I’m reluctant to admit it, but I don’t listen to much independent or alternative hip-hop these days, or at least not nearly as much as I did in college, when Rhymesayers, Def Jux and Stones Throw records were as much a part of my diet as ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese. I’ve had a hard time pinpointing exactly why independent rap stopped speaking to me, aside from a vague feeling that the genre had grown stagnant, but it was an interview with, of all people, producer RJD2 a couple weeks ago that helped me articulate it more precisely.
Like many non-commercial hip-hop artists, RJD2 professed not to listen to much commercial rap these days, but in explaining why he spared me the usual platitudinous lecture about the differences between rap and hip-hop and the indignities of rims, bitches and hoesstock diatribes that I’m subjected to weekly. His reasons have nothing to do with the artistic merit of commercial rap.
“One of the beauties of rap music is that it’s self-referential,” RJD2 explained. “That’s one of the things I always thought was so cool about it as a kid; so and so would do this kind of record, and then so and so would come back and do this other kind of record. It was like an ongoing conversation.”
Since he no longer listens to much commercial rap, he no longer picks up on those references. “I find it hard to listen to rap if I’m not hearing the whole conversation,” he says. “I’m just hearing bits and pieces of it, so it doesn’t really feel like I’m getting the greater cultural context.”
The idea of rap as this form of coded communication is also what first engaged me in rap musicthere was a satisfaction in picking up on all those references and call backs that made me, even as a suburban white kid, feel like I was part of that conversation. And to this day, I still feel like I’m a part of that conversation when I listen to commercial rap music, even if the references are a little trickier to decipher and the call backs are to Gucci Mane, not Run DMC.
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Independent hip-hop, however, has become so insularand so obsessed with how much better rap used to be before it was corrupted by the south/gangstas/materialism/club culture/Auto-Tune or whatever the latest boogieman isthat it is effectively no longer a part of this exchange.
And that’s part of why RJD2 doesn’t listen to very much independent rap these days, either.
“To be honest with you, I don’t have the time to hear another indie rapper bitching about what’s on the radio and how they like Big Daddy Kane,” RJD2 says. “At least back in the late ’90s, there was this sense that Mos Def and Biggie inhabited the same world. They weren’t saying the same thing, but you could draw a correlation between the two. But now indie-rap, or whatever you want to call it, has removed itself from that conversation so much that it’s its own thing.”
This isn’t to knock all alternative rap, because there are still plenty of diamonds in the rough. At its worst, though, independent rap has become a genre of not only elitists, but separationists, thumbing its nose at a culture from which it seceded long ago.
So while commercial rap has continued to evolve in frequently rivetingand, yes, sometimes confoundingnew directions, most independent rap has stayed in its isolated comfort zone, sounding in 2010 much as it did in 2000, its biggest icons staunch ’90s traditionalists or one-time pioneers whose output stopped evolving a half decade ago (sorry, 9th Wonder, Madlib and MF Doom). It’s a genre in dire need of fresh blood, but too stubborn to reach out to its commercial counterpart for inspiration.
