There are times when it is no fun living out here on the left coast. Sometimes you just need to let out your rat-tail and have a good time. So if you’re in the vicinity of Pensacola-Gulf Shores-Mobile this weekend, you may want to head to the “Last Great American Roadhouse,” the Flora-Bama, for the Eighteenth Annual Interstate Mullet Toss. I can assure you that the fish won’t be the only mullets you’ll spot on the beach.
Rap is dying and I'm readying the coffin. Catch me on one of my angry days and I'd probably volunteer to pull the plug. I've never been a fan, never really claimed to understand the appeal, never appreciated the way it denigrates women and glorifies violence (ok, not all, but in general). When I hear a rap song on the radio these days it reminds me of what my parents must have felt the time I put the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" on the car radio during a family outing.
It really doesn't matter what I think about rap; its death is inevitable. It's suffering from the same disease that most anything that has the slightest hint of originality or importance soon succumbs to: Corporatitis. From the very day that Steven Tyler's lips broke through the wall to expose RUN-DMC to the world, the musico-corporate complex has had rap by the throat. As soon as corporate America knew that it had something it could sell to the young, white middle-class the deathwatch began. First they figured out the formula, then expanded the formula just enough so that it could envelop and eventually consume anything that threatened it, and finally rehashed it over and over again until it was so homogenized that it could easily be converted into a song heard at a dentist office near you. Though record sales do seem to be strong for the rap industry, it seems to be surviving despite itself.
But the biggest problem is that this dollar-sign mentality runs straight down to the very "artist." If it is obvious to you that originality will get you on NPR but the bling-bling is with the status-quo on MTV, then which one do you think a kid from the inner city is going to choose? Rap has always sat on such a razor's edge that infusing it with originality has been risky. And besides, how does one alter the formula? Isn't there only so much room for change within the genre itself?
But like anything else that corporate America kills, rap's death won't be quick. It will probably be more like a blood letting than a strangulation. Yet if we are to be optimistic, something better will come along. It always does.
