NEWS
EVENTS
A fresh breeze in hip-hop
RnB/Hip Hop | Tuesday 15th May 2012 | Osh
by Harry Cathead
The difference between hip-hop and other genres of music is that hip-hop is essentially street poetry on music. It’s as close to the street as you can get, and you can always turn to underground hip-hop to find out what’s the mentality among people hanging out on the city corners and doing their thing, whichever might that be.
When it first emerged 30-40 years ago, hip-hop was the music of the oppressed who only just gained their freedom from racial discrimination and found they were still trapped in a bigger box – poverty and ignorance. (A Tribe Called Quest and Poor Righteous Teachers are good examples) This has still not changed, the music just trancended race barriers. As it evolved and became popular and commercial, the trend went towards ‘gangster’ music, glorifying drug dealers, killers and a greedy, predatory mentality made its way into this culture through rappers popular in the 90s. This continued all into the ‘naughties’ with a big push from MTV towards the black outlaw image.
Underground was never dead, it has just been lurking in the shadows until the age of information came along. Without the aid of major labels, young artists never really had a chance, but the access fans gained to the world of independent music through the computer means that right now the underground can compete neck-and-neck with the fat cats. Useless to point out who will get the young ears, when nonsensical lyrics like “Let’s go to the beach, each/ Let’s go get away/ They say, what they gonna say?” are compared to real stuff that actually makes you think on top of sounding like good music.
As MTV took over mainstream hip-hop music, the underground experienced a rebirth and a new generation of artists from all corners of the English-speaking world started carving their niche on different channels that aren’t controlled on a central level by anybody.
Focusing on the UK, it’s now easy to see how another type of lyricism is yet again sweeping over the scene - the rap music of today is embracing more humanist principles. The likes of Akala and Lowkey (who suddenly quit music when he was still on the good side of the bell curve, but more of that later on) and more recently The Four Owls are perfect examples of underground hip-hop artists who have penetrated the market on their own independent feet, with the help of the Internet and social media to promote their music and ideas.
When young people are broke and unemployed, like it is the case now, their mind wanders and they turn to art to express their feelings. To this mix, add the unprecedented access to information (which was unimaginable only a few years ago), plus the familiarity with ‘mind-expanding’ drugs such as marijuana, shrooms and mdma, and in my humble opinion you get all the ingredients for a new way of doing hip-hop, a way wich promotes true humanitarian values and good taste.
If conscious music is gaining popularity on a large scale, it can only mean that there’s also a change happening at street level, and yours truly is here to try and make sense of it all.
