The trouble with backpack rap
- June 13, 2006 - 4:10 PM
-
PLATINUM POST105 Comments
Post A Comment
Yesterday one of my colleagues here at XXL suggested that I think backpack rap is boring because backpack rappers tend to complain a lot. In actuality, I don’t have a problem with backpack rap. The subgenre—like any other in hip-hop—contains a wide spectrum of material, from the hot, to the fairly decent, to the wackest garbage conceivable. I can’t stand flat-toned rappers spitting impossibly abstract rhymes over dark, predictable basement beats, for instance. But I’m certainly not mad at records with cutting-edge concepts, innovative soundscapes, and thought-provoking lyrics.
My problem is not with backpack rappers. My problem is with hardcore backpack rap fans.
Those dudes kill me. They have to be the most self-righteous Stans under the sun. Let me run down the profile.
You can find these hotheads in the record store copping a holier-than-thou attitude, spitting obscure hip-hop trivia with an almost religious fervor. They are the ones you see in the back of the club, glaring when the DJ drops a 50 joint.
These knuckle-shufflers harbor an obscene amount of nostalgia for a golden era that they were never a part of, and a baffling level of resentment for all that is gangsta and/or flashy and fly. They despise the music industry, without ever having had any contact with it. They romanticize poverty, worship political rappers (who, truth be told, often don’t want these guys as fans in the first place), and demonize any artist that doesn’t fit into their rigid definition of “real hip-hop.” They deliberately ignore anything that calls their limited conception of “real hip-hop” into question. (The Jay-Z/dead prez collabo “Hell Yeah,” for example.) They have little interest in dialogue. More often than not, they are very young, suburban white dudes.
Adam Mansbach nailed it in his novel Angry Black White Boy:
“How, Macon wondered as he cut a path toward the small stage at the back of the club, had the backpack rap set gotten so self-righteous so quickly? These kids were as dogmatic as the bitterest old-school has-beens, oozing with keep-it-realness and wistful reminiscences of a misimagined past in which hip-hop hadn’t been shackled to capitalism. The backpackers scorned commercial success and radio airplay—corrupting the culture, yo—but spent all their money on niche-marketed hip-hop accoutrements, from breakdance videos to old-school Pumas. They ordered water at the bar, not for fear of being carded or out of desire to stay sharp-witted for the freestyle ciphers to come, but because their giddily professed pennilessness nudged them closer to the underground rappers they admired—rappers who for the most part would have traded all the adolescent-male dick-riding for a major-label advance check and used the money to move out of the projects.”
I used to get a lot of letters from backpackers. No matter how many articles I did on Lyrics Born or Mos Def or Talib Kweli or J5, whenever I wrote on Jay-Z, the Backpack Brigade would inundate me with outraged mail. One dude fumed that Jay was the height of superficiality and that I was wasting media space on money-hoes-and-clothes rap. (Do you fools listen to music or do you just skim through it?) Another guy called Xzibit an “ass-kissing establishment man” after I reviewed one of his releases, characterizing X and radio rap in general as “vacuous self-aggrandizement, misogyny, and status-peddling.”
What’s unsettling about the backpack boys is that their critique of mainstream hip-hop doesn’t actually fall too far from hipster’s ironic interest in crunk. Both feel free to mock elements of black culture. Both are certain of their own aesthetic and/or intellectual superiority. Both can’t manage to see the humanity of those outside their own narrow worldview.
So yeah, give me Zion I’s Deep Water Slang any day of the week. But keep those Zion I fans far, far away from me.
-
MTV to Air Tech N9ne Tour Special [Video]
-
GZA Looks to Drop Science in High School Classrooms
-
Cash Money Records Sells 500 Millionth Song
-
Rockie Fresh “I’m Wit It”
-
Wiz Khalifa ft. Juicy J “Gone”
you’re a bitch
why you talking about black when you canadian?
this might be the greatest summary of backpackers that i’ve ever read in my entire life!!
Wow, I didn’t know there was a country called Black…
smh@ on1e
so there’s no black people in canada…LMAOOOOOOOO whut an idiot!
hey props for this blog…and for the most part it is true…
like a former backpack allum turned mega-superstar once said:
The underground just spunned around and did a 360
Now these kids diss me and act like some big sissies
“Oh, he just did some shit with Missy,
so now he thinks he’s too big to do some shit with MC Get-Bizzy”
Yo you speak the truth i don’t read your blog as much as i should but you have some realy good points. thank you for somthing other than the reguler blog.
I used to say around the late 90′s, that if it wasn’t for the internet that these kids probably wouldn’t exist.
The internet (and increased media attention on hiphop) gave the super-suburbian backpackers a way to “learn” about hiphop without having to interact with it’s originators. Now they know everything and act all elitist.
We called them “culture bandits” because they will rock the gear, talk slang, and shoot for affirmation but then when they get older, they can revert back to their surburban ways and probably will end up voting republican in the future. Perfect example are those Anticon d-bags.
Some cats are cool but they are few and far between.
You can’t know everything about hip hop unless you experience it. I’m a backpacker (big backpack fan) and a back pack rapper. But I respect Wayne, Drizzy, Jay, Yeezy and everyone like them excuses a few. I hate those bad fans too.
P.S. Waka Flocka is still garbage!!!
AWWWWWWW I love it… the funniest part is that most the backpack rap fans reading this don’t or won’t even know that you are talking about them. Most of them don’t wear backpacks anymore…. but you sure do give a lot of indicators in there… as for me, I love the collabo between dp and jigga… as well as jigga and linkin park… shit all of jigga’s latest joints for that matter… but I am also a dp fan to the bone…. i hate the industry, love the culture, hate the system, organize for change… and if i got a backpack on, its cuz my uzi weighs a ton!
Holla!!!
yea…alot of these so-called purists is that they never truely EXPERIENCED the eras that they think they know so much about…
alot of these 80′s babies grew up on hiphop when the mid-90′s and assume that’s “real hiphop”
speak on them about anything prior to ’94 they won’t have a clue…
one day i posted a quotable from melle mel from his song called “1984″ which was REAL ahead of its time…it tripped me out that half of them didn’t even KNOW who melle mel was…
Good Read