There are a number of major differences between delivering the State of Hip Hop address than delivering the State of the Union of the United States. The main one, at least for the speaker, is the fact that the audience is much less polite. There aren’t standing ovations every three sentences and people sure as hell aren’t afraid to let you know when they disagree with you.
“My fellow emcees, DJs, b-boys and girls, graf writers, beat boxers, and other members of the hip hop community, the state of hip hop is strong. The rest of American culture, whether they like it or not, is starting to realize that hip hop is here to say and we are not going anywhere in the immediate future. We have defied music industry experts who kept insisting that hip hop was just a phase the industry was going through that would pass. Yet as a presence in American culture we are as potent as ever. As measured by our influence in America, and the world as a whole, hip hop is as strong as ever.”
If I were in Congress I would’ve gotten a standing ovation by both sides of the aisle right there. Instead I got one “Yay-e-yay-eee!” from a man in the front right of the crowd.
“Thanks Cube. The only thing stronger than hip hop’s influence is hip hop’s economy. All you need to do is look at the Billboard charts to see how popular and profitable hip hop’s music has become. What’s even better is that hip hop artists and entrepreneurs are actually getting to see this money more than they did previously. Artists are signed to their own labels and actually making some of the profits they are generating with their music. However, the industry is still designed to take advantage of its artists and we need to continue to make sure that we are the ones profiting from our labor.”
“Hell yeah! Why you think I’ve been doing movies? It’s a goddamn rape over!”
“Mighty Mos knows what’s up. And by the way, you can speak your mind here Mos. No cops up in here to censor anyone.”
“Fuck the police!”
Cube gets a standing O for that interjection. Talk about playing to the crowd; that’s like yelling “Fuck T.O.!” in Philly.
“Anyway, while we still may not be getting our fair share of profits from record sales we are proving plenty entrepreneurial. We have artists who own sports teams. Artists are doing commercials. Artists have their own clothing lines. Their own shoes. Their own movies. Their own beverages. Hell, Andre even has a cartoon show. The industry might still be corrupt, but we are still finding ways to get paid.”
“Yep!”
“Oh, whattup Jay… I thought you were done with this. Aren’t you supposed to be playing golf or something?”
“Haha, it’s all marketing homie.”
“I told ya’ll! Nobody’s better than me, they just got better marketing schemes!”
Immortal Technique was never one to hold his tongue. He doesn’t care how many discs Hov has moved or how many tricks Hov has screwed. Time to squash this tangent.
“While it’s great that we are finding ways to get paid and have unprecedented cultural influence in America and around the world, I’m afraid we haven’t used this power to do much good. While we have progressed in terms of cultural and economic power, our most visible artists haven’t done much good with this power. We used to have our most visible artists doing songs like ‘Night of the Living Baseheads’ or ‘Brenda’s Got A Baby’ encouraging people to not do drugs and to treat women with respect. Now everyone on TV is claiming to deal drugs and pimp hos. The underground scene is split between denouncing violence, drugs, womanizing, materialism, etc. and glorifying it, with a bias toward glorification. But in mainstream hip hop, the one that holds the bulk of our influence in society, it’s almost all negative. If you turn on BET right now there is a 95% chance that, if it’s not on commercial, you’ll see a guy talking about how he’ll kill you, how he deals drugs, and how rich he is while 20 women in thongs shake their asses three inches from the camera.”
“YEEEAAAAAAAHHHHH!”
“No, I’m saying that’s a bad thing.”
“WHAAAAATTTTTT?”
“Yeah, it’s a bad thing. Kids who turn on BET think that the four elements of hip hop are groupies, drugs, money, and guns. For every DJ you see in a video, there’ll be 300 naked women. For every graf writer, there’ll be 100 guns. For every b-boy, there’ll be 60 grills and 100 rims. And even when mainstream hip hop does display the elements of our culture, they bastardize them. In the mainstream, the sole job of the DJ is to yell out their name on their mixtape and occasionally they’ll chop and screw something. Occasionally there will be popping and locking in hip hop videos, but hip hop dancing is now portrayed as simply leaning back for guys and bending over and shaking their ass for women. And emceeing has reached a new low when artists like Diddy can come out and admit that he’s using ghostwriters and he still has a #1 album. He should be laughed out of the hip hop community. The entire point of emceeing is that the artists writes and performs their own music. To hire ghostwriters bastardizes the entire thing. Of course, it has occurred before and people knew or suspected such things from artists in the past. But now people are coming out and admitting proudly that they hired the best ghostwriters available and that’s why you should buy their album… and then people do! What the fuck people?”
“They always hating on me ‘cause I’m the king of the city. It’s like BIG said, ‘more money more problems.’ You’re just hating on me ‘cause I get paid and banged J-Lo. It’s like I said, I’m public enemy number one.”
“Shut your ass up you shiny suit-wearing fuck. I’m public enemy number one; always have been and always will be. You are part of the problem, not the solution. You go on Empty-V pretend like you’re a rapper. Stick to making clothing.”
“Hold up Chuck, there’s nothing wrong with using other people’s lyrics. It’s all about making ill music.”
“Except you ain’t making the music. The person who plays a Mozart sonata isn’t the one who makes the music; it’s the writing of the music that requires creativity. Drop the mic Diddy, you shouldn’t be holding it.”
Then the place descended into chaos. Dre and Bleek got up to defend Diddy (there’s a shock) from Chuck D and Rakim, and then a collection of old timers, underground heads, and purists jumped in against them. Then Cage took the opportunity to get in Eminem’s face because he wrote for Dre, and then the American Association of Ghostwriters joined the mix. Crooked I was trying to hold back Pharaohe from jumping across the aisle and swinging on Copywrite, whose scrawny ass was talking shit as usual. And of course, Suge was standing in the back laughing and enjoying the lunacy.
“Yo… Hey… Hey… HEY! SHUT THE FUCK UP AND SIT DOWN! THIS AIN’T THE FUCKING SOURCE AWARDS! This is what I’m talking about. We can’t even be united against people bastardizing our culture. And what’s dividing us? Money. Ghostwriters want to get paid, those who get other people to write for them want to use their visibility to sell music that isn’t theirs.”
“Man, hip hop has never been the same since ’88. Since it became a lucrative profession there’s a misconception that a movement in any direction is progression.”
“Exactly Bis. Everyone is out trying to get paid by exploiting hip hop any way they can. It’s working and we are getting paid, but at what cost? And then everyone starts fighting with everyone else over stupid shit. People putting bounties on other people’s chains. People beefing over insignificant shit, or even worse just to get their album hyped. The only time the hip hop community ever pulls together to agree on something is when someone dies, and even then it’s brief. Then we go back to squabbling over dumb shit and in the process bastardizing our culture and making ourselves look like assholes. So before we continue fighting about this bullshit, let’s at least have a moment of silence for J Dilla and Proof and all the others who died this past year…”
My ears were still ringing from the recent uproar, but the volume of the silence rivaled that of the previous chaos. People can and do say a lot of bad things about the hip hop community, but they can’t say we don’t respect the dead.
“The man has a point.” Thank god for Black Thought. I’d pissed off a lot of people in the last 15 minutes, so it’s good that someone who commands virtually everyone’s respect had my back to some degree. “We are more powerful than ever, but more divided than ever too. The underground hates the mainstream. The mainstream ignores the underground, as well as the roots of hip hop culture. The old heads hate the new shit and their message. Everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else for being fake or for biting or for whatever. Everyone is fighting to get paid at any cost. But no matter how much revenue we bring in, if the cost is our culture is it really a profit or a loss? How much is our culture worth to us? Does it have a price tag? We aren’t even reaping the majority of the rewards the exploitation of our culture is producing; the goddamn record companies are. Don’t we look like fools… Killing what we built from the inside out, and fighting over who gets the spotlight to do so. In the past The Roots have challenged listeners to demand more from hip hop artists and get us to make good, meaningful music. It’s clear that our listeners aren’t doing that. The truth is, it has to come from within. We have to demand more of ourselves. If we don’t demand of ourselves the preservation of our culture rather than the exploitation of it; if we don’t demand that we unify as a culture to do some good in our communities instead of just glorify the byproducts and sources of the bad in them; if we don’t demand good music of ourselves, nobody else is going to do it. We don’t have to go back and do boom bap shit or anything like that; we can still do new shit while staying true to the core of hip hop. But there has to be a tipping point where we start moving in the right direction, and if there isn’t one soon you’ll have an entire generation of ‘hip hop’ fans and artists who don’t know anything about real hip hop. And then there will be no going back.”
Silence. Even if I could have put it as well as he put it, it wouldn’t have had the same weight coming from me. Why the fuck was I chosen to give this address again?
“Damn right. We’ve come a long way people. Let’s just not forget where we’ve come from.”
And with that it was over. The crowd was ambivalent. Some resented what was said, some loved it. I felt great. There is nothing more cathartic than yelling at Puffy. I’d really recommend it for anyone who gets the chance to do so. Overall though, I though it went pretty damn well all things considered. As we were walking out of the auditorium, I overheard Paul Wall talking to Lil Jon.
“I don’t care what those fools say. I’ma still have videos with chains and cars and half-naked bitches. That’s what people want to see. Hell, that’s what I want to see. Fuck what it does to ‘the culture,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. I want to see some naked bitches shakin’ they shit.”
“YEEEEEAAAAAHHHH!”
Sigh. We still have a long way to go.
By Nick Kuhar and Justin Smith
