Kendrick Lamar and Drake: Brief Reflections

It’s much ado over nothing at all.

I have to admit that I took only a passing interest in this recent and overblown beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, since I’m not a hip-hop fan.

However, I do have ears. I’ve been listening to this music since at least 1980. I can recall when popular rap tunes on the radio did not exist. As late as 1985, hip-hop tunes that were big hits on R & B radio could be counted on one hand. That (in my opinion) is how it should be. Not that Black American pop music of forty years ago was anything great in its own right: it could be horribly slick and sterile, a lot of synth-driven blackfaced white noise. I don’t have to name names (okay, DeBarge and Donna Summer were classic examples of what I mean). But forty years ago, there were options besides choking on one stupid, belligerent hip-hop track after another. Today, those options don’t really exist, because everything has been infested by this fake hood “culture.”

How it is that a relatively insignificant genre of Black music came to represent our entire cultural heritage is indeed baffling. There is a huge discrepancy between what Black Americans really are and how they are represented in “hip-hop.” But the same can be said about white “Hollywood.” In fact, “Hip-hop” (the so-called “culture,” as if this is all we really are) is Black…