Atlanta Vs. New York ... Hip-hop Will Never Be the Same Again

As I watch a music video by Mos Def and Talib Kweli, that is getting less than 300 views, I wonder where hip-hop has went. The question is rhetorical; Southern hip-hop has been consolidated from all points South of the Mason-Dixie line towards Atlanta and New York rap, well, they still play it in New York. One of my favorite AC contributors has informed me that even in Chicago, you're hearing a lot of Southern rap music. You hear it hear, I hear it when I go back to Akron and listen to the Cleveland radio stations I hear it everywhere. That old complex, abstract, New York hip-hop, sans nineteen nineties, is dead on arrival.

The aforementioned song was produced by J-Dilla, a prolific producer from the underground Detroit scene. It is interesting how producers like J-Dilla, Hi-Tek and Kanye West from the Midwestern continue to add their own fuel to the fire of a New York scene that this younger generation knows nothing about. Most of the artists up there can rap circles around these Southern artists, but as many spins as they get on YouTube they can't sell as many records. Instead, we would rather hear someone like Gucci Mane or Shawty Lo with their synthetic beats.

What happened to those abstract, space artists that were supposed to archive and catalog nineties hip-hop as though they were historians? Everyone says; "these guys are so great, they're ahead of their time", but the concerts are never advertised and you have to find them in some grimy club somewhere, and no one ever buys their records. Why are these artists obscure, and why are these artists hard to find? The same has occurred in R&B, as artists like R. Kelly are getting few spins outside of their hometown. No one wants real music, instead we all want something produced in a laboratory by a bunch of music geeks that know enough about music history to appear as though their music is thorough but not enough to replicate the true spirit and fill the soul of music listeners with anything worthwhile. I was listening to some Pharrell the other day, and I had to wonder what I thought I was doing because this isn't what music is about.

It's like we hear Alicia Keys and we say that is the real s* right there but is it really? She's incredible, don't get me wrong, but I doubt that anyone would have taken her seriously back in the seventies when that type of music was mainstream and part of the status quo. It's just a small sample, a brief taste, something they hand you out for free in the grocery store when they are trying to get you to buy something new, in comparison to a full meal your mother cooked on Sunday and the entire family ate at her house. It's sort of like, Kentucky Fried Chicken sells grilled chicken and they put Black people on those advertisements to give it some legitimacy, some authenticity, but they aren't really eating that stuff they're just getting paid to be in a commercial. They know better because they've had better; this is how I feel about this new hybrid rap music, conflicted.

You want to be new, you want to be fresh, so you talk about new artists like Trey Songz. But when the editor isn't looking you pull out the iPod and listen to some real music. This is the nature of trying to stay in this game after the age of 30. Atlanta has its own soul, its own energy and way of doing things, but what they're marketing to us is bull, transparent, full of smoke and mirrors and everyone knows it. The South had the real music back in the day when everyone was dancing to Motown and Stax was the competition and continued to stay real during the Philadelphia era, but this stuff today is not it. A sad chapter in a rich music legacy ...