What some hip-hop opponents here might not be aware of is that there are many people within the hip-hop community who feel just as antagonistic regarding certain strains of rap as they do. I'm sure some of you have seen the Chris Rock (an ardent supporter of hip-hop) routine on rap ("it's hard to defend this ****"). Hip-hop music is not just one thing - it can be taken in any number of directions - but it has suffered (in the eyes of many) greatly as a result of its own popularity. As soon as major labels realised in the early 1990s how much money could be made from rap, the style became streamlined and packaged for suburban consumption. All that post-N.W.A. talk about gangstas and b*****s (okay, well not all of it - but probably most)? That wasn't aimed at inner-city black kids, it was being made for ghetto fantasy loving suburban white kids (the majority of people who were consuming rap at the beginning of the 90s). In other words, it wasn't the black kids making stars out of rappers - it was the white kids. A parallel can be drawn between what happened with disco in the 70s and what happened to rap in the 90s. When disco began in the early 70s it was, for all intents and purposes, "underground" - finding favour mainly amongst predominantly gay party-goers. It was only once the "straight clubs" latched onto the sound that it became a record-marketer's dream. Suddenly every record label was wanting a piece of the cake and before you knew it even the most staunch rock 'n' rollers were jumping on the band wagon. What was once a style of music being made with at least some degree of artistic integrity became cookie-cutter music for the masses. Exactly the same thing has happened with rap. Of course, disco was subjected to the same kind of negativity as rap has been and, I would guess, mainly by the same kinds of people: folks who were looking only at the post-streamline product rather than the roots and what had become the "underground" variety of the genre.
