the dotmatrix project

via the mind of Jay Smooth

Destroy & Rebuild.

While I have been responding to Sean Coon’s mostly anti-Kanye West posts I was not successfully explaining the disconnect from his opinion to mine. Today, Jay smooth posted a video of his interview on The Sound of Young America, TSOYA. This helps explain most of the problem with older Hip Hop heads that don’t believe that Hip Hop beyond speaking of politics is of amazing quality. Sometimes they give the newer music some respect but never feel it could be as important, powerful or relevant as it was in the past, in their opinion.

Those who really know music realize that every genre becomes commercial through fault of business and is so common that no one artist should be blamed for the turn. Think about it.

It may be opinion and mine is otherwise so I keep responding when there’s things to respond to.

From Ill Doctrine:
At 6:15 on the video the question from Jesse Thorn was,

[...] I think that’s such an important distinction [...] [W]hen I hear someone talking about Hip Hop who’s in the well intentioned liberal community (audience laughter). It’s about a like a Public Enemy someone who is very explicitly political and ideological. What exactly is it that they don’t get about the things that aren’t [political or ideological], or [instead what are they] struggling to get about the things [in Hip Hop] that aren’t explicitly ideological?

Jay Smooth’s answer was,

[...] I think a lot of people recognize that this really struck a deep chord with this generation of youth so they want to be down with it, but they can’t really connect to it on that aesthetic level, so they find some other reason to feel like it’s important and say that they are down with it and it’s a well meaning thing but then you’re setting up standards where Hip Hop is doomed to fail in the long run. I think we have a lot of unrealistic expectations with Public Enemy especially where we thought they were going to be the new generation of black leaders and actually present a political platform and get elected to office and these are twenty year old musicians you couldn’t really expect that from them. As years evolved and people kept making great music but didn’t, you know, reshape the democratic party (audience laughter) a lot of those people who were trying to be down with Hip Hop but didn’t really get it got disillusioned and then looked down on us for failing, when we were failing to do something you never should have expected us to do.

and the conversation continued,

and something they’ve never asked of like a Neil Young or a Tom Petty. That’s what I always say, nobody ever complains that John Coltrane didn’t present enough of a political platform because he was speaking to your soul in a way that music does which I think is a more of a primal profound thing than any words ever do, and I think Hip Hop does that too.

Here’s the video:

All that’s left to see is Charles Gibson doing the Superman dance.

(via Ill Doctrine)