Hip hop: Art or Buisness

Hip Hop: Art or Buisness

 

Is there a difference between hip hop and rap? Is the music pushed to the public doing a culture a disservices. The difference to the music you can find on various internet sites and the music in the charts or on the radio is so radical that they may as well be completely different genres. The difference is a product of the industry. The artists coming up speak about their reality Chicken hawks in plush suits swoop down squawking about money and houses with their talons squarely aimed at the very soul of the music. The artists themselves have to make the choice between putting honest tracks out or making money and the result is weak music with unintelligent, irrelevant lyrics that kids grow up believing. I’m not blaming music, or anything else for that matter, for gun crime but I can’t help but feel that if the most prominent rappers in the country weren’t talking about shooting people in their tracks then maybe people would treat guns differently. It is that ugly side of the hip hop coin that forces me to defend the culture when people attack but I am getting tired of it. The only difference between artists like Fliptrix and Split Prophets (some real UK hip hop) and people like Tiny Tempa and Drake is a few million pounds in advertising and a soul because I believe that people like Dr Syntax and The Four Owls would sell just as many records as the shallow snakes if they were given that kind of exposure. It would take a massive shift in perception now, the claws are in to deep and the heart might already be poisoned beyond help but as long as there are artists putting out real music there will be people that listen. Music is a matter of taste but truth is truth, you can feel it when your hear it, it will grab your attention and refuse to let it go. All I’m saying is in our individual daily struggles next time you hear some one rapping about great parties, the women they have slept with or people they’ve shot just ask yourself how can you relate to it. Let face it life is far from one big party and I want my music to represent how life is not a distraction from what it isn’t, these days there are to many distractions and I need to get stuff done. Forty three million albums have been sold this year, which is actually a quite significant drop from last year when the numbers were a touch over fifty three million. The drop in sales is down to the amount of free music that is easily available online and even some artists have come out of their five star holes to complain that they are suffering. Maybe the big ones are suffering but I’m sure the internet has given hundreds of the independent artists out there the opportunity to reach infinitely more people and probably get most of their fan base from the people who hear their music online. Try before you buy will work as long as people still buy. We the fans have to support real music put out by real people otherwise or we can carry on saying “man that’s not it“ every time some one attacks the music based on some bullshit . For to long suits have run the music world forcing the real music to go underground while they churn out watered down swill for ridiculous profit. There are smaller labels out there putting out some real music, High Focus Records for example has a line up that is constantly putting out some really intelligent hip hop. I’ve spent the last couple of days “researching”, basically smoking and listening to what hip hop is in the UK these days. During these blissful couple of days I came across a hip hop collective by the name Concept Of Thought, three young guys out of Brighton prove beyond a doubt that the future of hip hop could be bright. I found their ten track album on their webpage, where you can listen and download if you were so inclined, and trust me once you listen to this thing you will be compelled to get a copy for yourself. Maybe it was the weed but while that album was playing I’d found myself drifting along with the music, head nodding away as if my name were Churchill. The vocals are delivered with some really smooth flow that seems to accentuate the beats perfectly but as with all good songs its not just the beat or flow. The lyrics are intelligent and with substance, which is the main thing that is missing in mainstream hip hop, more than a few times I found myself taking tracks back to hear a line again. Never in the charts do you hear an evangelical argument, I mean how would they fit that into the video, I can see it now bitches and nuns everywhere. That however is just a reflection of our society as a whole, we don’t want things that might cause us to question our reality which is why throughout the day on the radio we get bombarded with ghost written music designed to make money not move or inspire people which to me is the ultimate goal of music, maybe I am just naïve but some things just shouldn’t be about business, keep those jackals away at all costs before everything we love takes another hit. If you love hip hop get out there and support your scene, push records like the crack dealers mainstream acts love to glorify and storm shows as if they were the beaches of Normandy because hip hop hasn’t got an underground it has a resistance.