empowerment. Believe me, there still are some true heads out there trying to keep the ancient hip hop spirit alive by producing them gut wrenching beats and crazy lyrical flow, but they ain't gettin' no shine compared to the craptacular material some "Hip Hopers" are flooding the mainstream airwaves with today. Don't get me wrong, hip hop back then had their fair share of party songs and dance tracks, but hip hop also had something important to say.
Back then, you might have had a conscious sound to your rap and your track might get out there, but it's only hitting underground ears and college radio. If you were lucky, you would get signed to a small indie label with an even smaller budget to shoot a music video. And once your video is done it only gets played once a week on your music video station, while rock and pop tunes were on such heavy rotation, you can memorize the lyrics in one afternoon without buying the album. (I STILL know every word of Never Tear Us Apart by INXS). Back then, hip hop wasn't making real money, yet more and more people were paying attention and listening...including white middle class America. And that got the attention of the major record companies. They had the perfect plan to capitalize on both hip hop and the middle class American listeners...simply change the message of hip hop from something meaningful to something meaningless.
They took out all that conscious empowering stuff they feel was "useless" to the TARGET market and decided to give them something more "real". Major music labels thought it was good that these rappers would rap a bit more about what happened in their "hood", and convinced them to "share" their experiences of drugs, gangs and violence. The record companies embellished on the their bravado, and thug mentality, and developed "the gangster rapper".
It was a lot easier to rap about slinging some dope or blasting soe foo' on your block because he owes you 20 bucks than how to keep your ass in school and discovering your self worth. Gangsta rap help perpetuate a stereotype in the Black and Latino community and some people who lived in some inner cities believed what they were listening to about themselves was actually what they ARE and they themselves buy into that stereotype and make it worse by slinging more dope or blasting some foo' cause he owes them 10 bucks. Middle America couldn't get enough of this. They were buying into it like crazy pushing rap album sales from BARELY GOLD to an almost guaranteed DOUBLE PLATINUM. More and more people began to believe this quality of hip hop was the new quick way to get over. It quickly became the career of choice for young inner city idiots. 'Get in the streets, get into some trouble, get a criminal record or some dirt on you, grab a mic, and hope you get paid for your so called "struggle". White kids in middle America were doing it too. Some of them would throw on some gear, some J's, twist their cap back and spit in the mic swearing they're hard. Some of them would go as far as doing dumb criminal stuff so they can earn some of that sweet precious "street cred" they hear about but ain't worth jack. But it didn't stop there.
Gangsta rap begat THUG rap. What's the difference? Not much, really. Except dudes think they're more grimey, hungry, broke and will do whatever they can (illegally) to merely get by. Then Thug rap begat The Flossin' Flows when it wasn't too much about being a THUG, but about being a filthy rich thug. Y'all know, 'throw them Rollies in the sky, and wave them side to side and keep them hands high'? You got cats wearing the super expensive designer gear, in super expensive mansions, pushin' super expensive rides that even Bill Gates had to put on Layaway. They throw cash in our face like they're Scrooge McDuck and have more jewelry than Liberace. Thanks to these guys we now got a new term that ended up in Websters Dictionary...Bling Bling. Hip hop became the global voice of influence and over the years look what the influence was, nothing substantial really. It sold a lot of records, and sold a lot of guns, clothes, jewels, cars, women, and lets not forget RIMS. Hip hop single handily sold A LOT of RIMS. Some jackass even put rims on running shoes....good one douchstick. What do we got left when it comes to the essence of hip hop in the mainstream? Nothing, nada, zero, zip, zilch and a whole lotta diddley squat. We went from Grandmaster Flash: The Message to Solja Boy Tell em and his Superman song that he should have been SUED OUT OF HIS SKIN for infringement. And Solja, if you're reading this, I know a lot of people were feeling that song when it came out, but you made a stupid song and we learned actually how many stupid people there are in America based on your record sales. So thanks for the consensus count on idiots, the record companies appreciates it.
A guy like me would believe that real hip hop died, and it's greedy, show-off, retarded cousin took over in it's place. A guy like me would think that anyone who actually had something to say on a track would instead say "what's the point?" because messages of true awareness don't reach who should be listening. A guy like me would rather tear a twenty dollar bill into little pieces and mix it with dog food than use it to buy ANY Lil Wayne CD. No diss to Lil Wayne personally, I'm sure he's a nice person, but his music annoys me like a wild hair growing up my butt that severely needs to be plucked. But I now see that guys like THE FREEDOM WRITERS are trying to get to broadcast level like Morpheus and his crew and are waking up people from this wackadocious hip hop matrix some of us are plugged into today and taking us back to where true hip hop lives.
But knowin' is hoping that YOU GET IT.
Lista.
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