Fantasy Land: Music Industry Crashes, Music Gets Better!

Seriously, I hate to be rude, but Slumping Record Sales Good for Real Hip Hop Artists?  That's crazy talk!

According to Charles Jones:
"This current recession in the hip hop economy will be a good thing if it runs off all the rappers and potential moguls who only got into the game for the money, hos and clothes. In fact, it seems like recently hip hop has retreated aesthetically and sentimentally back to the hood. Some of the biggest songs of the last half of 2007 like "Duffle Bag Boy" and "I'm So Hood" and even "Crank That" have been directly and definitively made for the hood."

"Artists are trying less to cross over into White America and more to gain their respect and notoriety from people who look like them. And that is a beautiful thing because hip hop first and foremost is a street culture and rap is street music. Maybe this will be the beginning of a new golden age one where the culture controls, exploits, and owns its image and therefore directly reaps the financial benefits."

This variation on the fantasy land argument that if there's no money to be made real artists will return to the forefront has little historical basis, at least, none of these people ever give historical examples and I don't know of any.

In this case, the idea that music for the hood will not be about stacking dollars when the basic idea is that the real hood is full of poor people who want to stack dollars is crazy talk that ignores the actual products coming out of the hood.

Didn't Mr. Jones pick up on the content of Duffle Bag Boy?  Sentimentality for the hood or for those big bags of money?

But even in situations where people aren't poor but don't emphasize money in their lives, you don't automatically get good art.  If you spend a lot of time in truly grassroots settings where people are making art for the love of it, you still get as much bad art as you do good, sometimes more.  I was in that space for many years.  I listened to a lot of stupid poems and lousy musicians in between the occasional worthy act and that was fine most of the time.

It wasn't about great art, it was about community.  And that made some not so great art quite meaningful but it didn't have anything to do with how much money other people were making through their art.  It had to do with our values and where we focused our energy.

We can't make change if we're disconnected from reality.  Come on, people!

Comments

[J. Jesus Ruiz]

I don't know the dude but it sounds like he's pulling ish out of his ass.