hip-hop & rap music

Aug 24, 2005 16:46

Listening to Hard Knock radio -- always inspiring conversations about hip-hop, youth, rap music, and all the cultural and economic stuff having to do with it. Always some shit that just needs to be said. The questions... why are mostly white cats listening to "conscious" hip-hop? Are blacks and other people of color only listening to the silly, really oppressive hip-pop shit? Or have rap music and hip-hop been commidified already? Is there anything left of the original sub/counter/popular culture that hip hop was? [Mad props to the Bay though, keepin it real, home of the best underground rap scene!]

I remember just a decade ago it was still all about creating a culture (not necessarily counterculture) because many of us didn't have anything else to look at. Reminds me of the brainy Professor Rivera in Ethnic Studies who teaches about popular culture: "the most marginalized create culture and the capitalist elite aristocracy commodifies it, markets it, and sells it as a product. then the cycle begins again somewhere else and new popular culture is created." So if hip-hop is done for and Elvis and Eminem have taken over, what's the new popular culture breeding out on the streets these days?

Sidenote: I think I got a job!!! =]
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