Least tragic hip-hop deaths…

I don’t want to be thought insensitive — especially I don’t want to be thought insensitive by a bunch of gang bangers who hold their guns sideways while they blow people away — but this post cracked me up!

Does anybody know if this guy was an actual rapper, or if the cops just assumed he was a rapper because he got shot?

I know that’s a serious question, and the other citations and comments on this post are serious too, but my style is to smile at that shit. Take 2Pac, number ten on the list of least tragic… there’s gotta be a weed carrier out there who should replace 2Pac. Yet I always think of 2Pac as the only Marin County rapper I know, and there’s a disconnect there, until you understand more about the projects at Marin City.

Cobb (Michael David Cobb Bowen) cites the “least tragic” post while writing of his equivocal love for Hiphop. He says, “You know something mysteriously wrong is going on when you have a category like ‘Least Tragic Hip Hop Deaths’.” He brings a lot of other threads together, including Lonnae Parker’s Washington Post article today:

Last spring, I got together with some other moms from the first generation of hip-hop. We decided to distribute free T-shirts with words that counter some of the most violent, anti-intellectual and degrading cultural messages: You look better without the bullet holes. Put the guns down. Or my favorite: You want this? Graduate! We called it the Hip-Hop Love Project.

Others are trying their own versions of taking back the music. In Baltimore, spoken-word poet Tonya Maria Matthews, aka JaHipster, is launching her own “Groove Squad.” The idea is to get together a couple dozen women to go to clubs prepared to walk off the dance floor en masse if the music is openly offensive or derogatory. “There’s no party without sisters on the dance floor,” she told me. In New York, hip-hop DJ and former model Beverly Bond formed Black Girls Rock! to try to change the portrayal of black women in the music and influence the women who are complicit in it. “We don’t want to be hypersexualized,” said Joan Morgan, a hip-hop writer and part of the group, but we don’t want to be erased, either.
— Lonnae O’Neal Parker

Final analysis for me is to read the comments thread at bol’s “least tragic” post. For me, Hiphop is about the language. The commenters’ back and forth on 2Pac, the “hateration” and the slams on one artist or another, the ethical asides, the serious intent of some commenters and the dry humor of others makes the post entirely worthwhile. I’m grateful to Cobb for surfacing it. Cobb says this and I can say no more:

As usual at Cobb, I think of taxonomies. And because it was my generation that was responsible for investing so much into hiphop, these taxonomies are deeply intertwined with black identity. So I must speak of these in terms of black people and all of black music. Black music is Hiphop, Gospel, Blues, Funk, Reggae, Jazz and R&B. Seven nice round categories. Each of those expresses a different set of values best. The tragedy of hiphop is that while it has the potential to sample expressions of all because of its open structure, that it has been reduced to the narrow emotional spectrum of lust, greed, anger and frustration. Now one can split hairs and say that is really the fault of rap lyrics; that hiphop music can express a broad range of emotion instrumentally. My response is that jazz musicians and R&B artists have appropriated all that. I would allow one other exception to the completeness of this taxonomy and it is an important one, and that is the emotions of dance music. When Missy Elliot cranks out one of her jams, she has got the groove nailed and the infectious beat. I’m going to call that Funk, not Hiphop. And in that realm, I’ll gladly admit things get complicated for me.