HipHop Thugz

"In too many instances, hip-hop has become a celebration of ruthless self-interest, delivered by performers who don’t dare crack a smile for fear of losing status. That’s not where the music started, ..." - Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker, 12/3/07

The above is an excerpt from an article that goes on to review a couple of books of photographs of HipHop from a more innocent time. This got me to thinking, why is HipHop like this? First of all not all of it is but enough of it is to lend credence to this stereotype of HipHop. Some might be tempted to take sides on the age old question; Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? But of course nothing in life is ever that simple. The reality often is that both are true even within the same body of art. We have all heard the saying that life is a circle?

It is true that HipHop started out as more of a type of party music but the machismo, braggadocio & tough guy attitudes has always been there to some extent. First off that is just the default nature of the male gender and is also often reinforced through external social forces, especially on young men and especially on young men in poor and working class neighborhoods. But why is it so prevalent in contemporary HipHop? My personal belief is that the major record labels saw that the concept of the angry black man from the ghetto was appealing to the middle-class white kids in the suburbs, so although it was not the record companies that created this attitude in Hiphop they are the ones that saw the dollar signs in it and therefore aggressively pushed it to the forefront of the genre...and in turn the youth fed into it and now we have this hyper-thuggish, although often is more verbal-hype than actual action, attitude from many of our HipHop youth. So here is an example of art imitating life imitating art.