Questlove bemoans the state of hip-hop, “an entire cultural movement, packed into one hyphenated adjective”:
These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as “hip-hop,” even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. “Hip-hop fashion” makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: “Hip-hop food”? “Hip-hop politics”? “Hip-hop intellectual”? And there’s even “hip-hop architecture.” What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer? …
On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop’s success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion.
He relates an encounter he had with a fan:
The other day, we ran into an old man who is also an old fan. He loves the Roots and what we do. Someone mentioned the changing nature of the pop-culture game, and it made him nostalgic for the soul music of his youth. “It’ll be back,” he said. “Things go in cycles.” But do they? If you really track the ways that music has changed over the past 200 years, the only thing that goes in cycles is old men talking about how things go in cycles. History is more interested in getting its nut off. There are patterns, of course, boom and bust and ways in which certain resources are exhausted. There are foundational truths that are stitched into the human DNA. But the art forms used to express those truths change without recurring. They go away and don’t come back. When hip-hop doesn’t occupy an interesting place on the pop-culture terrain, when it is much of the terrain and loses interest even in itself, then what?
Update from a reader:
I would like to challenge Questlove’s assertion that “the only thing that goes in cycles is old men talking about how things go in cycles.” I would challenge him to listen to the music and experience the persona of Jerron Paxton, a musical prodigy who wears tuxedo overalls and interprets the music of early American musicians such as Blind Blake, Jelly Roll Morton, and other luminaries of American folk, blues, and ragtime music. Jerron is part of a resurgence of black stringband music also reflected by the music of the Grammy winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, Dom Flemons, as well as talented white bands such as the Crow Quill Night Owls and many other more obscure musicians. See an interview with Jerron here. You can hear him playing banjo, fiddle, guitar and piano all over Youtube.
Now, perhaps Questlove means that a particular type of music only enters the popular consciousness once, but that’s certainly not the case. Take, for instance, the time in the late nineties when bands like the Brian Setzer Orchestra and Squirrel Nut Zippers brought big band swing music back into the popular consciousness and the pop charts. When you consider such recurring trends in American popular music, Questlove’s assertion that “the art forms used to express those truths change without recurring. They go away and don’t come back.” is sheer nonsense. There are many thousands of living American folk and blues musicians such as myself who recognize that “the art forms used to express those truths” are constantly echoing and re-hashing one another.
(Video: “The Roots: History of the Hip Hop Band”)
The Dish 