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Blog Entry 37 of 59 The Lush Report
I'm trying to bring some of the more overlooked stuff from the local music scene. I have to balance it against a full-time real job, so I can't be as thorough as I'd like, but hopefully you'll find some of the stuff that Mark Brown and Ricardo Baca don't cover. If you've got a tip on a great venue for live music or great musicians to check out, e-mail me here. To bookmark this blog, click here.

Blog Url: http://denver.yourhub.com/~JohnsMusicBlog

Post and Rocky do a disservice in hip-hop coverage
Contributed by: John Zwick, YourHub.com   on 2/18/2007

You would almost feel bad about the Denver Post having such a big section on hip-hop the day after the Rocky did the same. Since the two don't collaborate on stories, they must not have known each would cover similar ground, unless both just decided that Black History Month was the time to make a superficial nod to hip-hop before ignoring it for another year.

See the Rocky's stories here:
Denver hip-hop moves slowly to acceptance | Battling a bad rap| Gangsta lyrics sell a dark life| Rappers brawl in upcoming 'Def Jam: Icon'
See the Post's stories here:
Why is hip-hop all rage? | MCs' public displays show struggle to define manhood in urban culture

Fortunately, the Rocky's feature had so little of substance that the Post didn't have to worry about being beaten to the punch. All they should be ashamed of is a feature just as short on anything worth saying.

Despite the headline, the story behind 'Denver hip-hop moves slowly to acceptance,' suggests just the opposite. A full page of the broadsheet Saturday Spotlight went to the story, whose focus seemed to stick with reminding readers that not only does hip-hop exist, but it exists on a local level. Without going into great detail, we got the usual hand-wringing about Denver's place on the national stage (waiting in the wings at best,) and on the difficulty for local hip-hop to get exposure. Aside from using a quote that's more or less recycled from a story we ran months ago, there wasn't much mention of actual local hip-hop. A brief name drop from the Five Points Plan folks and radio heads like DJ Chonz was about all we got after exposition at a Cafe Nuba event. Nothing further about Paas, Lo, the entire Life Crew, or harder-edged local talent like Nyke Loc or Julox.

With it all, we get a little pull-box that breaks hip-hop down into "The Elements," the same tired classification that any nerd battling on an internet forum could hit you with - the same stuff you could find in 5 seconds on wikipedia. While it's true that the deejay, emcee, b-boy and graffiti artist are all elements of hip-hop, holding them up as some kind of inseparable quaternity is like the grade-school textbook version.None of the elements fall apart with the removal of another, and they hardly encompass everything about hip-hop. If you want to get excessive about it, KRS-One laid out nine elements in song, and expanded his understanding to include several more including fashion, slang, entrepreneurship and more. The "Four Elements" notion is the same kind of gloss-over coverage that's arbitrarily defining and limiting the understanding of hip-hop to fit into a neat little package.

'Gangsta lyrics sell a dark life' inexplicably tries to draw a parallel between the murder of Darrent Williams and hip-hop music with heavy implication that The Shelter nightclub and a group on Williams' record label were somehow responsible - if not in action, at least in creating a culture where this was possible.

The article's subsection "Chicken and the egg" looks like it might examine whether life imitates art or vice versa, but gives almost all of its space to Ron Stallworth, a self-published ex-cop who argues that violent rap music incites actual violence. If this were an article on whether heavy metal music inspires suicide and grisly murder, you'd only find this many column inches given to the subject in a religious tract. So why is the notion that Judas Priest causes teen suicide laughable while it's a topic for debate in rap music? Do we, as a culture, think rap fans are stupider or more impressionable?

After a decent, if not always incisive, bit about 3DEEP promotions and the difficulty of putting on hip-hop shows in Denver, we get a brief review of Def Jam: Icon, a video game featuring rap stars under the Def Jam label duking it out, including a question to less-than-eloquent rapper Fat Joe about violence in rap music.

You can't be serious.

Fighting games are big bucks and so is cross-promotion. Def Jam was sharp to capitalize on the market and use a game to familiarize kids with the names and faces of their label lineup as well as get beats stuck in their heads, translating to future record sales. But is Icon really planting the seeds of violence in kids? I don't recall reports of rabid DMX fans putting their friends in Figure Four leglocks as X did in the original Def Jam title, Vendetta, years ago.

The Post's feature focuses largely on hip-hop as held up in the Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes documentary which showed at Starz Film Center on Auraria Campus and will be on PBS on Feb. 20 which TV critic Joanne Ostrow frames as largely a critique of the modern masculine image. The story's counterpart by Ricardo Baca attempts to divine the total message of three popular rappers. In doing so, it ends up highlighting Eminem's duet with Elton John and Kanye West's speaking out against homophobia in hip-hop - a stark contrast to Ostrow's half which paints most of the culture with a broad brush of oldschool meatheadedness. It raises the question: is homophobia really a hip-hop problem or a problem with the culture at large?

50 Cent catches his usual excoriating, too, but it doesn't seem likely that the average kid looks at being shot nine times as a rite of passage. If anything, Fiddy catching a gut full of lead is appealing not because it glamourizes violence but because it's so damned cartoonish. That's what makes popular rap appealing. It's a larger than life, cartoonish reflection of ourselves. ( Ludacris has a way of driving that home in his videos.) Expecting real-life re-enactments of the lives rappers act out on record would make about as much sense as getting mad at Johnny Depp because he's not really a pirate. The kids know this. Why are adults so slow to follow?

The sad irony is that while both features lament the lack of public exposure for positive and uplifting hip-hop, neither dedicates the space to actually cover it.The features ought to be good letter bait to this generation's crop of scared parents, but not much more. If you want to save yourself the time, go check out a few old documentaries on jazz and rock 'n' roll from the library. The objections of terrified parents haven't changed that much.


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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
Submitted By: Brit Horvat
posted on 3/24/2007 @ 2:54:42 PM
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Wow-- I was beginning to think I shared a cubicle with a musical genius, and well, it's true. More more more!
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Submitted By: Eric Lubbers
posted on 2/19/2007 @ 9:40:41 AM
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Hear hear.
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