Hip Hop's Not Dead: Tate, Pough, and the State of Hip Hop

            Following the celebration of Hip Hop’s 30^th anniversary hip hop scholars and well-known personalities, Greg Tate and Gwendolyn Pough, both shared their views on the future of hip hop and the challenges it faces today. In his article “Hip Hop Turns 30: Whatcha Celebratin’ For”, Tate expressed a pronounced negative view of today’s hip hop and where it is headed. He chronicled the beginnings and development of hip hop – from unifying Black Power Movement aimed at giving disadvantaged African-Americans a voice to a commercialized anthem of wannabe gangsta rappers selling out their brothers and sisters on a world market for White money. In Tate’s own words, “Twenty years from now we’ll be able to tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren…how once upon a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say in public whatever was on his or her mind…and how the Negro hip hop artist…chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck it up a stripper’s ass because it turned out there really was gold in them thar hills.” However, Pough – markedly more optimistic regarding the state of hip hop – articulated a hip hop that is more than music but rather a “state of mind” and a culture that simply reflects the society in which we are currently living. In Pough’s opinion, hip hop has limitless potential for the greater good and will achieve that – but only once the practitioners and consumers of the hip hop culture change their behaviors and generate “constant and steadfast” messages of betterment for the greater community.  

           While Tate and Pough disagreed on the future of hip hop, they did agree on the current situation being less than ideal, with so called “artists” choosing to refrain from producing art and instead producing commercialized stereotypes that generate dollar and upgrade their own bank accounts (but not the community). In their opinions hip hop is no longer a fresh beauty, but more like a paled and beaten youth laid up in Intensive Care somewhere. However, Tate and Pough both fail to acknowledge to a large extent (and perhaps even realize) that hip hop’s Black roots were never really that Black – parallel to the Black Art Movement and Black Power Movement – but not singularly a part of them. That being said, hip hop is not solely American either, and while the scene in America seems morbid, hip hop culture in other regions of the globe are healthy and thriving in the folk traditions of the hip hop culture – and by that, I mean to say, that hip hop outside of America is still working towards the advancement of disadvantaged people, equal rights and equal representation before the law and in mainstream media, and the unification of all peoples. Hip hop is giving an outlet to frustrated youths living in highly repressed societies throughout Asia; hip hop is inspiring and unifying the marginalized across Europe; hip hop is empowering and motiving the deprived and dejected in the Middle East; and despite what has previously been said, hip hop is still giving hope and a voice to the lost souls of America (North, South, and Central). Hip hop is alive and kicking – Tate, Pough, and the rest of us kickin’ it State-side merely have to look outside of ourselves to see it.

 

- Su Veney