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Why is there no "classic" hip-hop?
By Alan Light
Special to MSN Music
This article was originally posted on 11/28/2006
Let's compare two recent sales charts in Billboard magazine. The "Top 200" list of the week's best-selling albums indicates that although hip-hop might not be quite as dominant a commercial force as it has been in recent years, things still look pretty healthy. Diddy, Jibbs, Ludacris and Lil Boosie (Li' Boosie? Did I miss something?) are among the seven urban artists in the Top 25.
Turn back a few pages -- or scroll a little further down the screen -- and you'll find the Pop Catalogue chart, which tracks sales of releases that have been out for at least two years. It's not quite a typical week, because as soon as the calendar hits October, the onslaught of Christmas records starts taking over. Still, the list is mostly representative: rock icons (the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Doors), heartland favorites (Bob Seger, Journey, Lynyrd Skynyrd), some younger acts whose old albums are goosed by a new release (the Killers, Evanescence, Rascal Flatts).
Notice anything conspicuously absent from that Catalogue Top 25? Not one album by a hip-hop act. In fact, a closer look reveals not a single listing for a recording artist of color among these older releases. It's a glaring distinction and reveals a longstanding split between rock and urban audiences. Rock listeners constantly look back, grounding themselves in the music's history and core artists. Meanwhile, in practice if not in actual definition, hip-hop is about looking forward, with occasional glances to the side -- trying to take the music into new directions, while keeping a clear sense of popular tastes and styles.
Consider the terminology: The radio format that plays the Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin is called "classic rock." Classic -- meaning timeless and eternal. The lunchtime or late-night radio shows that play Slick Rick, Run-D.M.C. or even Biggie Smalls, however, say that they celebrate the "old school." Old meaning, well, old. Great, unforgettable, revolutionary, but still -- old.
The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" single, the first hip-hop song to hit the pop Top 40, was released in late 1979 -- meaning the genre has been a national force for 27 years now. If you do the math, starting from Elvis's first recordings in 1955, that means hip-hop today is as mature as rock was in 1982. That's after disco, after punk, at the launch of MTV -- hell, hip-hop was already on the rise and stealing the attention of rebellious youth. Rock and roll was starting to stare down the reality of being a middle-aged music, and gradually accepting that perhaps the magic of its '60s high-water mark might not ever be replicated.
So why is there such resistance to aging, or to actively engaging history, in hip-hop? Rappers such as L.L. Cool J and Ice Cube have proven that a lengthy career as an MC is not an impossibility, and Ice-T and Queen Latifah have even demonstrated that finding mature extensions for your work doesn't mean surrendering your integrity. But the fact remains that while it's an inevitable rite of passage for a 14-year-old rock listener to discover "Dark Side of the Moon," you won't find many teenage rap fans camped out in their basement with "3 Feet High and Rising."
It's tempting to lament this lack of a sense of history from urban fans. But there's little doubt that it also has its advantages -- it's one of the reasons that hip-hop has continued to innovate at warp speed for so long; even if the genre is not exactly in a golden age at the moment, it still comes up with more new sounds and approaches than anything else, with a vitality and consistency that continue to set the pace for pop.
More than anything else, rock struggles against the weight of its own history -- new bands often exist purely as laboratory concoctions (one part Gang of Four, two parts Clash, mix in some early Kinks and stir). The Killers follow a breakout debut album by upping their ambition and wind up with ... a watered-down Bruce Springsteen record. Hip-hop has none of these shackles, and thus the ability to at least try to break rules instead of being broken by them.
The obsession with modernity is also part of a continuum among the black pop audience in America. The blues was cast off as the sound of an older, oppressed generation, and just consider the demographic composition of today's jazz buyers.
They say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, but the opposite might also be true -- remembering history too well leaves you with no way out of its maze. Ideally, both genres could learn from each other: Young rock bands should try to make some history of their own, and the hip-hop community would benefit from taking some notes on its own past -- at least until it finds itself with a punk-style rebellion of its own to shake things up a bit. Anarchy in the BK, y'all.
