The Source: "hip-hop culture is being snatched right out from under us"

yup, eminem "stole" hip-hop and made it "corporate" while poor jay-z and nas and etc are suffering on tiny grassroots indie labels...who are they kidding?

I honestly don't read the Source enough to know, but aren't they, like, just as a-historical as every other music magazine?

i hope hip hop gets completely stolen out from under their feet. it's time we get a new adventurous, forward thinking music

Hip hop is fast becoming jazz. It's being split right down the middle into Al Hirt/Kenny G (watered down pop-pap) vs. Ornette/Sun Ra (over-intellectualized for the college kids smoking doobs).

Horace Mann, how is Sun Ra over-intellectualized music? How much of it have you actually listened to, and what? If you are talking about the reputation his music has, maybe you are correct; and if you are talking about who show up for the shows (in Philadelphia anyway, the only place I've seen the Arkestra perform), well, you do see a lot of white folks there, including college age stoners. But that also depends a fair amount on the venue, and it's not as though he and the Arkestra have no black following.

I also think it's insulting to suggest that either artist did what they did in order to attract a whiter audience.

Jazz's gradual loss of a popular audience has more to do with moving away from dance than anything else, in my opinion.

That "safe/over-inteelectualized for the college white kids/suburbanites" trope really needs to be retired...

Anyway, I think there's room for middle class rap. Def. Del the Funkee is an example and hey, even the Beastie Boys. But Eminim has made the same album three times, he's become sorta like Lenny Bruce at the end, when LB would just stand on stage and read his court transcripts.

(The idiocy of the argument is to pretend that this is anything other than the regret or cold feet of ownership -- to pretend that someone else, whether Eminem or "the machine," is responsible for it. No one screwed rap. Rap is winning -- what all of this fretting should be figuring out is on what terms.)

Actually based on cursory looks at MTV and VH1, to pick the most salient examples, there is a fetish for pronouncing one's allegiance to "old school" hip-hop and citing people like Grandmaster Flash, Bambaataa, etc. They appear on "history of hip-hop" documentaries all the time. Hip-hop is more likely to suffer from a surfeit of historical consciousness than the reverse.

"As the only truly unrestricted voice for the hip-hop community, THE SOURCE is the one medium that can accurately document and protect our culture’s growth and achievements"

This betrays the purpose of the editorial.

Hip-hop has always had room not just for a multiplicity of sensibilities but also different ethnicities as well. THE SOURCE's hip-hop orthodoxy has just a bit more "authenticity" than the imagined sacrilege they imagine is being perpetrated by the Evil Corporations. They take fun out of hip-hop. To what ends do they imagine their version of hip-hop was working--was some kind of political revolution in the works before Universal Music Group stepped in and co-opted it? Hardly.

Everytime I pick up David Toop's "Rap Attack" I mourn for the hip-hop writing that could have been: good natured and open-minded, optimistic and not overly anxious about authenticity.

I think this statement is OTM. Not all early hip-hop was good, but you might think it was pure genius considering how some fall all over themselves namechecking early and often obscure artists. In addition, much early hip-hop, while important as far as laying the foundation for later innovation, is pretty boring to listen to. I love Kool Keith, but I rarely throw on the Ultramagnetic MCs anymore; I would greatly prefer to hear Dr. Dooom or Octagonacologist. Some of this probably has to do with the diversification and advance of production technology, I guess.

Just like generations past, when Jazz and Rock’n Roll were lost

When was Jazz lost? Are Jazz artists primarily anglo these days and I just don't know it? Or is it "lost" simply because the artists and audience aren't exclusively black?

This is where I stopped reading the article. I fear for the extreme stupidity of what follows. Should I read the rest? ;-/