Superblast!: BarkerRant: Why Hip-Hop Sucks in ’08

Dig this: BarkerRant -- an infrequent, but frequently mind-blowing, column from our esteemed critic/curmudgeon Andrew Barker. In today's episode, Barker trashes Mims.

"Let’s talk about time travelin’ / Rhyme-javelin’ / Something mind-unravelin’...get down!" Outkast, "Return of the ‘G’"

If you happened upon any music critic’s year-in-review essay, you’ll likely have learned that 2007 was a terrible year for hip-hop. I don’t wholeheartedly agree, as last year saw very solid releases from Kanye West, Talib Kweli, Ghostface Killah, Lupe Fiasco and Jay-Z, but I still concede the point. There were few rising stars worth mentioning. Heavyweights like T.I., 50 Cent and Timbaland publicly embarrassed themselves. Pimp C died. Ja Rule still refuses to retire. And the year’s biggest breakthrough single, Mims’ "This Is Why I’m Hot," was flat-out wretched enough to, as a friend of mine put it, make "Candy Shop" sound like "California Love" in comparison.

The late revelations of Nastradamus notwithstanding, hip-hop isn’t dead, but it’s certainly stuck in a holding pattern. It’s probably inevitable that this would happen; the meteoric rise of the genre from "banned from the Grammys" notoriety to anchor of the music business was so remarkably swift that the music itself could hardly keep up. The speed with which the genre chased the freshest faces left some of its brightest stars relegated to the "where are they now?" file after a single album. The default tropes that were exciting 15 years ago -- the money, the drugs, the Cristal, the rims -- have been exhausted to the point of collapse. The names presently atop the hip-hop charts are depressing not only because so many of them seem destined to be one-hit wonders, but also because so many of them don’t seem to even have the ambition to be anything more. Most pathetically, the kids these days can’t even manage a legitimate rap battle, with Kanye and 50 declaring war via press releases, instead of rhymes, and judging their merits on record sales, instead of mic skills. (Seriously, how depressing was that whole brouhaha?)

One can blame hip-hop’s conversion to a ringtone-based economy, or the cooption of great rappers by mediocre filmmakers, or the mere existence of Soulja Boy, but the truth is that it’s just gotten too easy. The procession of singles keeps floating by, the money is still being made, and no one has to give a shit if they don’t want to. The script for an aspiring MC has whittled down to: Release an album; Get famous; Spend the rest of your career coasting by on guest spots with J Lo. It’s a profitable enterprise to be sure, but it’s a static one, yielding placeholder stars and soundalike tracks instead of real artists. What’s missing is a sense of danger, the daring to forgo fleeting pleasures in favor of grander statements.

In other words, hip-hop either needs to go prog, or it needs to go punk.

Granted, it’s always a dicey proposition to try to superimpose the timeline of a newer genre onto the history of an old one. Things will never completely line up, the exceptions will always outnumber the rules. Recall when Outkast released Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and every critic worth his or her byline rushed to liken the record to The White Album and, by extension, Outkast to the Beatles. The comparison made very little sense. (A more accurate comparison would have likened the record to Kiss’ 1978 solo album period -- with Andre as Gene Simmons and Big Boi as Ace Frehley -- though on the whole Outkast are even less like Kiss than they are like the Beatles. Personally, I’ve always seen striking similarities between my favorite Outkast record, Aquemini, and my favorite Beatles record, Rubber Soul, though no one else ever seems to agree.)

With that in mind, hear me out: In the mid-’70s, rock and roll had been around for two decades. It had seen its heroes come and go, its martyrs overdose or choke on vomit or go down with the plane, and it found itself the crest of the musical heap, with nowhere left to go, no status quo to push against other than itself. Sure, there were the placeholders -- Grand Funk Railroad, Free, Blue Oyster Cult (or BOC, Britain’s answer to BTO) -- who just kept on truckin’ with the same old sounds and structures, but rock’s pioneers went in two different directions. One group went further into space, stretching the boundaries of what rock music could be with orchestral flourishes and maddeningly complex arrangements, the other went back to basics, reconnecting with the primal rhythms and degenerate energy that had made rock and roll so exciting in the first place. It was only because of this, for better or worse, that rock and roll survived.

As for hip-hop, it’s not that individual artists haven’t been making moves in both directions. It was eight years ago that Del and Dan the Automator dropped Deltron 3030, hip-hop’s first sci-fi concept album (as well as the first sci-fi concept album from any genre worth listening to -- take that, Tales From Topographic Oceans). The Roots have essentially become a jam band in recent years; Phish by way of South Philly. And general Prince-like eccentricity is becoming more and more acceptable with every Cee-Lo or Andre 3000 type that breaks through to the mainstream.

On the other side of the equation, the underground is bubbling over with energetic, underfunded MCs. Despite the countless critical accolades and magazine profiles, Lil’ Wayne seems to resist every opportunity to cash in, with most of his frighteningly prolific (and frighteningly consistent) output landing outside the industry machine, on mixtapes and free downloads. And most importantly, and certainly most punkily, hip-hop has become scene-driven again. Granted, hip-hop regionalism never disappeared, but the sort of intense cross-pollination that only occurs when like-minded artists coexist, collaborate and compete with each other is blossoming anew everywhere from the low-fi London grime-merchants to those hyphy ghost-riders in Oakland.

But it’s not quite enough. Someone needs to stir shit up. It’s not enough to hate Ludacris; someone needs to hate Ludacris the same way punks hated Led Zeppelin. Feuding with individual MCs is so early-’90s -- I want to see someone call out the entire hip-hop machine. The prog rappers need to go out of orbit completely. Sure, Outkast is sufficiently weird, and the RZA is fast becoming some sort of deranged hippie, but where are the 20-minute scratch solos? The laser light shows? The Ayn Rand references? Hip-hop’s new breed needs to heed The Streets and "Push Things Forward". "This ain’t a track, it’s a movement. Cult classic, not bestseller. Stop me if I’m wrong. Stop me if I’m wrong."

And maybe I am. It was, after all, nearly 12 years ago that DJ Shadow released a track titled "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in ’96." (The culprit, in case you’ve forgotten, was "the money.") That sucky year in question saw the release of The Fugees’ The Score and Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt, two of hip-hop’s all-time great statements of purpose, as well as Tupac and Dre’s "California Love," which speaks for itself. Add on to that Nas’ It Was Written, Tribe Called Quest’s Beats, Rhymes and Life, Outkast’s ATLiens, Luscious Jackson’s Fever In, Fever Out, De La Soul’s Stakes Is High, Ghostface Killah’s Ironman, The Roots’ Illadelph Halflife, ~~Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx~~ ('95, close enough), Redman’s Muddy Waterz and Kool Keith’s Dr. Octagonecologyst.