what's wrong with this picture?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

As Wu-Tang Clan producer Robert "RZA" Diggs notes in the promotional bumf accompanying the rap collective's fifth album, hip-hop is in dire straits. In the US, its stock has tumbled to the point that its primary function seems to have become the production of hits based around novelty dances: the chicken noodle soup, the krumping clown dance, the Aunt Jackie. This is the genre once known as the Black CNN reduced to the level of Black Lace's Agadoo.

From today's Guardian.

• Obviously this is the frame for his argument, i.e. AP has to raise the stakes in order to turn a mundane album review into a 'state of modern culture' think piece.
• The rapper said it, so it must be true. Huh? Hasn't the 'hip hop is dead' line been used to sell pretty much every big hip-hop album for the last few years? Why not analyse that instead?
• 'primary function'? Wow, you mean the primary function of a type of music is to make people dance?
• But the real issue I have is with 'reduced to the level of'.  So things change, and the ways things change might involve new patterns  of visibility, different musical 'product', and I'm sure the way people use or respond to Agadoo is different to the way they do 36 Chambers. Yet as soon as you say 'level' you place yourself in the position of the person who grades the levels. Your style implies an alignment of your judgement with my judgement, a consensus world in which we all agree to look down on the schoolkids youtubing their dancing and the wedding disco DJs. (But this position is the editorial style of the paper in general, so meh whatever).
• WILL THIS SORT OF SILLINESS EVER GO AWAY? Or will I just learn not to get irritated by it?

Comments

[zenith.livejournal.com]

I don't think that sort of silliness will ever go away in the Guardian - they've done it with artists far more "mainstream" than the RZA (pretty much EVERY r&b/rap interview or positive review says that the singular artist in question is good and the rest of the genre is shit, without really explaining the points of difference). It will never stop annoying me, but I've stopped being annoyed by artists I like being quoted on it, unless they say something really specifically irritating. I've kind of accepted that, as someone said years ago when we used the term, "all pop stars are rockists" - that is to say, all of them will say that their own stuff has meaning and is authentic and so on. It's not the job of the artist to comment intelligently on the genre (except in their sound!): it's fine for them to just say "they're all shit, I'm great!" It's the job of the critic to look at the wider picture and see past that.

[zenith.livejournal.com]

In terms of hip hop in particular, and the Wu-Tang even more specifically, there has always been this contradictory tendency to say everyone else is shit but then a) collaborate with almost everyone you could possibly be refering to, and b) blatantly indulge in all the things you said were bad that other people do. Great example of this being the beginning of Wu-Tang Forever, in which RZA complains about people trying to make hip hop into r&b or funk. He then ends that album with an r&b tune, essentially.