Genre is a box in itself, it is a limiting structure, it is a set of rules. Beyond beats and rhymes hip hop is categorized for its violence, its hyper sexualized nature, and its stand offishness. To take away these signifiers in hip hop would be to get rid of hip hop all together.
It is impossible for a rapper or artist to be truly other in the box that is hip hop. It is impossible to rap or create within hip hop with out being placed in the spectrum of hardness, with out being considered as someone who is in conversation in someway with masculinity or violence or any of the other signifiers hip hop has come to be. If a rapper for instance just wanted to talk about their favorite color or discuss what it means to feel loss or any other emotion for that matter with out bringing up questions of "is this rapper hard?" "is this a message rapper?" "what are they saying about being real?".
I would urge something else of hip hop, I would urge it to take its business elsewhere, I would urge it to kindly die. Hip Hop is not a box that can change, it is a safe, it is a vault, it is an unmovable object. Or, maybe hip hop is not a box but a time bomb, ticking down till its influence can explode over musical genre, a big bang if you will.
- Samson
This box idea made me think of that one music video we watched in class that had those random frames floating around, capturing random objects or things in motion. I wish I could remember the video but, in regards to confinement and boundaries in a genre that Hurt claims to be unchangeable, I believe this idea to be the most exciting about hip hop. I consider this kind of limitation, as an invitation. An invitation to be more than what everyone else is trying to be. Sure it is a challenge that not many are willing to take especially in a competitive genre such as this one but, there isn’t anything more real than being who you are and trying to go against that boundary. I may be missing the ball on this but I disagree, hip hop doesn’t have to be stuck in a box.
ReplyDelete