We all know it’s stupid to be on some ol’ “mainstream rap sucks! I only like shit that sells less than 100 copies, cuz that’s the realness!” shit these days. Leave that for clueless midwestern whiteys who wouldn’t know “realness” or even “hip-hop” if it did a drive-by and mowed them all down in a hail of bullets and non-navel-gazing lyrics. The real struggle is not against mainstream rap. The real struggle is against mainstream coverage of rap.
What hath Robert Christgau wrought? He finds the demo tape of a group that is so pathetic, not even your friendly neighborhood Gossiping Bitch would waste much breath sonning them, and he thinks, “Hey, these fingernails-on-a-chalkboard voices, this complete lack of rhythm, these pointless cultural references–this is the best rap album in the past five years!” And so comes the effusive, and repeated, praise in the Village Voice. Followed by a four-star review of a fucking DEMO in Rolling Stone. And that’s just the beginning. (Et tu, Salon?)
Listen up before we bring Big Pun back from the dead to John Madden tackle ya corpse and hoist it on the cross at the hip-hop tabernacle, “Christ”gau: Northern State is completely irrelevant to hip-hop, and you’re a sucker for hyping them up. The floodgates are now open. Every trendy NYC music journalist chick and hipster is out there with their stupid fucking “Jew. Lo” belly shirts (note to whoever is responsible for those shirts: they’re not funny. Please stop immediately) and thick-rimmed glasses, braying to each other, “Ohmigod! She said she wrote about The Bell Jar for her book report! I wrote about The Bell Jar, too! Finally, rap has become a legitimate form of music! We can have our own dope phat rappin’ parties without all those damn black folks!” And then they continue on to shove Sarai, Fannypack, and other talentless hacks down the public’s throat.
These are the people who gave a greenlight to Marci X. They must be stopped.
Look, if you don’t know rap, fine. Just don’t write about it. Give that money to, say, the fine folks behind ego trip (aka The Bible of Gossiping Bitches), and let them write about it. But don’t go searching for the next great white rapper and bring us pathetic shit like Northern State and songs about cameltoes. Next thing you know, that chick on MTV’s True Life: I’m Getting Divorced who called herself “Slim JG” and was married to a crackhead will be the hot new shit, right?
In your efforts to look beyond Jay-Z, Snoop, 50 Cent, and the other chart-toppers, you have completely missed the point. Rap isn’t supposed to speak to YOU, you ivory tower-dwelling, coke-party-attending fuckwits. It’s supposed to appeal to people who are actual fans of the music. It’s supposed to appeal to people who actually understand hip-hop. You are not among that group of people. So stop desperately searching for groups who take your pasty worldview, shape it into elementary-school rhymes, and paste it over laughably poor production so you can tout them as the greatest thing to happen to hip-hop since “Whoomp! There It Is!”
All these groups don’t deserve even a tiny fraction of the ink you’ve wasted on them. Your desperate attempts to sound “down” by writing about these groups is a complete insult, and you’re all a bunch of idiots who should stick to trying to out-hipster Pitchforkmedia. We hip-hoppers don’t want you to join us—especially not if your “party invite” is a bunch of meritless bullshit. Drooling over Northern State as the start of a great feminist movement in hip-hop doesn’t get you into the club; it shows that you haven’t been paying attention for at least the past decade.
So here’s the deal: You don’t write about rap music anymore, and we won’t write about the finer points of drinking cosmopolitans or how emo our pants are. OK?