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Sunday, May 21, 2006

Two Years Too Late

2006 has been a superb year for political hip-hop, and it's been a long time coming. There was a time when every whylin' out and slappin' bitches track had an intelligent counterpart, a considered political stance, a social commentary that led Chuck D to famously call rap music "the Black CNN". This was before Dre's "The Chronic" destroyed hip-hop, leaving a legacy of low IQ commercial dreck that persists to this day. Even when the underground rebuilt itself, it did so largely as a monument to 1981 Queens, with MC's mostly flowing about flow, a circuitous curse that left the underground only a half step above the mainstream.

These are gross generalizations, of course. You might hold up Talib Kweli as a conscious brother selling records or Dead Prez as an underground political stalwart, but commenting on the genre as a whole you would be hard-pressed to assign a passing grade.

So it has suddenly come to everyone in the hip-hop world's attention that the current administration is not meeting the needs of the American people and they are using their platforms to comment.

You know Kanye West thinks George Bush hates Black people (which was a stupid conclusion as the people of New Orleans were not so much Black as they were poor), but any day this month you might find me spinning new tracks by The Coup ("Babylet'shaveababybeforebushdosomethingcrazy"), T-K.A.S.H. ("How to Get Ass" a foreshortened title from the chorus "This is how to get assassinated" a song all about Bush and Cheney), or P.O.S. ("Half Cocked Concepts" a track whose opening line is "First of all, f*&% Bush, that's all, that's the end of it").

Now then, if you want to see exactly how politically impotent hip-hop has become, consider these great bastions of social consciousness. The president is bad, the president has done a bunch of bad things, f*^% the president. So where the f*&% were you guys two years ago? What the hell good does it do to question the president halfway through his second term? Are you guys creating politics out of refrigerator magnet poetry or something?

If you want to make a difference, lay the blame for all of your complaints at the feet of the Republican Party. This is obviously a more accurate stance as Bush, despite his conveniently monosyllabic name, did not do anything, NOTHING, without the Republican congress. But more importantly, it would be a statement that mattered. Mid-term elections are coming up, and politicizing young people and minorities, the target demographic of hip-hop, matters. It matters a lot. The fact that you are dissatisfied with Bush does not. What do you think we're going to do, lynch him? Or did you maybe think you could, through song, persuade a Republican Senate to impeach George W. Bush? If you get people to the polls to vote Democrat, like people who stayed home in Ohio in 2004, you have made a difference. If you convince people not to like the president, you have only created an ineffectual mass hysteria.

Besides, you could rhyme "Republican" with "again", "fan", "can", "Mexican" - any variety of words. "Bush" only rhymes with "push" and how far can that take you?

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