I am not into hip-hop. I have never been. I never look right in the clothes. I walk too stiffly to roll with gangstas. I’ve had a lisp all my life that makes me sound dumb when I try to sing or rap. I am aware that this makes me uncool and nerdy. Although my age puts me squarely in with the bracket that grew up on hip hop, I am by all accounts an outsider to the culture. Yet I’ve got nothing against it. The only way this affects the substance of my argument is that there will be no name-dropping, no insiderey mention of “talented artists” to confirm my cultural cred.

There seems to be this unspoken theory, stuck there in the backs of the minds of anyone pondering the state of the modern world, that Culture originally floated down to us on seraphim wings. Culture, by this theory, was originally divinely inspired. Any developments since the dawn of time are, by definition, a corruption.

Therefore, the coming of age of every new generation has always been accompanied by hand-wringing over what the whippersnappers are into these days.

So.

Hip-hop makes our young men into violent misogynists. It makes young women into sluts. Fifty years ago the same thing happened with rock n’roll.
I hear Elvis swung his hips around sumthin’ awful! Decades later, rock is iconic. The music, the culture, the celebrities are ingrained into The American Identity. Modern rock has stolen hip-hop’s birthright.

The generation before that probably also said that swing dancing promotes sin, which in my humble opinion, is not necessarily a bad thing.

The young ‘uns were even out of control 3,000 years ago. Scope out Ezekiel 23:

1: The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying,
2: Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother:
3: And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity.

Gals like that are great at parties. Later in one sister’s life:
19: Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt.
20: For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
21: Thus thou calledst to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth, in bruising thy teats by the Egyptians for the paps of thy youth.

People say this stuff about everything. People said Paris Hilton was ruining culture. They say Facebook and blogging are ruining the world. They say cable TV is ruining the world. I guess we would all be better off if we lived our lives the exact same way the previous generation lived its lives. We would all be better off if, instead of developing, nothing ever changed at all.

We’re not all perfect. No one is a model citizen. No culture has ever been an absolutely perfect culture. Whining about the decline of civilization is as old as civilization itself. The only thing that’s actually being lost is one generation’s domination over the culture, as the next pries it out of their reluctant steely grip. The hand-wringing is, by and large, the expression of resentment over a loss of cultural power.

Are there pernicious elements to modern culture? You bet. But does everyone seriously believe that they just sprung up out of nowhere, that we just made up misogyny — among other things — all by ourselves? We got it from the last generation of culture; we inherited the art, the social hierarchy, the everyday social interactions, and in turn made all this into our own, just like every generation had done before. We play with it a little; maybe fight it a little, maybe accept it a little, and who knows what else.

But for some perspective on this phenomenon, I shall cite Sturgeon’s law: ninety percent of everything is crap.

For someone to sound the ‘end of the world’ alarms, he invariably has to cite the very worst examples of hip-hop culture, the gimmicks and stupidity that pander to the lowest common denominator of market shares; basically, everything you see on BET, and take these base examples to represent the entire culture. This is like pointing out a girl’s most hideous Halloween costume and then talking about her as though she wears it to work every day.

Even if someone did dress like a sexy jungle cat every day, so what? Bootyshaking and making cuss words rhyme is simply not the end of the world. It strikes me as arrogant for someone to pronounce it so. It seems to me that the biggest motivation behind such a pronouncement is to try and arrogantly put yourself above the culture, that this would be done out of fear and lack of understanding. That, for me, is the key: how can someone declare that hip-hop is leading us down a bad path? How would such a person know how any of this will turn out? Even Miss Cleo isn’t that good.

The introduction of mass media in the 20th century obviously put a megaphone in the hands of almost anyone who wanted it. No longer is hip-hop or any culture fully “marginalized.” No longer is it something you can find only by being cool enough, by knowing the right people, having the right style and knowing exactly what block to hang out on at the right time of night. Now it’s on your boob tube and in your face, even if it’s part of Sturgeon’s crappy majority, and if you don’t like it, you actually have to put some effort into avoiding it. Those who dislike it might resent having to actively avoid it. So they take their megaphone and rail against it louder and more stridently, which usually comes off as comic to the cool kids — the people they’re trying to malign.

Am I saying all the old-time fogeys shold just take a chill pill and let modern bootyshakers run amok? Absolutely not. The hand-wringing performs two valuable services for hip-hop.

Yes, it serves as a conscience, identifying and keeping the nastiest, most depraved elements in check. But it also gives legitimacy to an urge to push the envelope. A young subculture, revelling in its newfound acceptance, requires its detractors as a way of keeping its fresh, edgy feeling.

They are the waters being tested. As such, they are a vital part of the culture too. Offending the detractors is the surest way to know you’re crossing boundaries; crossing boundaries means you’re discovering something new, and that is the job of art.