I cannot resist the urge to contribute to the argument of whether hip-hop is dead. I wonder whether hip-hop is now just a product manufactured by the music industry, the same way the Big Mac is manufactured by McDonalds, or whether Hip-Hop remains an authentic vehicle for hitherto silent voices.

If hip-hop is dead, then is it the music industry – that purveyor of fine urban fables - telling me what goes down in my “hood”? Do the playlists on my IPOD truly represent my listening tastes or simply document my ongoing subjugation to the music game?

A social critic argued that the listening public gets the artists it deserves. This is a trajectory I cannot follow because it assumes the public exercises choice over what is heard and that it listens with a discerning ear. As far as I’m concerned discernment encourages personal taste and therefore cannot embrace the freeze-dried, vacuum-packed bobble-headed figurines sent our way with annoying regularity. Get what we deserve? The assumption here is that music listeners have some influence which artists record company’s court, sign and produce. As if the music business itself is run like American Idol. But that’s the irony of the whole thing and precisely why the show is so popular. American Idol is the only place where Americans are afforded the chance to get it right.

The notion that music listeners get the artists they deserve reeks of the appropriation we’ve been trying to get away from these past few hundred years. I smell an ‘ism’ some place! Get what we deserve? Sounds like the feeble excuse of a perpetrator who has committed an act of domestic violence and attempts to convince that his partner provoked him………… And invariably the music industry’s victims, like those on the homefront, are women and children: those myspace-MTV—BET-VH1-Sidekick-IPOD-toting children-of-the-corn who believe The Game ain’t in on the game; those women who succumb to both the ghoulish, over-sexed images in music videos and the ignorant terms used in place of their names. Why, prey tell, would I mistake a word ghosts use to scare the daylights out of mortals for a term of endearment?

Is Hip-Hop dead? I wonder to what extent Hip-Hop has become a technology utilized by the music industry to control what sounds permeate our eardrums. Indeed there is a vibe out there in the universe that’s still referred to as ‘Hip-Hop’. A vibe associated with certain motifs: urban, diverse, graffiti, struggle, dance and drama. The range of expressions that vibe covered was spellbinding in the past and brutally American.

Listen to me exert my right to free speech! Hear my flow but amend nothing………….. And it was like nothing we’d ever heard before. Had me rushing to the stove. Must turn off that damn tea kettle! Only to discover Public Enemy brewing up da noise. And now? Creative retardation and video paraphinillia resist the lyrical alliteration and socially-conscious allusions of yesteryear.

Portrayals of bitches, pimps and hoes crowd my HD cable TV. Fictitious characters brought to life in long odes of debauchery and all too often glorified in the behavior of our young men and women in the community.

Hip-Hop is dead all right. What was alive and vibrant and meant to open our eyes. What was cultivated in nakedness, shrouded in raw expression and passed on with pride has been brutally re-gifted. Re-merchandized in a way that threatens to strip away that glory these past few hundred years was not able to take. The music business does not provide for a range of musical tastes. Individual preference has been foreclosed by the industry’s insatiable desire for platinum. Titanium. Moon Rock. Or whatever is synonymous with bling these days. I have far more questions than answers. I have less choice than I’d like. As for the Hip-Hop nation, what I see disheartens me.

I do not believe we have the artists we deserve. I do believe that we can nurture the artists we deserve if we reclaim Hip-Hop. This would require us to separate Hip-Hop from the caricatures of our shame and stifle the shrieks of cultural predators by refusing to purchase their tracks. The purpose of this would be to encourage images we can delight in rather than shrink from.