Three years ago, Nas proclaimed “Hip-Hop is dead”. Not everyone agreed, but enough did that the title alone caused controversy and a wave of answer songs. Which tells you something.

In the past 30 years, hip-hop went from nothing to arguably the dominant form of popular music in the world. And you could say that its success is what has led to all the lyrical hand wringing. Any time an art form gets big, there will be a counter-current of purists who want to go back to some imagined pure origin when definitions and distinctions were clear and everyone knew who the “real” players were. Look at jazz, for example.

What people forget is that no popular art form is born from nothing. They’re all bastards, hybrids, combinations of this and that. That’s where their life comes from and why they continue to grow. The natural lifecycle of a successful form like hip-hop is that it spreads out and drops its seeds into new hybrid forms. The real power of hip-hop is its appeal to young people around the world who see themselves as voiceless. The tools of hip-hop are readily available to them in a way that the tools of, say, classical music, are not.

So until the world changes in some very fundamental ways, hip-hop is not dead. It’s just gestating.

Published on Apr 14, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop