BY ALEX HO

In print | Published February 21, 2008

Kanye West’s acceptance speech at the 2008 Grammys may have been about as shrill a public staging as any of his past diva antics: his message about crossing genres was pretty stale, considering that that’s about all any mainstream hip hop artist has done for the past decade or two. But his expressed ambition to be “the number one artist in the world,” to say nothing of his totally queer Rocket Man-esque get-up that night, speaks to a general trend for hip-hop towards an increasingly abstract and faceless product that can appeal to as many people across the globe as possible. Nas was right, and wrong. Hip hop is far from dead, but it’s certainly miles away from its original social and political roots.

To start with the obvious, hip hop is no longer alternative. It is and has for a while been the status quo of mainstream pop music. Today, the inevitable progression for, it seems, nearly every pop artist is to go hip hop, from a means for once squeaky clean bubblegum pop figures to get “Dirrty” to the unexpected reinvention of folksy Nelly Furtado. And with its induction into the mainstream, hip hop has largely shorn off its counter-cultural context. It’s tough to imagine anything as straightforwardly angry as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” today. But that’s hardly a problem since hip hop has so many other elements to chew on. As a musical niche with a heavy visual component, namely its style of dancing, no doubt propped up by the advent of MTV and the music video, hip hop has become an easily accessible signifier of modernity and of coolness that any youth culture can latch on to. Just look at hip hop’s prominence in virtually any nation’s pop music industry.

Hip hop’s ubiquity makes the criticism of its lyrical content all the more ironic. It’s undeniable that by the late ‘90s much of mainstream hip-hop’s thematic scope had regressed to a total of two topics — excessive sex and excessive materialism — usually served with a big helping of hyper-masculinity and misogyny. Unfortunately, this has been the loudest image of hip hop, which continues to undercut its full acceptance by mainstream America, cloud the considerable musical merits that the majority of its artists bring to the table (OutKast and Gnarls Barkley stand out in my mind) and perpetuate the most despicable of black stereotypes. At its worst, hip hop has become the modern form of minstrelsy.

At the same time, excessive sex and excessive materialism are things that any capitalist, consumer society can get behind wholeheartedly. I argue that a part of the reason for hip hop’s growing popularity and integration into mainstream pop is its appropriation as a vehicle for exploring these vices. Everyone wants to be hip hop, and there seems to be a lot of flattening of hip hop’s cultural specificity. Now drawing heavily from reaggeton, American hip hop is growing ever the more multicultural and all encompassing.

The recent glorification of the ghetto bares itself in a pretty recent text that caters to the suburban high school demographic, (I may just have to crucify myself for referencing it) the direct-to-video masterpiece “Bring it On 3: All or Nothing.” Okay, I can’t speak for the whole of the film, as I’ve only seen about half an hour of clips through YouTube, but what I’ve seen is just so excellent. Not even getting into the movie’s over-the-top horniness, this sequel takes the cheerleading-comedy-doubling-as-an-after-school special-on-racism paradigm and goes way further than could ever be conceivable in 2000, somewhat making amends for the offensive “separate, but equal” message of the original. Our new white-as-snow protagonist, Britney (now Hayden Panettiere), has to leave her beloved cheerleading squad when she moves to a largely black and Hispanic school. Initially ostracized for her whiteness (“This ain’t ‘The O.C.’” she’s told when she arrives.), Britney has to prove to Solange Knowles’ queen bee that she is talented i.e. ghetto enough to be on the cheerleading team.

The ‘hood culture is played to a cartoonish excess here with Britney’s new squad krumping to literally scare her former squad off the stage in the film’s hilarious final dance-off. But, unlike somber, tasteful miscegenation movies of the early ‘00s like “Save the Last Dance” and “Crazy/Beautiful,” “Bring It On 3” isn’t lip service; it’s the real deal, unabashedly reflecting how hip-hop has been wholly embraced by youth culture.

This is all to say that Kanye West isn’t accomplishing anything new. Hip hop has long dominated pop culture, and West is merely coasting along its mass appeal. Electing every pop star in your phonebook to guest perform in your records, sampling like there’s no tomorrow and randomly spewing out topical issues makes for a compulsively listen-able pop album, but it’s hardly new or relevant. Is the irony completely lost on him when, in “Stronger,” he raps, “Do anybody make real shit anymore?” West’s brand of hip hop reflects what’s most boring and self-promoting about making it to the top.

Alex is a sophomore. You can reach him at aho1@swarthmore.edu.

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