What Went Wrong With Hip-Hop?_風聞

Hip-hop was fight music (for high school kids), so was rock (for young adults).

They once represented violent uprisings against a society perceived to be morbidly alienating in which upward mobility is exclusively reserved for the privileged class, and citizens are maneuvered and pit against each other by a system that perpetuates war and hatred, and freedom of choice is nothing but a shallow farce aimed at neutering social equality across the board.

In order to fight against the evil leviathan that is the establishment system/culture, some of those music had to resort to more cynical, anti-puritan, anti-social, or even Weltschmerz stance.

In the beginning I guess we can say wherever there’s struggle, there’s inspiration, but later on it all changed. Commercial success of virtually every artist hinges upon his or her ability to capitalise the market. So when their interests align with that of those they seek to destroy, the things they produce become as hypocritical as the words of hypocritical politicians they detest. The lyrical content therefore loses its original vitality as a cultural weapon, but instead it becomes kind of a sensual loincloth covering an flaccid subject.

That’s what went wrong in the West. But in other societies, things are obviously different, the struggles we have here are in no way the same as the struggles they used to have over there. Essentially it was their fight, not ours (we didn’t have Vietnam War/hippies/the beat generation/ghettos/gang crimes/white supremacism/religious prosecution). But we didn’t know and couldn’t care less when we imported those stuff.

When I was 14, I was a rabid hip-hop fan spewing unfounded hateful speech and vile assaults against basically everyone I came across online, writing verses dissing teachers and school. I only stopped because I thought rap was not as confrontational as metal. When I look back I am amazed by not just the amount of hate I had but the fact that it largely came out of nowhere.

For me it was just a phase, get over it and that was it. But it’s obviously different for those who make a living out of it, they are absorbed and assimilated into the asembly line that mass produce meaningless gibberish. The saddest thing is, most of them don’t know what to fight for, what to fight against. The things people fought for or against in the past are either no longer viable options, or not worth fighting (for or against) anymore.

Chinese hip-hop’s dilemma lies with our societal condition, which dictates consumers’ preference. It’s not that we don’t have our own Bronx and Compton, but government’s moral authority would never allow these fertile soils for discontent to ferment on their own and brew angry music that describes violence and drug abuse in painstaking details, which in turn could legitimise these actions. PGone is just one of those chiggaz with no cultural self-awareness, and got too dangerously engrossed in formal resemblance with black ghetto culture to mind cultural and political realities on the ground.

He’s a goner now, but I certainly hope that as we shelf his music and boycott his butt off we’re not killing a viable genre of fight music that is still in its infancy. After all, there’re a lot of things worth caring and fighting for, and hell lot of injustices we need to fight against, too.

I hate to be cliche but the key really lies in localisation, internalisation, and innovation (and I believe Gai does this quite well).

*disclaimer: not a fan.