Word: hip-hop
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...Your exhibition defines the mid-'80s to 1990 as hip-hop's "Golden Years." What happened after...
...Nothing stays the same. Remember, hip-hop was born on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, a serious fiscal crisis in New York City and other urban areas, gang activity, etc. Since then we have been through the horrific Reagan era, the invasion of crack, guns, AIDS and an alleged economic boom in the 1990s - "alleged" because not too many Black people I know, even the ones with college degrees, are anything more than a paycheck away from poverty. Hip-hop has documented all of this, and more. As Amiri Baraka (n? LeRoi Jones) stated in "Blues People" (perhaps...
...Golden Years," to me, simply means that was a period when hip-hop or, specifically, rap music, was incredibly exciting, fresh, def and diverse. There was no such thing as positive rap or negative rap, or so-called gangsta rap. Rap was rap: rhythmic American poetry, period. There has not been a time since when an N.W.A was as popular as a Public Enemy, or where the storytelling of a Slick Rick could fall alongside the pimp strolls of a Too Short, or Roxanne Shante was just as necessary as a Salt 'N Pepa or Queen Latifah...
...Public Enemy proclaimed hip-hop the "Black CNN," and even original gangsta rappers NWA said "it's not about a salary it's all about reality..." Does this still hold true? What's happened to the "bearing witness" side of hip-hop? And how do the more mainstream artists view those like Mos Def, Common, the Roots, KRS One, Black Eyed Peas etc. - the acts that arise in every generation who rededicate themselves to the core values of the socially conscious rappers of the early years - are they the conscience of the hip-hop nation...
...That said, hip-hop has always been Black America's CNN. That has never changed. CNN shows all kinds of news, not just "positive" stuff, and that is the same for hip-hop. And hip-hop has never stopped bearing witness. Listen, for example, to Nelly's album very closely. I have been to St. Louis several times, but his album gives the close listener, via the lyrics and the accents and the attitudes, an inside look at Black working-class St. Louis. If that is not bearing witness, I don't know what bearing witness...