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.