The Sunday Telegraph [1] is heralding what it says could be the death of Rap music.
Confronted with haemorrhaging sales, the most assertive popular music movement since the Sex Pistols has lost its swagger and is suffering a crisis of confidence.
This year rap and hip-hop sales are down 33 per cent, double the decline of the CD album market overall….
…
Rap has been deserted by many white fans and middle-class blacks, apparently tiring of the “gangsta” attitude to women, racism, violence and bling – the gold rings and medallions that have made hip-hop a byword for -vulgarity.
“The public has made a choice. They’re saying, ‘We do not want the nonsense that we see and hear on radio, and we are not putting our money there’,” said KRS-One, a rap legend from the Bronx. “Rap music is being boycotted by the American public because of the images that we are putting forward.”
James over at OTB comments:
While I’d like to think moral outrage is the main cause of declining sales, I’m skeptical. Former record industry talent evaluator Tom Vickers observes that, “Rap has gradually degenerated from an art form into a ring tone. That’s why we’re seeing this backlash. There’s only so much bling the public can take.”
I, too, would like to think that moral outrage was involved. But, like James, I doubt it.
(By the way, how in the world do you take the spoken word, and make a ring tone of it?)
I think what’s really going on , here, is more along the lines of self preservation from the ‘Gangsta” nonsense, while never identifying it as a ‘moral issue”. (Morals, you see, aren’t ‘cool”)
The kind of attitudes that have been part and parcel of rap since shortly after the style came on the scene years back, eventually lose their attraction, after having been identified as self-destructive by an increasing majority both inside and outside of black culture. …even absent the moral consideration… as that style’s body count rises [2], and as they become ostracized from even mainstream black society, much less society as a whole. One can only put up with so much drug abuse, one can only put up with so much murder, etc., before one realizes that maybe the Rap artists once held as special, really don’t deserve the distinction. As Jules Crittenden [3] says:
You know. The murder. The drug dealing. The siring of as many children as possible by as many women as possible and abandonment of same.
Certainly, those can be called moral issues. But those also are issues involving simply surviving. After a couple of decades of examples of such behavior, and such violent deaths, and the destruction of even those that remain alive, the association of rap to those kind of “lifestyle choices” and their negative consequences is set in stone. Attention, at that point, starts getting paid to other things. People find other places to hang their metaphorical hat, given the self evident self destruction of those making those lifestyle choices.
I suspect to a large degree that’s what’s going on, here, in the overall.
Some of the other elements involved, certainly are part of what’s been troubling the music industry overall these last several years. But as the news story itself indicates Rap is going down like a stone, even in comparison to the remainder of the already failing industry.
Frankly, Rap started as, and always has been, driven by what’s coming up from the street… [4]
The record companies, and the government, share a common consideration; the government can’t create, all it can do is tax and regulate.
In a similar vein, the record companies can’t create talent, all they can do is record it when it shows up, and try to ‘regulate’ it…(edit it?) into something salable. That’s precisely what happened to rap in its early days.
However, the feed of salable talent from the street has dried up, for lack of interest at the talent end. To borrow a phrase, the street has grown quiet.
Why? One reason, is the link of rap music to vulgarity. Certainly, vulgarity has been one of the calling cards of rap for the last decade or so. One can only attract more attention to oneself by being more vulgar, both in word and meaning, and in having more “bling”, etc. When sales started going down, it was precisely because rap music devolved into a contest of who could be more vulgar. Clearly, that’s no longer working as a sales tool. There’s only so vulgar you can get, particularly if you’re interested in selling the product,a nd tha limit has been reached and surpassed. Forced to rely on talent, rather than vulgarity to win sales, rap is failing in terms of sales, and popularity.
As an aside…
Much has been said about the reasons behind the attitude of rappers (anti women, me first, etc. ) but I suspect that the biggest reasons are the dissolution of the black family, specifically the lessening of the role of black fathers, as a direct result of “the great society”. Add to that, what many have called the “feminization of America” and one begins to see that much of what rap has been about these last several years is a reaction to that situation… An attitude in complete opposition to the diminishment of the role of male blacks. (Which could account for why you see so few female rap artists…)
I guess I bring all this up, because I’m wondering; how much of what is under discussion here the results of people discovering that the opposite extreme is just as destructive?
I suppose if I poured my second cuppa, I could find better words, but I think you see where I’m going with this.
Personally, I doubt it’s absolute death of the style, but if it is, it didn’t come fast enough.
A final note: It strikes me as interesting, but the story should come from a British newspaper. The indications of been there for quite some time, now, but apparently newspapers here in the states don’t possess the testicular mass required to print the story here, possibly for fear of being targeted by the Sharpton / Jackson race huckster cabal.