“Well, we can move hip-hop into the category of pop, so long as we are moving it away from the places and producers who pioneered those sounds.” And then, ultimately, what we have is this race-less whole of the thing. What you’re seeing is this ideological work in action. When Tyler, the Creator says “urban” sounds like a politically correct way to say the N-word, he’s not far off of what is historically accurate. It’s America’s extractive relationship with Blackness and Black people on display, and the genres themselves in this country are not separate from our conversations about race. It’s funny to me because if you actually read between the lines of the big story from Billboard, you see that the real issue is that hip-hop is almost too successful-it’s influenced everything else on the chart, including all these singles and albums that are now outperforming it. I don’t know how much you followed the conversation earlier this summer about rap on the Billboard charts, with a lot of people wondering whether hip-hop is finally flagging. We might be able to say that the hip-hop culture is distinctly American, but when we call it distinctly American, we can’t do that while celebrating the fact that America’s creation of it wasn’t like, “We want to create this great thing that comes from these traditions of these brilliant people.” It was like, “We want to steal these people from where they come from and then bring them here and sell them as though they are cattle, currency, contraband, and force certain traditions onto them and force certain traditions out of them.” Despite that, something like hip-hop emerges, and then the country turns around and is like, “Yeah, let’s make stamps about that.” I think that is a facet of American capitalism that gets overlooked. When we have this 50th commemoration, we also have to take into consideration that lots of the folks who are applauding and celebrating are folks who did everything they could to make sure that didn’t make it 50 years or, before it even existed, everything that they could to create the conditions that brought about hip-hop’s inception in the first place. However, all 50 of those years have featured folks-powerful institutions in the United States-surveilling, trying to contain and constrain, and sometimes just outright denigrating hip-hop and the people who make it. On the one hand, hip-hop has survived for 50 years in the United States. I wrote and released this album that I put online last night called Illicit, and it’s really to try to talk about these exact things.
What’s your outlook? What are the next 50 years looking like? Carson, an associate professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia and a rapper in his own right, about the challenges facing hip-hop on its golden anniversary as rappers now seem to be losing their grip on the pop charts, streaming is weakening the whole notion of genre, and artificial intelligence is potentially rivaling artists. The Mystical Dance of Death and Rebirth in 50 Years of Hip-Hopīut what about the next 50 years of hip-hop? The Ringer spoke with Dr. It’s become the great, global soundboard. Hip-hop has flourished, in large part, by adapting to these shifts more confidently and creatively than other genres. This success story spans several formats-from vinyl to cassettes to CDs to downloads to streams-and multiple music industry transformations. Hip-hop is now perhaps better understood as a federation of regional scenes, some more renowned than others, but each at some point played a crucial role in the larger success story of the genre. And yet hip-hop quickly proliferated all across the country and claimed a few de facto capitals: originally NYC, but then also L.A., along with southern strongholds in Memphis, Houston, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and the current capital, Atlanta. This is a subculture that was once so small, so hyperlocal, so New York that we can trace its origin to a particular house party in the Bronx. Hip-hop hasn’t simply endured for half a century, no-hip-hop has commercially grown bigger every decade, and in the past five years, it has eclipsed pop to become the most popular music genre in the U.S. To speak of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary this past Friday is to somewhat undersell the momentousness of this milestone.
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