In the beginning hip hop had a simplicity and inventiveness born of poverty and necessity. Now, trapped in its own creation myth, it has become formulaic, anti-experimental and - especially in the hands of its British and Irish audiences - reactionary, writes ALAN O'RIORDAN
HIP HOP has given the wider culture many things in the past 30 years, including a whole vocabulary of slang. This includes (or once included at any rate) the word "fresh" as a multi-purpose expression of admiration. "Fresh" was most often used in this context in the early 1980s: good rappers were fresh, good beats were too. And why wouldn't it have been thus? For hip hop was just that - bold, new, exciting. It was, in essence, what every great American musical form was at its beginning.
However, as I stood in the crowd recently at what I now know to have been my last ever hip hop gig, I felt certain that "fresh" was the last word one would use to describe what was happening. The exact opposite summed up the mood: stale. At first I noticed nothing wrong. How could I? Like all hip hop fans (though I use the word with many qualifications now), I was like the frog in the steadily boiling pot of water. It had seemed okay for so long, I couldn't sense when it started to go wrong.
Except, unlike the water around the frog, it was the inertia of hip hop that was causing my inner fan to die. The warm-up DJ was playing, and playing the very same tunes as ever: Grandmaster Flash, Eric B and Rakim, Dr Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg, DJ Shadow and the Wu Tang Clan. They call these tracks "anthems" in hip hop; in truth, they are standards, and as tired as anything by that name from the jazz world.
It seemed suddenly clear that nothing had changed since the mid-1990s. Hip hop, from the late 1970s onwards, flourished, became established, then expanded and diversified; finally it stood still, reaching a sort of senescence and musical incuriosity around 1996.
But looking around, it became clear that something similar had happened to the hip hop diehards. It was like travelling back in time, to an age of baggy jeans and outsized T-shirts. Perhaps they found this reassuring. Certainly, the music was that: we were firmly in the realm of the nothing new, a fact confirmed by the emergence of the main act, an act centred on - you've guessed it - the proverbial two turntables and a microphone: the holy trinity of hip hop's very own creation myth.
THIS MYTH HAS a power that is unique among major musical forms, in that fans still feel a direct link to it. Unlike the relatively far-off origins of jazz, or the fusion of rhythm and blues with country and folk in America's Deep South that slowly evolved into rock'n'roll, hip hop's creation was comparatively spontaneous, straightforward and remembered. Its evangelists are still around to tell us: "I was there. I remember when Kool Herc took two copies of the same record and created a break beat."
Hip hop's creation story is rather beautiful. It speaks of necessity being the mother of invention; of how the poverty of the south Bronx helped create this most basic of sounds, stripped down to the bare essentials of word and rhythm, beat and rhyme. Two turntables, two records and a microphone - simple as that.
Sadly for hip hop, the centrality of this creation myth has bred increasing atavism in its fans and artists, something which has led to conservatism and lack of curiosity. Experimentation is heresy, not "real" hip hop at all, not "true". Thus, "true" hip hop fans continue to worship at the altar of beats and rhymes when the formula has become formulaic.
That this misplaced puritanism is not enough food to nourish a culture is palpable at any hip hop gig. There is little excitement, the tone is reverent. The crowd is mostly male, ascetic and geeky; like young priests, they stand and nod, cognoscenti of what's not worth knowing. They lean at the railings, the better to see the DJ do his thing; they manfully cheer when the MC, yet again, does a call-and-answer routine, or divides the room to see which side is loudest.
The Sugar Hill Gang, recent visitors to Dublin, have been doing this thing for some 30 years. It's time to change the record, certainly, but perhaps it is already too late for a hip hop reformation. Who would have thought that the vehicle of so much political radicalism would now be enervated by its own musical conservatism? With most musical genres, it is taken for granted that its chart music will be formulaic, essentially dull: repetitive, after much delay, of what's being done at the non-commercial cutting edge.
The unique problem for hip hop is that its cutting edge, what should be the ideas factory for the music, is populated by overly serious practitioners who have grown too much in love with a sclerotic art form, resistant to change and the influence of other forms of music.
The puritanical streak in what one might call worthy hip hop provides no inspiration to the rest. And since hip hop once was and always has the potential to be the great magpie music (all its beats are stolen after all), this is a catastrophe. When the creative artists are too busy adhering to a stale formula, the mediocrities who follow (and so often popularise) can safely re-tread the same musical ground but - and this is hip hop's other great problem - with added misogyny, antisocial machismo, materialism and vulgarity.
Make no mistake, however, hip hop was always a macho music. Fidelity to the street was once about, on the one hand, the indignation of Public Enemy and, on the other, the visceral documentary sound of NWA. The former said, this is not how it should be; the latter said, this is how it is, motherf****r. Both said it in a way that could not be ignored, with abrasive, exciting sounds that were, to go back to that word, fresh.
Now, hip hop retains "street" values only in the sense of glorifying criminality, and justifying the "bling-bling" attitude as a kind of black version of the American dream, or even the street's answer to pioneer capitalism.
"We are still street," P Diddy and Jay Z told Alan Yentob on the BBC programme, Imagine, recently. "We wouldn't be allowed leave that behind," said Diddy.
They were, of course, drinking champagne in a penthouse shortly before visiting Diddy's office on the 54th floor of a Fifth Avenue skyscraper.
Well, at least we found out what street he meant. It is surprising but typical of hip hop's current conservatism that the likes of Jay Z and P Diddy, whose own origins lie in neighbourhoods that epitomise all that's wrong with the American economic system, should have learned nothing from their own success except the illusion that anyone can make it.
Hip hop's apologists will name Nas, The Roots, Common and The Streets as proof that hip hop remains verbally and musically interesting. And I would have to agree - those and a few others are interesting. But if ever there were exceptions which proved the rule, it is these oft-named paragons of excellence.
Nas's latest album is called The Death of Hip Hop- need we say more? Mike Skinner of The Streets is a great example of exactly what nobody else is doing; The Roots are hip hop's best live act because they actually play instruments. And the sniffy attitude to them from the hip hop fraternity speaks volumes. No, these examples do not reflect the true landscape of hip hop, nor do they impinge on it, sadly.
FOR A REAL view of the state of hip hop, tune in to the US hip hop stations, or to Tim Westwood's by turns unintentionally hilarious and disturbing BBC Radio 1 Rap Show. There, you'll hear a terrifically boring, anti-musical soundscape of murky beats overlaid by one-theme rappers with names such as 50 Cent, Ludacris, Lil Wayne and Kurupt, relentlessly informing us about "bitches and hoes".
Westwood's show is particularly illuminating on the cultural allegiance hip hop inspires. Between tracks, it's a non-stop flow of "shout outs" to "soljahs" around England; that is, teenagers increasingly likely to kill one another for straying onto the wrong "turf". This is a reflection of a culture hip hop has had a part in creating. This is in itself hard to believe, conditioned as we are to believe that poetry makes nothing happen. But the English experience of hip hop is proof that it does: a wholly American phenomenon has been imported wholesale by that country's urban youth: its clothes and vocabulary, but worse, its crime-tinged, dehumanising, sexist, homophobic values.
Closer to home, we find the Bebo sites of Limerick gangland thugs festooned with gangster rap iconography and vocabulary. To claim any cause and effect would be over-statement, but the symmetry, the easy fit, between hip hop and such sites tells you a lot about what's wrong with a once vibrant, progressive music.
Hip hop. Its beauty spots are still worth visiting, but I sure wouldn't want to live there.