July 23, 2008
A True Public Intellectual
John McWhorter, a man who I often disagree with as much as I respect, critiques the Academy’s standard perspective on Hip Hop:
McWhorter argues. Far from being truth-tellers, he says, so-called “conscious” rappers recycle endless clichés and conspiracy theories about inner-city blight, the drugs trade and Aids. Instead of generating a desire to change the system, rappers and their acolytes in the media and academia simply encourage a sense of passivity. “Insisting that things are still so simple that black people need to get together and rise in fury against an evil oppressor makes for entertaining hiphop,” he writes. “It sounds good uttered fiercely and set to a driving beat. But this way of parsing things does not correspond to what black America really needs today, as opposed to what it needed 50 years ago.”
I also highly recommend his book Doing Your Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music. The book does not argue what you think it does.
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