DEATH & RE-GROWTH

How can it be re-presented without jeopardising or endangering what has already been dehumanised and acclimatised into a power-relational dynamic between oppressors and oppressed? I think appealing to the commercialised space of the media through which rap and hip-hop has been attached with negativities and so on proves to be the best if not the only way. I think rappers like Nas and Rakim or KRS-1 fully understands the nature of such a highly-commercialised space and its ties to politics and the oppression of all types of people. Therefore, the process of appealing through this filtering space demands their knowledge of history as well as the current climate in terms of the relationship between discourses and peoples and the tools with which these relationships are determined and expressed. Where do they draw their inspirations from?—the very grass-root conditions and contexts from which they emerge. There is no denial of the negative elements historically associated with their own image(s), rather, these are twisted into tools of expression and empowerment—against the very conditions which aspire to maintain the history and current atmosphere working against them…

Coming into terms with the nature of commercialisation and its attachment to politics and power and as well as to the poor conditions of low socio-economic spaces demands a new flip on one’s approach as to the ways through which he or she advances into the significance of this very ‘space’. It demands a set-back period in which the tools of expression has to go through a process of re-invention and re-consideration—hip-hop is in a state of 911—was the catch-phrase just prior to Nas’s HIP-HOP is DEAD album. Can we assume for the time being that this project exemplifies introspection and a rupturing event?—and that ‘Untitled’ is the moving forward phase? It’s almost as if rap-hip-hop has been denied its significance and attachment to the concerned people fenced in the mental and physical-dominance of history, rather, it is perceived by Nas as actually going through the very same struggle which is associated with its voices—that the very tool which gives audio to these voices itself is mashed up in the slow-mental death of its so called voices—that it has become for a while now a subject suppressed and robbed of its sovereignty to the disappointment of the people who created it and envisioned it as a liberating element; that it has become the opposite of that envision.

Its revolutionary characteristics and things which made it peculiar and different to its outside has been slowly pulverized into the commercialised-space it utilises for mobility. The fundamental flip to its profitable sense needed to become or manually moved to its fore (since it has been slowly yet implicitly secluded)—such that its present face(s) needs to be destroyed or at least be seen as ineffective to those who rely upon it—such also that it needed to be deprived of its significance by announcing its DEATH and who better to do it than Nas?

2bcont…