Opinion: Where is the Love?

NY rap at one point was the pillar for both commercial and underground rap to thrive, but in the last 20 years we’ve been getting outpaced by the rest of the world catching up. The birthplace of rap has lost its pride when it comes to artist appreciation and growth. It has even trickled down to the nightlife scene, where a lot of native New Yorkers are echoing the same sentiments when it comes to hip-hop admiration being harder to locate as a fan.

Now, don’t start jumping to absolutes or negative connotations just from this recent cultural shift. This trend happens in all genres, and there is beauty in it. This is all subjective and relative based on taste and proximity. There is, and will always be, a vast amount of talent coming out of New York. But how it is celebrated is definitely not the same.

The inception of Hip-Hop happened in the Bronx by experimental children who probably weren’t trying to be rebellious, but during a time when things were very dark in the city. Black people were being violently targeted by landlord arson, community neglect, police brutality, and corruption. It was a lawless land, but for black children, it was an imperfect playground to escape to. Breakdancers, graffiti artists, and DJs were all able to thrive in the oppressive dysfunction, which eventually led to a cultural Mecca of creativity across ethnicities. Black Americans and Caribbean immigrants came together and turned the little resources they had into art that would eventually become a staple forever.

Hip hop expanded from just the Bronx to eventually all the five boroughs, Long Island, New Jersey, and the entire tri-state area. The party was everywhere, and everyone was invited. You then add the party culture in NYC, fresh off the house and disco era, where artists, celebrities, and athletes would find themselves sharing spaces with this rebellious art form, helping popularize it.

In the late 80s and early 90s, Hip Hop’s identity became stronger due to it being so intertwined with black struggle and perseverance. Rappers were getting more creative with telling their stories to a cadence that flowed rhythmically with a beat. The most beautiful thing about Hip-Hop is that its poetry will always have relevance because, like Jazz, its job is to connect with people on the highest level of substance requiring the lowest level of maintenance and resources. It’s like the soccer of music genres; to be a good golfer, you need to buy clubs. To be a good hockey player, you need to buy skates, equipment, and a helmet. To be good at baseball, you need a bat and mitt. To be a good soccer player, one person out of a group of 22 needs to supply a ball. And with soccer, you cannot hide behind your resources; you need to have skills to succeed. In rap, it’s the same way. You don’t need to play an instrument, don’t need to train your vocal cords, you don’t even need a DJ, you don’t need anything but poetry.

Rap’s accessibility is what made it expand at such a fast rate as well. Going back to the soccer analogy, accessibility is the easiest path for expansion. No other sport generates more money, fans, and pays their athletes more than soccer. So as NYC being one of the many cities where Black Americans retreated in The Great Migration to escape Jim Crow, state-sponsored violence, and lynchings, Hip Hop grew rapidly across regions where Black people were dealing with oppression and poverty. Rap and poetry were already art forms long before Hip Hop, but the cultural significance that derived from New York reshaped into something that can be warped into a plethora of different styles.

By the mid to late 90s, Hip-Hop was regionally embraced by every black city in America. Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Atlanta, DC, Memphis, and Houston all had extremely unique and talented rappers who represented the places they were from. The beauty of music is interpretation. It was a black language in every respective part of the country, and one of the best parts about it was that our oppressors were disinterested.

Today, Hip-Hop is extremely misrepresented. As with all things monetized in a country that prides itself on its capitalist system, our oppressors try to combat our innovations with erasure. White consumers monopolize the art by stripping it of its essence to prioritize their inclusion. Music executives now try to dictate and control our art with the same tools we used to build it up.

The phasing out of physical media, predatory music contracts, and the death of radio have all been tools used by the oppressive class to manipulate a market they have no business being in. Yet, Hip-Hop still prevails. Hip-Hop has such strong roots in struggle and is so low maintenance that it can never actually be controlled. As long as there is black struggle, there will always be black resistance.

My dad used to always tell me every single thing starts in the ghetto, and it really wasn’t a hard aspect to grasp. On a small scale, I remember growing up with my peers and the vernacular/code we created out of the pure instinctual adaptation to having to interact around our oppressor without being perceived and understood. It was our natural defense mechanism, just like the conception of Hip-Hop. This is also why artificial intelligence is a threat to many art forms except the art of poetry because you cannot program any system to “feel”.

Now let’s dive into what we did lose in Hip-Hop. Unfortunately, due to gentrification, a lot of American cities are slowly becoming soulless. People are actively being displaced from the same places that were once demonized by our oppressors. The places that were being attacked, like the Bronx in the 60s/70s, are now being romanticized as “convenient living” for those wanting to cosplay other ethnic cultures. The South, where slavery and Jim Crow had their strongest grasp on black Americans, has been and will increasingly become the sole cultural Mecca for innovation, black prosperity, and embracing of black identity in America once these cities become completely compromised, and then the cycle will reset itself.

We are feeling these trends today as native New Yorkers trying to reconcile with our communities being influenced by capitalism. One of the biggest challenges we’re facing is the erasure of Hip-Hop club culture in NYC.

Capitalism prices out natives, but it also gaslights us into believing we just aren’t doing the work. Realistically I do believe that if you search hard enough, you will can very pleased with the club culture New York has to offer. I still have many generations of family thriving in all of the boroughs and tri-state area. I still have a ton of fun when going out to dance in clubs or lounge in bars. Yet the notion of prosperity doesn’t not absolve the observations of clear erasure.

As someone who has worked in the club scene in NY, things have gotten a lot more exclusive, which is a by-product of capitalism and gentrification. Promoters, hosts, and owners are becoming greedy and charging ridiculous prices for drinks, covers, and just asinine micro-transactions throughout the course of a night of leisure. Clubs have completely lost their identity by trying to appease to broader audiences rather than focusing on their aesthetic. Places like Taj and Soho Park would be committed to playing Hip-Hop for the entire night unless a curated event was planned in advanced. Now in order to have a night centered around Hip-Hop, you have to keep up with specific DJ's which a lot of people oppose.

Strip clubs have always been an important part of Hip Hop culture, and it’s already understood that places like Starlets have a minimum spend for fun limit that ranges around 2 to 3 thousand dollars (Cash Cobain says 10). In the South, strip club culture is a lot less elitist and classist. You’ll find more community and locals who respect these establishments for what they provide down South. In NYC, because tourists and out-of-towners sensationalize our strip clubs, it drives the culture of these places and minimizes them to symbols of status.

Hip-Hop didn’t start in the club, and it won’t need the club to thrive. Hip-Hop needed Disc Jockeys. DJs' roles in Hip Hop, unfortunately, have lost their importance with radio erasure and the death of spinning records. There was a huge influx of mash-up DJs in 2019 and 2020 that prided themselves on creating mixes that spoke to their personal taste. This trend was terrible for NYC Hip Hop. DJ's became very biased in their curations and have been less receptive to reflect the mood or climate of the current rap scene. DJing becoming a hobby during COVID created interest without admiration. Instead of the passion that DJs took pride in from its inception, they’ve become replaced with hobbyists.

In 2019, NYC Drill gained a lot of popularity and was a lot of fun. Before COVID, Pop Smoke, Sheff G, Smoove L, Fivio Foreign had truly restored the feeling. I cannot recall a time in Hip Hop where so many gangster rappers were embracing the dance culture that came with their sound. “Getting sturdy” took not only NYC but the entire world by storm. Obviously, the tragic and unforeseen circumstances of Covid and the lockdown put a hold on club culture but I do not attribute that to it’s regression because other parts of the world were dealt the same circumstances and eventually proceeded to normalcy. I blame the demonizing narratives that solely targeted Drill rap in NYC, for the regression of Hip-Hop club culture in NYC.

During Covid, a lot of people were chronically online. We were constantly seeing opinions and commentary from people all over the world who consumed Hip-Hop. Sometimes what people consider nuance is just elitism and anti-blackness dressed up to appear intellectual.

A big narrative that began to be pushed after the death of the very talented artist Pop Smoke was that Drill music was directly responsible for his passing. A lot of people, especially in NYC, took his death very hard and spited the genre he helped build, rather than celebrate it as his legacy. It’s intellectually lazy and extremely conservative to denounce an art form due to actions that transpired outside of the music. I argue that all forms of Hip-Hop are safer than the capitalist monster that tries to exploit the culture and strip it of its true meaning.

NYC Drill is no different from any other Hip-Hop sub-genres that galvanized the world. The subject matter isn’t different, the passion isn’t different, the talent isn’t different, but what was different was the audience.

With the right-wing pipeline rapidly gaining traction in 2019/2020 with Gen Z and a very pretentious attitude corrupting cities due to gentrification, we lost our appreciation for the art we always took pride in. I personally saw “Hip Hop fans” denouncing Drill to the point it became the scapegoat for crime and dysfunction in NYC, which is a very false equivalence. One example I see that is extremely irresponsible is that Cash Cobain’s “Slizzy” sub-genre is directly responsible for making the crime rate go down; even giving him a key to the city to reinforce that narrative.

The real reason crime has gone down in NYC is because of mass surveillance and Black displacement. Black displacement doesn’t mean that because Black and Hispanic people left, the white people who replace them aren’t committing crimes at the same rate; it means that neighborhoods are being less policed because Black and Hispanic people are targeted, arrested, and detained by the NYPD at a much higher rate than white people. Gentrification is changing neighborhoods that have been predominantly Black and Hispanic, which is completely destroying all of the things that make NYC truly special.

We must keep supporting our young artists like A Boogie, Ice Spice, Lil Tjay, 41, Wolfacejoey, Kay Flock, B-Lovee, DD Osama, Ron Suno, and all the acts from NYC who have taken their art to a high platform rather than tearing them down. Next time you find yourself criticizing the state of NYC Hip-Hop, whether it’s the club scene, the talent, or just the essence of the city in general, be conscious of all the active work being done by the industry to erase our culture. Our fight is never with the art, it’s always against the violence of capitalism and gentrification. The kids are and always will be the key to our future; they must be embraced without bias.