Does Hip-Hop=Music?

I wanted to open this week’s blog post with a quote from the reading: “Rap, by definition, is political music. Fabricated from stolen snatches of prerecorded music by smash-and-grab producers who frequently thumb their noses at copyright laws, it is the musical equivalent of shoplifting.” As we all should know by now, in the early 90s (1992? I don’t have my notes with me at the moment) copyright laws came down hard on hip-hop music as a whole, basically killing the concept of sampling and with it the deejay. Before, hip-hop deejays had would pretty much take anything they wanted from any song they wanted and use it in their tracks, after these lawsuits that art in particular became difficult to use. After those cases we did not see any more deejays using popular music in their tracks, as it was too expensive to do it, especially when we realize that some songs had a dozen or more different samples in them. While hip-hop had its beginning firmly rooted in the art of deejaying (Flash, Bambatta, Kool Herc) and the Golden Age had a very big emphasis on it as well, after this time period we see almost no deejaying in any genre music. Is it a coincidence that it is after losing this building block we entered what is referred to by some as the downfall of hip-hop? It is commonly believed that hip-hop has been waning in quality since the Golden Age, but I personally don’t believe that the end of deejaying is (solely) responsible for it.
Another point that many of the readings for the week brought up (and the reason for the title of this post) is that a majority of the population has trouble accepting hip-hop as music. We have seen many times before that hip-hop has spent the entirety of its existence trying to legitimize itself to the masses, and we still see this going on today. However, there was a point in one of the chapters were I saw a fairly unique viewpoint. Hank Shocklee gave the quote, “We don’t like musicians. We don’t respect musicians. The reason why is because they look at people who rap as people who don’t have knowledge. As a matter of fact, it’s quite the opposite. We have a better sense of music, a better concept of music, of where it’s going, of what it can do.” I really enjoyed this, and the quote really fits into the themes of hip-hop we’ve seen. Rather than trying to make hip-hop legitimate, Shocklee feels that it is all other music that is not legitimate.
As a musician, I have a hard time understanding why so many people have a hard time accepting hip-hop as music. While I have a fairly broad/hippieish belief that anything can be music to anyone, even many of the stricter definitions shouldn’t have a problem with it. From a purely musical standpoint, there is no reason that hip-hop should be ostracized.

Midwest Rappers?

This week’s blog post is going to be solely discussing Prophets of the Hood for one specific reason. It’s the only one I can get my hands on. I’m having trouble getting the online article to work without buying it (I hope I’m not supposed to), and I cannot seem to find my copy of Parodies of Ownership. So here I am, with roughly a third of what I was supposed to read for the week. Let’s see if I can make it work.
Also, sorry about the title not really making sense. It's the best I could come up with.
For one, Prophets seemed very boring to me. This might just be because I’ve really enjoyed the last two books (Toure and Dyson) and Perry’s style is very different from theirs. But the intellectual debate just tends to bore me in general, and beyond that, hip-hop just seems to flow better when it’s in a more informal format. This may just be my opinion, but I feel like hip-hop being discussed in this manor is kind of missing the point. Hip-hop is fun and energetic, shouldn’t reading about it be the same. I’m probably just being greedy here, but that’s just my $0.02.
In the first chapter I felt like Perry was trying way too hard to get the reader to see his point. He spent the entire chapter just trying to make the point that rap is black music. While every once in a while he points out that people of other nationalities do participate in hip-hop, he is always quick to make sure that the reader knows that they still have to fit into the black mold of the genre. I remember one part where he was discussing language and he made the remark that there has been a fairly strong Hispanic influence on hip-hop, but is quick to caveat that to succeed these musicians have to use African American vernacular and put their own language into that. While I am far from an expert on hip-hop of any kind, and especially Hispanic hip-hop, I don’t seem to recall this being true. If I am wrong someone please correct me, but haven’t we read entire articles on the (hidden) prevalence of Hispanic hip-hop? I guess what I’m getting at is that Perry really wants the reader to see his side of things, and that he could have used a lot fewer pages to do it.
One other thing I wanted to bring up was that Perry brings up a fourth hip-hop area. While we have already been over the East coast (message), West coast (gangsta), and South (party) rappers he mentions the Mid West as an area of hip-hop in several areas of his book. I guess I just hadn’t realized that we had a large number of rappers around here. If this really is so, is there a specific area of hip-hop that Mid Westerners are attributed to?
I think that was my biggest problem with the book. To me it just feels like Perry rambles on and on and could use a lot less to make the same argument. I usually try to use these blog posts about things I like about a book, but there wasn’t really much I enjoyed here. I can pretty honestly say that this was my least favorite reading so far. While I’ll wager that I just made up my mind to dislike the reading too early and everyone else has seen the truth about hip-hop from it, I still feel this way. So feel free, nay encouraged, to chew me up if I just missed the point entirely.