On the Outrageousness of Hip-Hop as Significant Art

Stanley Crouch writes with about as much insight on as wide a range of topics (from Louis Armstrong to George W. Bush) as anyone alive. Today he assesses the move to exalt popular rap recordings as art that actually describes the situation of African-American people. As Crouch puts it, rap doesn't express the suffering of Black people; it causes it.

But it gets better:

This arrives through a media that has been bamboozled into thinking the expression of "black culture" can be reduced to gold teeth, pistol-waving, hedonism, whorishness, pathological narcissism, misogyny, drop-down pants and illiteracy.

And there's historical perspective:

When Elvis Presley and the early rock 'n' roll bunch appeared, they knew what they were and so did their fans: entertainers followed by teenagers. With the '60s came all of the pretensions and college students, assuming that whatever they liked should get the same credibility as what adults appreciated. We then saw the arrival of rock magazines.

It did not take long for the hustlers in rap to get the drift.

Put Crouch's column in the SWNID Must-Read Hall of Fame.