D'Angelo - Black Messiah (2014)

music critics voicing their political concerns by asking why more musicians aren't voicing their political concerns always seems like an echo chamber of concern trolling irrelevance to me

Go on then Swift fans, name me 5, no, 3, obviously politically or socially conscious rappers out in the last 10 years. Just 3. Then in rnb, Then name me 3 popular artists in any genre.

I'm rooting for you.

They're not allowed through, or not popular anymore. People want to hear that shit less and less. They just want weed songs. In the 80s 90s rap music was defined by it's socially conscious artist. KRS, NWA, P.E, Mos, Talib, Wu, Kast, Pac, Roots, Nas. They just don't exist anymore.

"NWA, Wu, Kast, Pac, Nas"

if these are socially concious (not saying they aren't) then Boosie certainly is.

david banner, killer mike...

son, boosie came out 98 lol. Putting Boosie general lyrics content in with Kast Wu and Nas is just funny though. "if they are..." :D

got 99 problems but a tanuki ain't one

since when was dangelo a rapper?

first 4 tracks on b.m got well over a million plays so far on Spotify, the rest hovering around just under a million. I'm guessing that's quite good.

xp I don't know about concern trolling - I'm sure the concern is genuine - but is strikes me that if you want rappers to step up then you should recognise those that do (eg Killer Mike, Kendrick, J Cole, The Game, TI) rather than ignoring them and perpetuating the myth that there's no politics in hip hop anymore.

I think its pretty fair to say somebody is concern trolling if they make the complaint whilst ignoring the rappers you mention.

Just search 'Mike Brown tribute' on youtube.

it feels like this very overworn trope, that pop music right now is apolitical in a way it never used to be, is one of the worst iterations of the old-ppl moan of "it was all better in my day". no one who makes that complaint is ever actually interested in current political music or, usually, current music at all

(SFJ using it is baffling because surely he KNOWS it's not true)

lex OTM. I feel that some people want to believe there's no politics in music anymore, as if that would prove something about young people today, so they ignore what's out there. I had someone moaning about this to me on Twitter yesterday and their example of a representatively apolitical modern band was One Direction.

Of course the Bay City Rollers were famed as Scotland's answer to the MC5.

i think this convo needs to include modern conscious soul/R&B artists rather than rappers but anyway, people have been complaining that rap isnt political enough as long as ive been into it (they said this in the 90s that it wasnt political enough like it was in the late 80s.. im sure in the 80s they said it wasnt as political as back when stevie and marvin gaye were making their great albums, etc etc)

i guess it's partly the old-person narrowing of their cultural sphere so that they can literally only name a handful of young artists, and those artists get held up as encapsulating an entire generation, but it's still embarrassing to see. but people who say that are less interested in political music and more about shoring up their generation's qualities. a few years ago someone was moaning at length about how no young artists were addressing the economic crisis, i linked him to the first pistol annies album, and he wasn't remotely interested in it.

also these moaning types tend to be the sort who refuse to acknowledge music as political unless it beats them over the head with it RATM style

It's why I tend to use the phrase "explicitly political" because once you start claiming that any music is devoid of politics you're in a tangle.

name them. stop dodging.

Scroll back a few posts

in R&B - erykah badu, dangelo, georgia anne muldrow, cody chestnutt, cassandra wilson (if she can count), meshell

Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill released songs about Ferguson. Frank Ocean weighed in on Tumblr. Rihanna tweeted about it.

dismissing current artists as apolitical also carries the insinuation that issues like feminism and LGBT rights are somehow not proper politics, given the amount of artists, high profile and otherwise, who have been vocal about them over the past decade - far more than i remember growing up

Absolutely.

thank you – I've been having this fucking argument for years.

i feel that, as far as my own awareness matters, that explicitly political concerns in music are being felt stronger than they have since the early 90s. maybe through the 2000s i would have struggled to have named many acts who were addressing wider issues of social, political and global justice.

but i agree with what lex and dorian are saying, that you only have to delve a little deeper to reveal all sorts of things and that the buck doesn't have to stop at obvious agit-prop rock stuff.

as usual it's men who have no stake in gender and sexuality wars that pine for "political" material.

not to be all grumpy old man about it, but i dont think tweeting about it counts.

hey grumpy old men are people too.

dismissing current artists as apolitical also carries the insinuation that issues like feminism and LGBT rights are somehow not proper politics

What hip hop acts have been campaigning for feminism or LGBT?

btw, Modern Neo Feminism isn't political at all, it's a club. An identity club. They're not fighting for any cause.

like, i think theres a diff between making a statement (which i would say tweeting is) and actually making a song or writing a lyric about it.

(duh! but its still a valid observation. i mean, what is dorian lynskey going to write his volume 2 about? political tweets?)

Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill released songs about Ferguson. Frank Ocean weighed in on Tumblr. Rihanna tweeted about it.

― Re-Make/Re-Model,

Lauryn Hill? 90s rapper Lauryn Hill? Non of the acts out in last decade that you mentioned seemed to do anything more than a deleted tweet or a tumblr post.

I've often felt that capital-P 'politics' goes in and out of fashion in pop culture like waves.
Sometimes showing you have a social conscience with opinions and concerns is a part and parcel of being an artist; and to the onlooker it can feel like everything, even some instrumental music, has an inherent politics at its core.
Other times, it feels as though the wider pop sphere has little time for politics as this gets in the way of the personal. Again, I'm struggling to think of much militantly political music from the mid-late 2000s save for damp offerings by Green Day etc...

idk, a tweet in the moment might have more of an impact than a few veiled references in a song, especially considering that songs take awhile to make & release, and if they don't are often thrown together and quickly forgotten.

xp

also, just wanted to add MIA to the list of excellent, modern, political rappers.

xp Before Twitter you had to give an interview or write a song or say something during a concert to be heard. Obviously if there's another outlet to tell everyone where you stand some musicians are going to prefer that. You can't insist that only the old modes count.

And that may be why there's no volume 2 for me to do.

RT, I'm going to print out the post where I name The Game, TI, Run the Jewels, J Cole and Kendrick and staple it your head.

a$ap ferg did a ferguson song too iirc

also can we give it more than a couple of months before demanding fully thought out political statements in their music from rappers

True. How many responses to the Rodney King verdict were there by the equivalent stage? Ice Cube's The Predator didn't come out until November and the verdict was late April.

MIA is 39, she came out over 10 years ago.

what do you need? someone under 18 who has just made their first single to come out with a new 'fight the power'?

i mean, chuck d was in his early 30s when he made shut em down. would that still count?

never mind that dangelo is 40!

i can link you to some 19/20 year olds making political rap records. they're just not famous, so i guess that doesn't count?

How many responses to the Rodney King verdict were there by the equivalent stage?

what's maybe more relevant is all the LA rap about LAPD brutality/corruption that came out *before* the Rodney King incident/trial. which was quite a lot.

(not agreeing w RT btw)

Who said anything about Ferguson?

RT, I'm going to print out the post where I name The Game, TI, Run the Jewels, J Cole and Kendrick and staple it your head.

― Re-Make/Re-Model,

Again, way off, check your dates. T.I came out 15 years ago. The Game? 10 years ago, and that's really scraping the barrel I think. RTJ is just a misogynist fairly disgusting male ego trip from what I heard.

what do you need?

― StillAdvance,

I've said it enough times, anyone out in the last decade, still no one has provided.

this has been mentioned already right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXsa6y2NJ14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQs7CWKHM9w