Image via Sean Zanni/Getty Images
Evan Nabavian‘s YouTube algorithm is chaotic good.
Real hip-hop won. It’s heralded at the Kennedy Center. Its ephemera is auctioned at Sotheby’s. It is allotted eight minutes at the Grammys between Jon Batiste and Sabrina Carpenter. It’s poked and prodded by soon-to-be management consultants at Columbia University. It’s a Jeopardy clue. It features prominently in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. It’s in an Amazon Business commercial. Devotees can come out of the closet and geriatrics commenting on the “Time’s Up” video can be even more pugnacious in their defense of the culture.
The authors of the sacred texts sample warm finger foods at the Gracie Mansion. Elsewhere, Kool Keith and Ced Gee peruse a street peddler’s paperbacks outside the Apollo. The guys who taught you how to flip “Funky Drummer” and “Synthetic Substitution” are rhyming over a beat that came out of a Motorola Nextel. They invert “The New Rap Language” of their forebears such that their flow is sparse in the extreme, eschewing the natural rhythm of the beat. More Blueface than Just-Ice, though the Ultramagnetic MCs were iconoclasts before it was cool (Ced Gee in 1988: “Sometimes I rhyme offbeat, awkward.”) “125 St” is modern to the point of apostasy, so it won’t be feted by elites or curmudgeons. But maybe that is its own reward.
We rely on your support to keep POW alive. Please take a second to donate on Patreon!
