What happened to socially/politically concious rappers

rc tanuki is wrong and lame as hell but a rephrased version of this could have flown on ilm a bit more than a while ago, the days transition from earnest roots/outkast-type groups love to general engagement to even more casual interest in rap weird voice weird sound novelties. sooooo guess i can almost appreciate british REAL RAP kid in 2014 longing for the good old days when the dudes coming at him are from a mostly equally lame ilm crew that confines rap discussion to one thread.

pfft we fought a war so that British racoons couldn't vote in America come on now

So that's what Iraq II was about.

i was gonna start a hip hop retirement community thread actually just to talk about old shit

as someone that's expressed a lot of questionable or stupid opinions on ilm, i sympathize, too.

also your british rap nerd view of the real rap canon is wrong. i feel like most of the explicitly political or CONSCIOUS dudes on your list, the this is real political rap that made a difference story around them has been carefully explained and it's easy to, like, figure out. maybe you don't listen to enough music made recently or understand enough about the situations or circumstances or whatever it's made in and don't understand the communities lots of rap music comes from and is addressed to? and you probably don't understand what these artists meant, their message or their image, in contemporary terms and.... i dunno, being a naive likely racist british dude, you might not be willing to listen and understand deeply enough to what's going on and give it the benefit of serious listening and picking out new age youtube rappers with conscious methods is not going to help.

tanuki did you listen to the last cormega album?

i dont think there's anything wrong w/ limited rap discussion to a rolling thread, it saves me time from sorting through 100s of threads i dont care about to get the rap regulars in one place. like unless we started a board called 'i love rap' then that's the best way to do it

otherwise i agree with you, i dont think conscious rap has really aged nearly as badly as ppl are saying, if anything the recent discussions of the carceral system et al make conscious rap seem fairly well considered, ppl are letting a well-meaning defense of 'rap weird voice weird sound novelties' harden into its own kind of annoying orthodoxy position where its the only thing that 'matters'

werent we just talking on here recently about how j-live's 'satisfied' has actually aged pretty well even tho its pretty lolworthy how it's used in the wire s.1

anyway i'm using this as an excuse to post this mick jenkins song which i think is good:

https://soundcloud.com/mickjenkinsmusic/11-prod-by-nifdproductions

i think the original list shows an inability to understand rap lyrics + culture or whatever in general, and if you try to apply that limited understanding to a more complex world, a lot more diversity in voices and tones and styles and content, you're going to be fuckin lost.

why don't jada and styles make your list, rc?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR-Rn-Pst2w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-cpL--0AQA

i dont think conscious rap has really aged nearly as badly as ppl are saying, if anything the recent discussions of the carceral system et al make conscious rap seem fairly well considered, ppl are letting a well-meaning defense of 'rap weird voice weird sound novelties' harden into its own kind of annoying orthodoxy position where its the only thing that 'matters'

hey wow i get to say deej otm

xxp yah def generally speaking these terms are so broad as to be meaningless and misapplied to such a huge genre, but i think even saying 'conscious rap sucks, i like not-conscious rap that happens to be conscious' creates a kind of distorted POV ... conscious rap rules except when it doesnt like all rap, i think u have to start from that open perspective though otherwise yr kind of sucked in by the invisible propaganda of those definitions

Obviously I was sort of the exact right age to really be taken with all that new school afrocentric/political stuff but it's funny (and maybe a little telling in ways that aren't so good) that I think a lot of people now are so gleeful in making fun of stuff like Public Enemy or KRS or afrocentrism or w/e.

I will say that maybe I don't it seems cliche to people now but I can assure as an early teens farm kid it was not something that I knew about, the Black Panthers or Marcus Garvey or Farakhan and I still feel that it all tremendously opened my eyes to issues of race and justice in America and as a white kid introducing me to the idea that my "normal" life was not given to everyone and in fact was built in many ways on the suffering of others. Like I get even sort of self-conscious typing this, because I feel like it's indicative of the "rockist" sort of po-faced, middle-brow sincerity that ILX can really rip to shreds but I was not a sophisticated person and had not been taught by my parents or my teachers to think in those terms. My one friend T0ntr3ll was literally the only black kid that ever went to my school k-12.

Also even non-political stuff like NWA, Geto Boys etc was sort of implicty "political" in terms of how I received it, as just portrayals of the ghetto and violence were not prevalent then (in real, realistic terms, like gangs in 80s comedy movies were always mixed-race Beat It dancers with at least one white guy with a mohawk and Sigue Sigue Sputnik glasses)

but anyway that's why no matter how grumpy old man they get about stuff I'll never really bag on Chuck (who is largely right on still), KRS (though he trieds me, esp his Ron Paul phase), or Cube or whoever.

I mean I can't even say that I don't probably have aspects of how I think that aren't 100 percent correct or righteous or whatever, like the things I probably still take for granted or just that small town knuckleheadedness I don't think ever leaves you really, but I feel like I owe all the 80s and early 90s rappers a tremendous debt.

And while I do enjoy reading what Deej or whoever writes about Keef or Rae Sremmurd or whoever, if I'm being honestly you can't tell me it's better now, no more than you could tell some dickhead boomer talking head in a documentary that The Beatles and The Stones aren't the apex of rock music. And fuck it I might be wrong but I don't wanna be right if that means like a lex-type eww old ppl music grody to the max mentality.

loving yr post, ups

v real

yes! ILX welcomes earnestness and sincerity when it is honestly expressed ime.

if rc was some earnest 35 year old true elements head rather than some british kid that is bent on exposing the horrors of islam and calling us out for not listening to the fugees... i'd have a lot more time for this.

thx :)

british kid that is bent on exposing the horrors of islam
^^i must've missed something

oh yea that's probably where the majority of the FPs came from

b-b-but everyone knows some of the best political rap comes from black muslims ...

haha yeah that is weird so much NOI and 5% stuff was so ingrained in a lot of what constituted "consciousness"

These are good posts but I feel like their arguments are a bit dated, if not nearly as much so as RTs. I mean, who even bags on political rap in 2015? The conscious rap backlash happened a decade ago.

well it def lost its cool factor, there was def a kind of glamor of opposition in the late 90s indie rap scene that has basically evaporated, everyone is afraid of being preachy ...

thx :)

british kid that is bent on exposing the horrors of islam
^^i must've missed something
--Wu-Tang Clannad (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

he also went on a tear about "Zionism" in the hebdo thread, iirc, it was a jamboree of multi-purpose offensive shit

I feel like while there isn't as much explicitly "political" stuff in the blatant sloganeering sense there is a good amount of poignant social commentary - tacit or direct - even in what is ostensibly goon or crime rap

xxxpost rev it's so marginalized now it barely exists to bag on

Ehh I don't really agree with that. RTJ have the most critically acclaimed rap record of the year and play theaters all over the country.

I can assure as an early teens farm kid it was not something that I knew about, the Black Panthers or Marcus Garvey or Farakhan and I still feel that it all tremendously opened my eyes to issues of race and justice in America and as a white kid introducing me to the idea that my "normal" life was not given to everyone and in fact was built in many ways on the suffering of others.

― Wu-Tang Clannad (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, January 8, 2015 5:29 PM (1 hour ago)

just wanted to add another big "fuck yes" to this

xpost rev - though isn't kinda by definition RTJ pitche a bit as a throwback to that era, & obv dudes are from a different era age wise

(though whiney insists they have a whole new fanbase of all my world of young ppl so who knows)

Their new fanbase of young ppl is the adult swim world of young ppl basically. It's not ... Cool, exactly

how is rick and morty not cool exactly

They FP'in! Aw, made you post
You a slave to a thread made by ott's ghost

the best

i was gonna start a hip hop retirement community thread actually just to talk about old shit
― Wu-Tang Clannad (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

and i loved the cormega album

ha, yeah. would def participate

Me too obvy

Altho isnt there already the random old ass rap you are digging thread

yeah but thats kinda like "random" or obscure you know. sometimes i want to just talk about kool g rap verse or rank master p albums or whatever

i feel like the focus on weird rap warbly stuff is far less on the ilm goon thread than on rap twitter, the rap internet elsewhere. there are only a handful of regulars and i think we all have pretty distinct approaches to hip-hop generally

i like m@tt's post though i remain proud of my "old ppl ewww" mentality, it is up to old ppl to improve themselves if this is to change

boomin' post UMS

Yeah, great post UMS. If RT had it within him to write something like that this thread would have been less of a clusterfuck.

anyway i'm using this as an excuse to post this mick jenkins song which i think is good

i'm still playing the album from last year a lot. if RT was a real person (or if he actually bothered to engage in the discussion he started) then i'd definitely recommend he check it out.

lex's religious devotion to capitalism's planned obsolescence is always a wonder to behold

so was RT banned? not seeing it in admin log

This guy went from 50 to 80(!!!) flagged posts in a matter of hours. You won't be seeing him for a while.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 8 January 2015 20:51 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

freedom of speech is under attack!

first they came for the racoons, and I said nothing

He actually pursued that line in the Charlie Hebdo thread, tasteful huh? (xp)

#weareallraccoontanuki

#jesuisleratonlaveur