A pivotal moment for hip hop culture

Commercial rappers have to change their tone starting now. Daveed Nelson and Jason Whitlock were right to denounce the overall state of hip hop. What has passed for hip hop in the last 17 years is heavily tilted in favor of negative stereotyping—which may have not only led to George Zimmerman getting away with murder but Zimmerman’s supporters resorting to ugly tactics to demonize Trayvon Martin and black people in general. Over the last decade, rap music has heavily focused on the negatives—bling, thugging it up, treating women as sex objects, glorifying illegitimacy, excessive drug use. As long as blacks go along with what the ratchet rappers are selling, then, the stereotyping of blacks by other races will continue. Yet, there has been a bit of backlash to the Whitlock column locally (a nighttime DJ and a gossip reporter were both bemused by Nelson’s statements) and nationally (two allhiphop.com postings that paint Nelson as out of touch and another member of the Last Poets distancing himself from Nelson’s comments).

Young Jeezy and Pharaohe Monch were the first two rappers out the gate with post verdict songs last Monday. I’m not concerned with underground artists following the latter’s lead, it’s the mainstream acts keeping up with Jeezy that concerns me. They need to stop rapping about strip clubs, pill popping, and cars and they need to start addressing the ills of the black community and work with bona fide leaders to provide logical solutions.

I am tired of the hip hop community refusing to either give or receive constructive criticism while making excuses for the way things are in today’s rap scene because it is a disgrace that there is no more originality on commercial radio today. Rather than defending the status quo, these people need to listen for themselves. While the worst features of black America continue to be exported to Africa, Africans—for the time being anyways—continue to reject materialistic rap music while using rap to address various issues in their countries and on the continent. Speaking of which, it’s a telling sign that even artists from the motherland have called out their much richer American counterparts.

Given hip hop culture’s short attention span, it has to seize the opportunity that it has to reshape how other races should look at us as a race. If the Trayvon tributes/Zimmerman dissing songs are forgotten a year from now rather than being a catalyst for change, then rap music will deserve to go the way of jazz (once prevalent but now treated as a novelty) or disco (its original form long dormant).