OUT OF THE BLUE

…a baby is being born the same time a man is murdered, the beginning and end.. NAS 'Nas is Like'

WHY HIP-HOP IS DEAD..This is a comment on another discussion somewhre else but I thought I'd put it here...

HIP-HOP is dead; it was born and died the moment it took its first step beyond its own space--the very moment its voice(s) declared life to it. Anything that's not unified and dismantled and fragmented across not only America but the world is dead. There was never hip-hop, it was just music which emerged from the suppressed communities of F.U.S.A... .Its contents are still very much alive and inherently breathing continuous life into the people in these communities but it was never attached to the 'music' form it claimed to give it life. Battling existed a century before hip-hop the music claimed it, struggling existed before and likewise to everything hip-hop claimed as its contents. What Nas was talking about as Hip-Hop is Dead is metaphorical and it means for everyone that claimed it should think of what they are doing as something different from what they think they are doing--hip-hopping. Meaning what they are doing and claiming as hip-hop in attachment to its urban-contexts and sub-cultural elements is something which never existed.
Why do everyone look to hip-hop (the music form) as some guideline which can trace back the origin of battling, emceeing, and so on when these existed historically beyond what hip-hop can take us back to? Hip-hop is dead cos it never manifested the conditions of suppressed peoples--and the moment it claimed to manifest these elements as its dynamism, it detached itself from it and therefore it carried on as something else yet still believing itself to be what is held in its face.

Look at Nas' 'Hip-Hop is Dead' and 'Untitled'...basically, it means 'get over yourself' and 'start something else' that’s more real than what you think yourself to be...basically saying that 'hip-hop' is what we say it is--what Kanye said when winning his award for best rap-hip-hop album last year, and likewise what everyone else who thinks they got something to say says in their own opinions. 'Untitled' is a new-growth metaphorically referring to the reality of black and other people's conditions in this f'd up world--something which the rubric 'hip-hop' can never embody. We can no longer look to hip-hop as an inspiration because it’s dynamically polluted with heterogeneously hateful shit rather than spiritually healing materials. What we should look to instead is individuals and how they utilise the elements of the social world for the betterment of oppressed people. And later, we can look at how some individuals with similar causes and styles can be grouped into a movement or sub-culture rather than just jumping into the wagon without being able to know your way around something historically unified into a term within which its elements contradicts each other in conflicts and all other types of shit…..2bcont…