Hip-hop is no longer cooler than me

It's a sad day when a farm boy from Iowa can say that about a musical genre he once loved. When will the awful dance crazes end?

By Paul Kix

Read more: Hip-Hop, Dance, Music, Rap, Arts & Entertainment

Barely Political

Mike Gravel does the Soulja Boy dance.

May 12, 2008 | I must have been 8 when I heard N.W.A.'s "Fuck tha Police." That seems about right, because us Iowa farm kids heard everything of cultural significance a year or two after it was important, and I remember being in third grade (this was 1989) when my life changed for the better. I was on the bus, with an older fat kid everyone called Speed sitting the row in front of me. Speed and I had a special bond: We were perhaps the only kids in central Iowa to love rap. "Listen to this," he said, discreetly sliding me his cassette player and mix tape. It wasn't just the swear words, though at first that was a big part of N.W.A.'s appeal. It was Ice Cube's anger, and Eazy-E's bemused inventiveness, and Dr. Dre's beats. As I grew up, N.W.A. led me to Snoop Dogg's "Doggystyle," which led to the oeuvre of Biggie, and the life and times of one Shawn Carter. But what I loved about hip-hop -- what I still love about it -- is its brashness. The uncouth bravura of Wildean M.C.s is intoxicating.

This brings us, inevitably, to the problem with hip-hop today. A genre whirled out of the grist of urban pain and worn as a low-slung hat and baggy jeans has somehow slipped on clown shoes and taken up night classes in pantomime. Its dances are silly, its beats infantile, its rhymes lazy. I am sorry to report this, but hip-hop is no longer cooler than me. I've known it to be true for some time but dared not acknowledged it -- until I saw Bo Ryan do the "Soulja Boy." Bo Ryan is the men's basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin. He is old, he's white, and he should have nothing to do with pop-cultural relevance. And yet there he is, online, dancing the Soulja Boy, an ongoing craze among young aficionados based on the song "(Crank Dat) Soulja Boy" by an artist of the same name. Soulja Boy's Internet sales of his 2007 self-titled album have exceeded 3.3 million copies, the most ever on the Web.

The problem isn't that Ryan fails inexorably in his attempt at the Soulja Boy. It's that he nails it. The slight bend of the knees and cross step, the rednecky hop and flip of the wrist, the goofy Superman in flight -- it's all, alas, straight-up Soulja Boy. In fact, if you compare Ryan's rendition with the original, you, too, might find yourself preferring the subtlety of Ryan's moves. (His cross steps aren't as aggrandized, for one.) Are these not trying days when a 60-year-old Wisconsinite improves "the game," when even Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel tries his hand at the Soulja Boy?

We are witnessing nothing less than the Macarena-zation of a genre. Because of Soulja Boy's success, industry execs now demand that new artists have dances at the ready to accompany their albums. The dances help drive up sales, that fast-disappearing commodity. And so the airwaves and Interwebs are still filthy with song-and-dance numbers, like Pop It Off Boyz' "Crank Dat Batman" and last year's "Chicken Noodle Soup" song, which accomplishes the impossible by being dumber than it sounds but remains great fun for 50-year-olds in middle management.

Hip-hop hasn't always had the most discerning taste; witness the electric slide and M.C. Hammer. But the music's coolness used to be matched by the culture it inspired: break dancers working to DJ Grandmaster Flash; horny kids grinding to 'Pac and Dre; poor kids krumping as a way out, every move informed by the street and its music. The problem today is that the newest dances are informed by nothing more than their potential profit margins. And in that grab for accessibility, the songs lose their credibility.

Or at least that's one popular theory. But I think this theory is ludicrous. Hip-hop has sought commercial viability since the mid-'90s. Jay-Z has built an entire career out of finding listeners like me, and you'd be hard-pressed to say his music suffers because of his pandering. I think, instead, today's young M.C.s are given too much credit, as if they're choosing to dumb it down. The problem with the dances of hip-hop -- and with the genre as a whole -- is that these artists are in fact choosing to do what they're capable of. This is their best, people. And I say that because the only thing more insipid than the dances are the songs themselves.

Next page: Was Nas right that "hip-hop is dead"?