Word: hip-hop
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Coincidentally, I was watching the concert movie Dave Chappelle's Block Party the other night, in which he puts on a bunch of these alternative hip-hop artists that you talk about in your book - Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Kanye West. Other than Kanye, why don't these artists sell as well as the Jay-Zs or the 50 Cents...
...always urban people, but the same images can be found in American history for centuries. So this idea that a certain kind of sexual deviance or violent behavior defines black culture has had a huge market in commercial mainstream culture for at least 200 years. Also, sexist images, which hip-hop has a lot of, seem to do very well across the cultural spectrum. So sexuality and sexual domination sell. Racial stereotypes sell. The market is more consolidated, which makes it easier for those images to perpetuate themselves...
...very creative. It's the substance. What are you making metaphors about 24 hours a day? Same thing with Jay-Z. Even he has acknowledged that he's "dumbed his music down" so that he can sell records. This economic imperative has had more of an impact on hip-hop than [on] rock or soul...
This is what hip-hop is now. What did it used...
...block parties where you had multigenerational consumption. You have 12-year-olds, 18-year-olds, 30-year-olds, 70-year-olds, all at the block party. They live there. They're hanging out. They're not going to listen to a lot of the kind of commercial hip-hop that we're talking about, where people are just rhyming about killing everybody who gets in their way and never caring about a woman - I'm not going to use bad language here; what's the point? - but you get it. There's no way that's going to be acceptable...