Rap’s ego trip

For hip-hop fans who relish a good debate, the last few weeks have been a gift horse.

On Sept. 25, hip-hop went to Washington. At a congressional hearing titled “From Imus to Industry: The Business of Stereotypes and Degradation,” spearheaded by Rep. (and former Black Panther) Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.), speakers included Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman, Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. and rappers Master P and David Banner.

That same day, a hyperbolically titled, three-part series premiered on BET: “Hip-Hop vs. America,” a town hall-style event at which a host of rappers (Nelly and T.I.), talking heads (columnist Stanley Crouch and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson) and activists (writer Kevin Powell) flexed their intellectual muscles while bickering about hip-hop, the N-word, misogyny and the like.

Things grew almost as heated as they did this year when, at Oprah Winfrey’s first show devoted to hip-hop, Warner’s Executive Vice President Kevin Liles took umbrage at Crouch’s term for members of the hip-hop community (“clowns”).

The last time hip-hop was enmeshed in such hullabaloo was during the gangsta-rap era, when feminist activist C. DeLores Tucker cited Snoop Dogg lyrics on the floor of Congress. In fact, the discourse hasn’t evolved much since: Detractors are still blaming rap music for violence and misogyny, and defenders are still asserting that violence and misogyny didn’t start with rap music -- they’re as American as apple pie. Fans, meanwhile, protest that hip-hop is a handy scapegoat for wider social ills. So, should we feel sorry for the beleaguered genre?

Hardly. A key difference is that in the mid-’90s, hip-hop was comfortably selling records; nowadays, album sales are down -- by more than 30% since 2000, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America. That’s faster than the beleaguered record industry in general, which is off about 20% over the same period. So it’s not just ironic that hip-hop is being censured and dissected at the very moment when the genre has become most commercially immaterial -- its public critique might be the best thing rap has going for it.

Worse than being attacked, after all, is being ignored. If rappers can’t sell the way they once did, nothing makes them feel as if they matter more than being at the crux of controversy.

The result, though, is that rappers today don’t just think they matter -- they think they really matter. On his latest album, feted egotist Kanye West rhymes, “my head so big, you can’t sit behind me,” but his boast might as well apply to hip-hop as a whole: The culture is battling a severe bout of megalomania.

Symptoms abound. Plenty of rappers seem to thrive on seeing themselves as victims of massive witch-hunts. Such artists as T.I., Fat Joe and Chamillionaire have spoken at length about their music as society’s scapegoat; others, such as the Game, lament that they’re being harassed by the “hip-hop cops,” a rumored NYPD unit said to monitor rappers.

While it’s true that there’s ample evidence of a rap police, Derrick Parker, the retired NYPD detective who says he was the original hip-hop cop, asserts -- in both a documentary film and a book -- that the so-called unit is hardly the coherent, ubiquitous surveillance team these rappers imagine it to be.

And while there has indeed been public debate about hip-hop lately, it nonetheless seems excessive to speak, as does one hip-hop blogger, of “the trend of making hip-hop the scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with society.” The talk of late is just that -- talk. Has any real action been taken, other than giving rappers new forums for publicity?

A crass clash

Consider, too, Sept. 11, 2007: the 50 Cent/Kanye West album-release face-off. In all the hubbub surrounding the sales showdown between 50’s album “Curtis” and Kanye’s “Graduation” -- which Kanye ultimately won by a mile, selling nearly 1 million copies in the first week -- few noted the narcissistic audacity of releasing and promoting albums on a day of national mourning, let alone staging a PR stunt that day. Kanye and 50 spoke of 9/11 as only megalomaniacs could: oblivious to the fact that having the world’s eye on America that day had more to do with the tragic events of six years ago than with the showboating of two entertainers.

Hip-hop is so self-important these days that it’s bred professionals who affix the genre to their titles: Michael Eric Dyson is known as the hip-hop professor (though on the BET program, he gave himself the title “P.I.M.P.: public intellectual with moral principles”); Detroit Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick has been dubbed the “hip-hop mayor”; Rani Whitfield is a physician who advertises himself, on his website and on talk shows, as “H2D -- Tha Hip-Hop Doc.”

Hip-hop performers, meanwhile, showcase their aggrandized senses of self by speaking of themselves in the third person. Artists such as T.I./T.I.P. and R. Kelly/Kells and Eminem/Slim Shady/Marshall Mathers have developed alter egos with whom they stage extended conversations, as T.I. does in his single “T.I. vs. T.I.P.”

It’s a truism that hip-hop’s foundation is ego. Boast and bluster are to the genre what mourning and melancholy are to emo music. And yes, because hip-hop is ultimately America writ large -- exhibiting, in caricatured form, the violence, misogyny and anti-intellectualism that characterize America’s culture as a whole -- it’s only natural that the megalomania and narcissism that characterize our broader contemporary culture be patently present in hip-hop culture.

But steeply declining sales and out-of-bounds swagger make for an irksome combination. The genre might benefit from a slice of humble pie and a more balanced sense of its place in the world.

Ultimately, we shouldn’t feel sorry for hip-hop -- we should feel sorry for those who are trying to enjoy it. Because, from the way the culture has been carrying on, you’d think it was something much more grandiose than what it is and what so many love it for being: music.