New Toon: If Folk Were Like Rap

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As you probably know, Rap suffers immensely from highly successful and lauded artists who rap about nothing but materialism, misogyny, and murder. Even the so-called socially conscious rappers are still nothing more than egocentric homophobes. Amongst Gansta Rappers, it seems a status of how "real" you are to repeatedly brag about how you hooked your neighborhood on crack hustling before you got into the rapping game. You can make excuses by saying these are the realities of the inner city, but previous forms of music that came from the Black community--Gospel, R&B, Soul, Funk, Blues--are absent the violence and braggadocio.

I really like me some good rap; Wu-Tang, Kool Keith, Del, etc. but I don't think this artform is even close to reaching its potential. People have written endlessly about the materialism of rap, but the thing that bothers me the most is the self-referential lyrics. There are whole songs, even whole albums, that are simply rapping about how good they are at making albums! When was the last time you heard a Radiohead song that talked about how well their albums perform and how Modest Mouse and Built To Spill can't even touch them because their the kings of this shit?

Nas, who is considered one of the best rappers and not...fake, had an interview in the latest issue of Rolling Stone to talk about his new album Hip-Hop is Dead. Sounds like it may actually contain some criticism of the industry. But then, after talking about how he is making the music for a film called Blood Diamond--which is about fucking Blood Diamonds--he says this:

Nas: ... I just got a big, giant rope with a chain and a gold King Tut piece with yellow diamonds and emerald green shit.
Aren't Diamonds just another superficiality of hip-hop?
No, they're a status symbol of royalty. And royalty figures in hip-hop wear status pieces.