Dowager Rap

Negotiating the popular music scene as one gets older--older than 25, that is--is a tricky business. By the time one reaches 25 a whole new set of musicians have grabbed the top spots in the hit charts and the music that seemed so fresh in high school gets worked into the rotation on the "classic" rock stations. Live trough a couple more of these cycles and you start to wonder if the whole genre isn't going to pot.

The nagging sense of permanent decline can make it difficult to survey the current music scene objectively. For quite a while now I've had the general impression that rock music has hit a dead end. Other people must be noticing the same thing because rock's current moribund state even has a name: Rockism. Rap is an even trickier domain to survey for someone outside its target audience, but it seems to have fallen into a comfortable groove of familiar gestures. Now that rap seems to be living off its inheritance perhaps a good name for its current state would be Dowager Rap. The entire American music scene seems like it's just going through the motions.

Yet, at the same time, there's more exciting and innovative music available than ever before. Certainly more than I could get my hands on when I was a kid. Take a quick visit to Calabash Music or Other Music and you'll find amazing music from all over the world--including lively corners of the United States and Canada. Montreal--Montreal--is now hot. It's mainstream music that's boring. Then again, it's always been boring to anyone who truly cares about music.

Kelefa Sanneh, who probably has the most adventuresome tastes of the New York Times's music critics,  reports on the current state of rap and finds it under siege, yet again, but also growing distressingly bland and irrelevant. The current denunciations of rap music after l'affair d'Imus cite rap music as it used to be--compelling enough to denounce. In fact, Sanneh says, "hip-hop isn’t in an especially filthy mood right now. It sounds more light-hearted and clean-cut than it has in years." Like rock music, part of rap's claim to authenticity is its outsider status. Rap's and rock's central contradiction has been the way both genres mass market that outside status. Rap's Naughty Three Words have become commodities, and they now have all the bite of an aerobics workout soundtrack. Sanneh concludes with these troublesome questions:

For all the panicky talk about hip-hop lyrics, the current situation suggests a scarier possibility, both for hip-hop’s fans and its detractors. What if hip-hop’s lyrics shifted from tough talk and crude jokes to playful club exhortations — and it didn’t much matter? What if the controversial lyrics quieted down, but the problems didn’t? What if hip-hop didn’t matter that much, after all?

Rap still sells, a lot, but it's become harder to discern broad social conditions in its songs. However, it may be that rap has grown too diverse to speak about it as a unified phenomenon any more. Diversity will reduce its relevance in the public sphere, making it harder to denounce or rally around. But at this point political irrelevance may preserve its creativity. Offshore bastard forms of rap and rock are creating whole new forms of music. Some of the best rock, for instance, is being created south of Miami. Eventually, perhaps, rock and rap will be like the blues: roots music that's present everywhere, but attracting a small number of devotees to its original form. If that's the case, then we're already moving on to the next big thing, which, frankly, we could use. Maybe I'm just a geezer from the tight-pants days of New Wave, but I can't believe people are going to miss all those baggy pants.