yogurt spelled backwards...

Hip hop is stale. Besides a slight intuition that De La Soul maybe hip hop's first gay group, the blandness that has managed to consume today's hip hop music is the first thing that comes to mind after watching this video. In hip hop's current landscape, the principles of business and desire to make profits have drained the creativity and life out of the music. With billions of dollars at stake, and as scary as this may sound, everything about hip hop today is a well thought out, calculated move. An artists image, sound, video and even beef are all strategic moves aimed at a designated audience. In the underground where creativity is suppose to reign supreme, many of the acts maintain an arrogant "I'm ahead of my time" type facade, that most times leaves them looking bitter and envious of those in the actual spotlight. Even the "hip hop is dead" nature of this post, is one that has been repeated far too often in the past year, but this love/hate relationship that myself and others have with hip hop is a derivative of this corporate bullshit that has transformed hip hop. But back in '89 there was no underground or mainstream, just hip hop. And when I was drawing peace signs and daisies on my notebook, De La Soul were just 3 kids from Long Island that gave themselves silly nicknames, found a few old records, looped the breaks and just rhymed. Though they obviously stood out because they refused to wear cazal shades, shell toes and big gucci links, no one really seemed to care and people just enjoyed the music. And the video even shows they gained alot of respect from their peers. Can you imagine if this video aired today? With this zero tolerance for gay shit in hip hop, I'm not too sure a group like De La Soul would be able to infiltrate the hip hop core the way they did in 80's. I don't care how you look at it, but if a rapper was interviewed on MTV today and said he got his nickname because he liked eating yogurt, chances are their career won't last long. And if you are going to have some sort of symbol affiliated with your group, it better have some sort of drug-related alternative meaning (i.e., Jeezy's snowman), I'm not to sure the daisy would work. Record execs would promptly change their names from Plug 1, 2 and 3, to Slug 1, 2, and 3. Besides noting that hip hop is extremely homophobic, the point is we have begun to take ourselves too seriously so much so that the chances of me seeing another group as innovative as De La Soul in my lifetime are very slim. Hip hop is stale.