| If you don't like the direction Hip Hop is going, blame it on the music industry. They control Hip Hop's direction — it's not in our hands anymore. As soon as record companies, radio, and MTV realized they could profit highly off of Hip Hop, it was over. Record labels realized Hip Hop's marketable potential in the late 1970s when some record producers saw the large crowds Hip Hop jams and b-boy battles were drawing. Sylvia Robinson was the first to jump on the bandwagon and quickly signed the Sugar Hill Gang to her Sugar Hill Records, despite the fact that no members of Sugar Hill were experienced rappers. In fact, it has been said that Sugar Hill's Big Bank Hank stole his entire verse for "Rapper's Delight" from Grandmaster Caz. The first major label to sign a rapper was Mercury in 1980 when they signed Kurtis Blow. The relative successes of Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks" and the gigantic national impact of "Rapper's Delight" opened the eyes of the music industry — here was a brand new form of music to capitalize off of. By 1985, over twenty labels were releasing Hip Hop. Rap's popularity soared along with profits. Major labels like Jive became big players in the rap industry, putting out records over the next few years by Too Short, Whodini, Steady B, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and others. A series of | corny "Hip Hop" movies came out — Breakin' I and II, Krush Groove — and a new video channel called M.T.V., which had previously refused to play "Black videos," finally consented after much pressure to play rap and R&B. Radio, with few exceptions, still refused to acknowledge rap as a profitable music form and ignored it, but the rest of the music industry's eyes were open, looking for the right artist that would make them the millions they demanded. In 1989 something happened that would change the face of Hip Hop: a little known group from Los Angeles called N.W.A. released a groundbreaking album — Straight Outta Compton. Straight Outta tapped into America's fascination and lust for violent imagery and exploded on the charts amidst a tidal wave of controversy and publicity. Record labels immediately took notice; here was a genre of Hip Hop that would sell and sell big! Suddenly it seemed like "gangster" groups were popping up everywhere — Compton's Most Wanted, Ice T, Above the Law, Eazy E, Geto Boys, and DJ Quik. Labels took notice which types of groups sold big and which ones didn't. While more traditional Hip Hop albums like Main Source's Breaking Atoms and KRS1's Return of the Boom Bap had only minimal successes in sales, N.W.A.'s Niggaz4Life enjoyed multiplatinum status. In the hunt for the next million-selling artist, labels began to shy away from | certain types of groups, instead preferring to sign the proven formula of gangsterism and playerism. In turn, artists wised up to the labels' game, seeing who and what type of rap was pulling in the big contracts. Soon what started as an elite group of "gangster rappers" became an explosion of countless numbers of gangster-driven groups. Soon commercial radio took notice of the enormous sales rap was generating, and Hip Hop's direction was changed. This trend has continued and, in fact, has gained momentum going into the late '90s. Fueled by promised big sales, groups now consistently aim towards the formulas that draw big sales and regular rotation on commercial radio: playerism and hard-core lyrics. It is harder than ever for a Hip Hop artist to get a foot in the door without resorting to the gangster formula. And the more groups that sell out to please a label or get signed, or concentrate on radio friendly music, the more Hip Hop's direction continues to swing downhill, towards the players and Gs that dominate rap now. It is a direction that is driven by multimillion dollar white owned labels and radio; no longer do the original people who created Hip Hop as a form of ghetto expression control it, and the result is a music and culture on the decline. Q-Tip once proclaimed "Record company people are shady." A truer lyric has never been said in Hip Hop. Hip Hop has lost much of its energy due to the money and lust labels and commercial radio have infected it with, and I, for one, miss how Hip Hop used to be. |