Via Guardian
Last night, 1,600 or so people descended on the Barbican in London for what was hailed as “the first-ever global debate on hip-hop”. Arranged by Google and Intelligence Squared – bespoke organisers of online conferences who recently staged something similar on the War on Drugs – it was like a cross between Question Time and a show trial, with advocates and speakers for and against the motion: “Hip-Hop Doesn’t Enhance Society, It Degrades It.”
There was even a live online vote, with statistics presented on giant screens and references to “swings” like a hip-hop version of Peter Snow on election night. To add to the gravitas of it all, we had BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis chairing the debate, and speakers ranging from the Jesse Jackson and Shaun Bailey – a special adviser to David Cameron on youth, crime and welfare issues – to rapper KRS-One and poet Benjamin Zephaniah, as well as a host of academics. There were even satellite link-ups with, among others, Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest and satirist PJ O’Rourke. Mystifyingly, Jemima Khan was our web-host.
Hit the jump for the rest!-Allindstrom
MoreIt was at once serious and ludicrous, or should that be Ludacris, with apologies to Eamon Courtenay, an attorney and advocate for the motion, who made that joke first. It was the preposterous Courtenay whose task it was to present the case against hip-hop. But as he strutted about, declaiming rap for its conspicuous consumption, making connections between the music and the proliferation of homicidal crime among black youths while quoting the lyrics to 50 Cent’s Crime Wave (“Got a itchy trigger finger nigga/ So if you hit me and you get me I’ll be back to get ya”) to inadvertently hilarious effect, one couldn’t help wondering whether this was all just one big send-up, a spoof of some long-forgotten late-80s yoof TV panel debate. Where was Janet Street Porter? Surely waiting in the wings.
Getting all hot and bothered about rap bling and its violent effect on teens today feels a little after the fact. What next: home taping is killing music, and video – is it spoiling opportunities for the radio star? And does anyone really give a toss about 50 Cent in 2012, let alone hold him responsible for urban degeneration? He wishes.
It’s a curious discussion to be having now when a better subject for debate might actually be: is rap going through a crisis? It wasn’t long ago that it was pronounced dead, and commercially it’s hardly what it was, with David Guetta-fied R&B enjoying the hegemony exerted by rap 10 years ago. Ironically, since 2009 and that RIP notice rap actually has been in its rudest health for ages, with amazing artists from America such as Drake, the Weeknd, Odd Future, Death Grips, A$AP Rocky, Danny Brown, Main Attrakionz and more making ethereally, almost psychedelically strange music that is so far beyond the music being railed against here it’s barely the same genre.
In fact, Tyler the Creator and his gang of feral sonic architects might have made decent subjects for a face-off because they have a lyrical agenda that demands scrutiny as to what is and isn’t acceptable, but they didn’t get a mention tonight. What everyone, on both sides of the fence, seemed to be militating for were the days when hip-hop was a unifying force for good, like those baby-boomers who still wish it was 1969. But actually there was only one Public Enemy – just as there is only one Rolling Stones – and besides, hip-hop in the main has always been more about razing than raising consciousness. The thrill is in the abasement, a point made eloquently by PJ O’Rourke when he came onscreen, first to ask, reasonably enough, “What the fuck am I doing on this panel?” to uproarious laughter from an audience who seemed to get the absurdity of it all, and then to make the obvious point that great art isn’t always morally defensible. “What are they going to do – rap about puppies?” Fair question, that.
In the main, we got two hours’ worth of clumsy cases for and against the use of the words “ho”, “bitch” and “nigga” as though Eazy-E still ruled the waves, after which ancient arguments were trotted out about corporate greed as though somehow the label homes of hip-hop stars shouldn’t be making money from record sales.
It was the sort of heated! debate! that would have made perfect sense in 1988, on the back of the releases of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions, De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising and NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, and that’s where most of the panellists’ heads seemed to be: arguing for rap’s agency of change (PE) and uplifting joyousness (De La) but against its incitements to destroy (NWA). The presence of Q-Tip and KRS-One, hardly agenda-setting artists any more, confirmed this feeling of belatedness. The only time vaguely contemporary, relevant rappers were cited, it was Jay-Z and Kanye, and even then nobody could really decide whether to praise or decry, the debate focusing largely, not on their respective lexical prowess or musical breadth, but on their use of the “n” and “b” words. Tricia Rose, distinguished professor at Brown University, got her knickers in a twist about sexist terminology as though somehow her career had been derailed by Schoolly D’s misogynist invective, while KRS-One, equally po of face, attempted to defend the latter word by frequent recourse to the dictionary – apparently, it’s in the dictionary that “nigga” comes from “neggus” meaning king, although he didn’t say which dictionary, nor did he have an answer when an audience member asked whether he would mind, then, if a white kid threw said racial slur at him, given its regal connotation?
It was a victory for self-righteous condescension, and nobody, not one person, managed to nail the appeal of the music on trial. In fact, the panellist raging against rap as “the marketing arm … of the prison industrial complex” did a better job of capturing its excitement than arch advocate Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown University, who made rap seem about as enticing as a 24-hour poetry slam.
Finally, it was over to Emily Maitlis, who reeled off the vote statistics (apparently there was a swing against the motion online and in the hall), after which there was nothing left to do but cringe as the original Jesse J came over all demagogue showman and, remembering his civil rights past, bizarrely urged everyone to stand and repeat after him: “I am somebody! Respect me! Protect me! My mind is a pearl! If my heart can believe it! Stop the violence! Save the children! Keep hope! Alive!”
