The State of Hip-Hop

I never really thought I'd say this, but I can't stand hip-hop right now. People have been complaining about mainstream hip-hop for years, but I've never been one of those people. I loved Cash Money Records and dudes like Young Jeezy and Lil' Wayne. I actually liked listening to the radio. But now I find myself listening to This American Life instead of the new Lil' Wayne single, which totally sucks by the way.

And it's not like my tastes have changed. I still listen to the songs that were popular two years ago that were playing on the radio. And people are still making music like that (The Fixxers out of LA), it's just making its way to the radio.

It all started last June, maybe last May. This was around the time T-Pain was getting really popular. I started liking the songs that were on the radio less and less. I thought, surely this is just a phase, some new joints will come out soon and they'll stop playing this crap. Even a friend of mine, who isn't particularly into rap, said the radio was going through a major drought. Then Soulja Boy came out and things managed to get worse.

The first time I heard that song I thought it was a joke. What pisses me off the most about that song is that the beat was completely ripped off a J-Money song that had come out the previous summer called "Peanut Butter Jelly." I consider that song to be a classic and it enjoyed a full three months as my Myspace song. Juicy J gives it a shout-out on the Three 6 Mafia song "Doe Boy Fresh" (that song never made to the radio). I thought that the similarities between Soulja Boy and Peanut Butter Jelly may have been a coincidence until I found out that Soulja Boy is from Mississippi. J-Money is also from Mississippi, and there's not enough hip-hop coming out of that state for it to be a coincidence.

Soulja Boy has always baffled me. His song wasn't an instant hit, either. It was on the radio a full two months before it really took off (the ultimate sign of a rap song going mainstream is when it gets played on 106.1 alongside the likes of Kelly Clarkson). Then all of a sudden it's everywhere and getting played every 15 minutes. And I never saw it coming. I thought, surely, people are not this stupid.

And I don't think people are that stupid- I think kids are though. The music that's being played now is so ignorant and the kids are eating up. Once, at an FC Dallas game, Soulja Boy was played on the stadium speakers an hour or so before the game started. There were a lot of kids around that day because we had given a bunch of youth teams discounts on tickets. Within half a second of the first note being played, these kids next to me started doing the dance from the video (the soulja boy was actually a dance long before Soulja Boy appropriated the name). Then I look around the stadium and every kid is doing it (mind you these are affluent sub-urban kids from Frisco and Southlake). Every last one of them. There was this one kid in one of the groups who was a little heavier, wearing glasses and some DC skate shoes I remember. He was looking right into his friends eyes while they were doing the dance, in that way that kids do when they want to make sure they're getting it right. It was so weird.

So why are radio stations, BET, MTV and the rest of the music industry catering to kids? Because kids buy records, young adults don't.

The state of hip-hop is the sort of thing people who listen to "real" hip-hop complain about all the time. But those people don't buy music, they steal it. So why should the industry cater to them? Complain all you want, but maybe next time you should put down that American Apparel hoodie that all your friends are wearing and pick up a Mad-Lib record instead.