Damn, what happened to us?

I'm not one of those bitter, old rap guys who believes rap music peaked in (insert year here-- 1988, 1991 and 1994 are particularly popular choices, but it seems to hinge in large part on the age of the person making the call) and believes most everything since then has been bullshit. No, I'm a bitter, old rap guy who loves tons of new shit and doesn't have a whole lot of prepossessions about what good rap music should sound like, be about, etc.

Rap music began as party music. In David Toop's classic rap history, Rap Attack, Grandmaster Flash said that the reason MCs were introduced was to keep the crowd moving instead of just standing around watching the DJ. If you listen to early recordings of live shows, you hear it-- rappers were there to entertain.

So I'm not persuaded when people gripe about current commercial rap music saying nothing. (This is usually when the bitter, old rap guy brings up Soulja Boy.) Still, I think there are a lot of subjects rappers don't touch on anymore and that's a shame.

I was ripping Ice-T's O.G.: Original Gangster last week and this track really fucked my head up.


Ice-T: "Ya Shoulda Killed Me Last Year" (Sire, 1991)

The directness and immediacy of it are just so foreign to rap music right now-- I just can't picture any current rapper of any commercial stature or prospects being this direct about a social issue, aside from maybe David Banner. I mean, in the months-long run-up to the current war, a war which just about every rap listener I know opposed from the beginning, what rapper had the nuts to say something like this? Jay-Z snuck a "leave Iraq alone" into his Punjabi MC remix, but that's it as far as I know.