The Alternate Hip-Hop Universe

The alternate hip hop universe

Something in this universe aligned to make hip hop what it is today, and keep a separate strata and type of hip-hop as “beneath” and secondary. Actually, nothing aligned but those entities artists giving awards-acceptance speeches call, succinctly, “radio and retail.” People eat what they are fed, after all, but loving the hip hop that I do, I like to imagine my alternate hip hop universe, where the strata are reversed, where one type of hip hop is the most commercially successful music in the country, creating an industry, and the other type of hip hop lives forever in its market-inept shadow.

Here in my alternate hip hop universe, Q Tip is being welcomed from a not-very-long hiatus with a #1 spot on the album chart for The Renaissance, now in its third week of release and not likely to leave the top ten for another six months at least. “Gettin’ Up” shot straight up the singles chart to #1, something that “Life Is Better” and “Manwomanboogie” will do right afterwards, probably at some point overlapping their time in the top ten. Pity Kanye West, who releases 808s and Heartbreaks this week, where it’ll debut at #11 and sell modestly before dropping out of the top 100 altogether. “Love Lockdown,” an unusually good song for him anyway, will find its devotees in stoners and hipsters, but won’t really be played much outside of college dorm rooms.

Beyonce’s double album I Am…Sasha Fierce is mostly laughed at by the music-buying masses, still too high of Raphael Saadiq’s The Way It Feels and, probably, finding a fourth single to treasure off of Alicia Keys’ year-old As I Am (that last part probably not too far off from this universe). But Beyonce’s used to this, being consistently outsold over the past ten years by the big names in the soul and R/B game, Jill Scott and Angie Stone. Artists like Scott and Stone – and, sure, Keys – made the trends lean toward soul-based singers with huge, irrepressible voices singing tunes they wrote themselves about love and independence and family that take on the sounds of truth just in how they sing, while thin-voiced come-ons about dancing and being arm-candy come out quickly and are forgotten about.

We’ve all stopped telling ourselves that Lil Wayne and T.I. don’t suck and you can’t hear them on any radio stations because they know better. Critics desperate to sound relevant and in touch, in fact, stopped describing Lil Wayne’s style upon vomiting a line such as “I’m a venereal disease like your menstrual bleed” in “A Milli” as “casual” and instead adopt the more accurate “repulsive,” and “obnoxious,” and perhaps even throw in “anatomically inaccurate.” The Black Eyed Peas that sang “A lot of MC’s should be unemployed” came after the Black Eyed Peas who gave us “Don’t Phunk With My Heart” and “My Humps.” The album containing those songs was just a forgettable demo tape the band made long before Bridging The Gaps showed us who they really were.

No middle schoolers find themselves singing along to “Love In This Club” because even they find the song ridiculous, and anyway, radio stations are too busy with their old copies of Talib Kweli’s Ear Drum and The Roots Rising Down to worry about the ethics of teaching kids to say to the girls of their choice, “Fuck it, let’s just fuck right here!” Rihanna and T.I.’s “Live Your Life” wouldn’t be taken seriously, as it is just a thin melody on top of an old YouTube clip, right? People would laugh at Mariah Carey for telling her guy to take her to the floor and not post it on You Tube in “Touch My Body” instead of laughing with her… and agreeing.

Next year when we look back on the artists that made up this decade, hip hop will still be king, but when we look back at the extraordinary black artists that made up this time, names like Wayne’s and West’s and T.I.’s and Sean Paul’s won’t really mean much, because there’ll be so much to say about Blackalicious and Me’shell Ndegeocello and Kweli and Erykah Badu and Tip (and, ok, Outkast and Timbaland) to get a word in edgewise. In that world? Quality and creativity are key, and the industry and sales respond accordingly – they respect the music that proves their genre is the essence and spirit of creativity today, and ignore the junk.