The Hip-Hopcalypse Is Nigh!

Jay-Z thinks AutoTune, the software made famous by people who can’t really sing but manage to sell music anyways, should be shot into the sun (to a beat by No ID). For once, I agree with Jay-Z, as he has successfully divined one of the sure signs that the End Times are near.

Hip-hop is, happily, alive for those who care to look. But it’s dead, oh so dead, for those who only want to make a buck. And though they should have seen it coming, shit-hoppers fiddled with their bling (there’s a word to put behind us when the decade is over) while Beat Street (and Wall Street) burned. Here are the Eight Signs of the Hip-Hopcalypse.

Puffy in the Step Into A World remix, 1997. "Puff rhymin on the remix? What’s next?" One Man Army asked. (The answer: Sprite commercials. A whole lotta Sprite commercials.) When I heard this Puffyesque bullshit hidden track on KRS-One’s comeback album "I Got Next," I was pretty sure it was a sign that Pakistan really was going to nuke India and start World War III. I ripped the album to mp3 without track 19 and have tried to pretend Puffy never did a verse with the Blast Master ever since.
2003: First time I heard "Back That Thang Up" on a certain pristine Ivy League campus in upstate New York, banging out of some 5,000 lbs SUV of the fashionable kind, driven by a tiny white girl nodding her head to the beat. She wore oversize sunglasses and a bright green shirt that read "Ithaca Is Gorges." Shudder.
People who clearly don’t actually know anything about hip-hop who, nevertheless, proceed to speak with the authority Britney has in politics about the music and culture. The most basic error is treating pop shit-hoppers like actual artists—for example, assuming their music is actually worth the thousands of words wasted on it. But the bullshit commentary usually falls into four categories: Over-intellectualization (Ben Adler at Campus Progress on that), puzzling hagiography, transparent bandwagon-jumping, or oddly-worded praise from a panderer. This isn’t just irritating. I worry that the actual history of hip-hop will get lost because, as will much of the rest of history, the winners will tell the tale. And the winners in terms of sales since 1996 have been, uh, yeah.
A gentleman named Hip Hop Dave, or Steve, or something. I saw him on a 2007 episode of Speed’s Supercars Exposed—in an orange Gallardo, of course. The episode had a bit where rich people who owned supercars meet up with "young people" who owned, designed and maintained low-riders in L.A. I don’t remember his actual name. (You can get the episode, which used to be here, here through Apple. I hate iTunes too much to even install the shit.) But here’s this older white guy, claiming to make his way through life as a producer of hip-hop (read: shit-hop) music, which he, with the matter-of-fact manner of an expert witness at a murder trial, happily demonstrated on his completely oversize sound system. Yes, I believe those were 12s in that Lamborghini, pumping out some good old-fashioned southern-fried double-time hip-pop. Classy.

I’m sure he was a lovely person on the whole—someone’s nice, rich grandpa who takes his grandkids for ice cream in a Lambo—so it pains me to say that this gentleman represented not only everything wrong with hip-hop in the past ten years, but everything wrong with America. Frigging everything.

Right next to the Morgan Stanley building. Exactly. | flickr user Lisl L

April 2007’s Hop-Hop Town Hall on Oprah: Stanley Crouch & Russell Simmonds, the mercenary tycoon and the out-of-touch grandpa, with an impotent Common babbling on and on, but ain’t saying nothing in the corner of the stage. (Q: What’s more disappointing than Common’s last two albums? A: The fact that Saul Williams’s loopy response to Oprah’s show was more coherent than Common, in a grey sweater matching Russell Simmonds’s, sounding like he just drank a whole thing of cough syrup before the show.)

Never has discourse about hip-hop sunk so low, and that’s in a music genre whose average lyric involves the word "ho" on a show that has become mostly about the world’s leading media mogul giving away free stuff for fun. I’ll let Jay Smooth of Ill Doctrine cover Russell Simmonds’s hypocritical bullshit. I’ll do a one-sentence rant on Oprah, who gets hip-hop like I get ballet, and the times she’s correctly criticized Ludacris while condemning the rest of the genre like it was pure poison, all while giving Stanley Crouch the kind of additional exposure Bill O’Reilly deserves.
Lil’ Wayne gets 8—E I G H T—Grammy nominations. The Grammy has upstaged the Emmy and reclaimed its status as the award most likely to track sales and abhor quality.

This is up there with the fact that Eminem is the highest-selling artist of the decade. The most overrated rapper ever has outsold the Beatles. Hey, could be worse. Could be Toby Keith. Wait, he’s number 4. Aaaaaand Nelly’s #7.

Just threw up in my mouth a little.
In the Fall of 2008, a Sean John poster—it had to be 100 feet tall—in Times Square. Of Puffy. Fist in the air like some Black Panther athlete from 1968. Except it was Sean Combs, the ultimate fucking sellout. Needed a whole thing of Junior’s to get over that one.
AutoTune, the audio engineering software that brought back Cher (1998’s "Believe") and helped make the most overproduced, most commercial, most soulless—and yes, worst—pop song ever (Faith Hill’s "The Way You Love Me," 1999) is declared dead. And yet, like the mad scientist’s reanimated monster whose voice it resembles, it lives.

OK. So maybe we’re a little on the post-apocalypse side of things in the hip-hop world. But things aren’t all bad. Brother Ali’s new album drops in September...

Update: When looking up Hip Hop Dave, or Steve, or whatever, I came across this video at the 2006 SEMA show, where Jay Leno introduces his GM-built "EcoJet." That’s right—a jet-powered supercar made by GM but branded with the "eco" prefix because it runs on biofuel. Not only is this so 2006—and not only is Jay Leno both unfunny and a Republican—but it might well be one of the signs of the actual (i.e., non-hip-hop) apocalypse.