You might think you don’t like contemporary hip-hop and hip-pop because it’s boring, derivative, materialistic, sexist, and stylistically conservative–in other words, because it’s like hair metal with looser clothes (at least for the guys)–but it turns out the real reason you don’t like it is because you’re racist. Well, that’s what Sasha Frere-Jones would have you believe, anyway. Slate’s John Cook kicks this unbelievably idiotic notion (as he puts it, and I’ve seen this sort of sentiment expressed with a straight face, “If the number of black artists in your iPod falls too far below 12.5 percent of the total, then you are violating someone’s civil rights”) right in the nuts.
I’ve talked about falling out of love with hip-hop before, and I like to think that it doesn’t make me racist, but simply someone who’s interested in other things musically, or at worst an old fuddy-duddy who’s still reliving the glory days of A Tribe Called Quest and Fear of a Black Planet. (For what it’s worth, Ghostface Killah continues to make knockout records.) Whichever it may be, there’s something really, really weird about critics making an argument that the more popular something is, the more worthy of critical praise it becomes, which is essentially what’s going on when people are anathematized for not liking hip-pop. I guess it’s an aspect of the backlash against “rockism,” and that backlash can be really perverse–and in some ways pointless, because “rockism” is predicated on people having an extremely narrow definition of what constitutes rock and roll, which is inherenty un-rock and roll.