NEW YORK--Writer and director Michael Holman, 55, arrived in New York City in the late '70s and immersed himself in the early years of rap music, documenting hip-hop parties with a Super-8 camera.
"I was in the game in 1979, and I would go uptown and see these amazing things," Holman said.
Now, though, Holman thinks hip-hop is mired in mediocrity.
"It's unprecedented where hip-hop is," Holman said. "I'm trying to think of a time when art celebrated stupidity. Have we reached a point, a wall, of diminishing returns?"
Holman was one of three panelists who took part in a recent discussion at Connecticut College on the history and future of hip-hop hosted by professor David Canton.
Other panelists were Imani Perry of the Center for African-American Studies at Princeton University and author of "Prophets of the Hood," and Jeffrey Ogbar, professor of history and associate dean of the humanities at the University of Connecticut and author of "Hip-Hop Revolution."
Despite the Nas song from a few years ago, the panelists said hip-hop isn't dead, but it is thirtysomething.
Or look at it this way: The group of people, mostly in New York, that in the late 1970s coalesced around the so-called "four elements" - MCing, DJing, b-boying and graffiti - are now in their 50s.
While rap music remains enormously popular, and hip-hop-inflected tracks have been commonplace in the Billboard charts for 25 years, some feel the music and culture has lost its way.
Holman traces hip-hop's origins to the "collusion of culture" in New York, which filled a void in the city as disco waned and arena rock started to fizzle.
Holman went on to launch "Graffiti Art," the seminal hip-hop television show, which aired once on WPIX but became an essential hip-hop artifact.
Ogbar, who grew up in Los Angeles and witnessed the rise of southern California hip-hop groups such N.W.A., remembered hearing "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang, and his friends were soon memorizing lyrics.
"It was festive, even though it came from horrible conditions," Ogbar said. "You have crime, you have poverty - a dystopian space. Out of that we had a constructive space where people competed."
Ogbar recalled that West Coast hip-hop, before "gangsta" rap became prevalent in the early 1990s, had "swagger but without the intimation of violence."
"But gangsta rap gave L.A. its aesthetic," Ogbar noted. "It dealt with drugs, gangs and violence."
Offering a clue to the current state of hip-hop, Ogbar asked the 20 students in the audience to take note of a thematic shift in rap's depiction of the drug trade.
"Early on, rappers of all different stripes were inveighing against selling drugs," Ogbar said. "The consummate gangsta group, N.W.A., who boasted of their ability to maim and murder people, did not glorify the drug trade."
In the genre's earlier days, Ogbar noted, MCs (rappers) would not assume the persona of the drug dealer and usually depicted the deleterious effects of taking and selling drugs.
Perry, 38, however took a more optimistic view of current hip-hop, saying there is quality music out there, if you know where to look for it.
"There is a sense that the music that is most popular is diminished, but there are seeds of excellence," Perry said.
Perry promoted female singers such as Janelle Monae and Nikki Minaj as vanguards of the movement.
"Minaj is the Lil' Kim of the 21st century," Perry said.
Perry is particularly interested the way Minaj and Monae play with their public personas in their music and recall older black blues and jazz singers.
And Perry offered a personal reason why she thinks hip-hop will persevere.
"My 7-year-old was up until 11 p.m. writing in his rhyme book," she said. "He was preparing for a battle at recess."
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Sunday, November 7th 2010 at 3:39PM
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