Why are hip hop critics, artists and fans so quick to proclaim it dead?
I’ve just been reading and getting slowly riled up by Simon Reynolds’ meditations on hip hop on The Guardian site. The contention of his piece is that, as Nas sang back in 2006, “hip hop is dead.”
I don’t get this desire amongst hip hop writers and artists to declare the genre dead. It comes around frequently – either in braggadocio rhymes by rappers on the cusp of retirement claiming the game will be dead without them or in treatises like Reynolds’ that propose that the artform has grown stale and morbid, teetering around on its last legs, dragged down by bling and bullshit.
Why not express a more complex view that all genres and forms of music wax and wane? Declare that “rock music is dead”, as balding buffoon Billy Corgan once did, and you’ll get short shrift. But somehow, even huge hip hop obsessives seem OK with denigrating the genre, suggesting somehow that it is incapable of regenerating itself, making out that it’s like Dr Who on his last incarnation.
That quickness of critics and even artists to organise hip hop’s funeral shows what little faith they have in the inherent poetry of rhyming and the way in which hip hop has always developed over time. These blankets statements are cheap journalistic tricks but still, they get me every time.







