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Over the past few weeks, as I've read blog after blog and article after article promoting the release of Kanye's Graduation and 50 Cent's Curtis, I've had a growing sense of unease about the whole thing. At first it was just a general disinterest in either album, but as September 11th has drawn closer and closer, that feeling has turned into something bordering on disgust at the decision, whether by them or their labels, to promote the albums around 9/11.
For the sake of full disclosure, let me say up front that September 11th had a huge impact on me personally. It's the one day of the year that I wish I could just fast-forward through so that I don't have to rehash 2001 over and over again, through the overwhelming amount of newspaper articles, t.v. segments, memorials and every other reminder of what happened six years ago. Several of my friends died in the Trade Center and for a few hours I thought my father had been killed as well. He worked in the Twin Towers but had taken a flight out to San Francisco from Newark Airport that morning (as it turned out, his flight left about 10 minutes after the infamous Flight 93, though it was impossible to get confirmation at the time from the airline that he was not on board UA93 - I didn't get a call from him until about three hours later, at which point I had to break the news to him that the WTC no longer existed). I mention this as a concession that I am undoubtedly more sensitive to this anniversary than the average hip hop fan, and I admit that it's entirely possible that I am overreacting. I am still surprised, however, that no one (that I'm aware of) has called out Kanye or 50 for their choice of album release dates. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, though, looking back at how hip hop reacted to 9/11 in the first place.
When Snoop, Daz and Kurupt knocked over replicas of New York skyscrapers in their video for New York, it generated several responses from NY rappers, further escalating the increasingly violent East Coast/West Coast "beef" of the time. Some people got so emotional about it that they drove down to the video shoot in Times Square and let off a few rounds just to let Snoop know how disrespected they felt by the song.
But when New York was quite literally attacked and two of the city's greatest buildings got knocked down in real life? The reaction from the hip hop community - a community born and raised in New York, let's not forget - was almost nonexistent. A couple of weeks after 9/11, Jay-Z dropped a freestyle for DJ Clue, bragging that even Osama Bin Laden couldn't affect the sales of The Blueprint (an album that "dropped the same day as The Towers"). Soon after that, Paul Cain released his own freestyle for Clue with the line that he "had more A-K clips than Bin Laden," generating a day's worth of controversy on MTVNews, but not much more than that. Perhaps the most lasting legacy that 9/11 had on hip hop was the fact that Biggie's Juicy had to be edited to remove the line, "Blow up like the Word Trade."
That's an amazingly small response to what has defined the politics, and a fair amount of the culture, of America over the past six years. The fallout from 9/11 has left a wealth of material for any politically-minded rapper to cover - kids (hip hop's main demographic!) going off to fight in Iraq, the government's increasing abuses of power and racial profiling, to name just a few potential issues for any aspiring Chuck D to draw upon - yet you don't hear anything about it in mainstream rap. Perhaps it's just another sign that hip hop, a genre of music that was once the bogeyman of Middle America due to its outspoken political views, is no longer politically relevant. Sure, hip hop briefly embraced its roots once again when Katrina came through, with Kanye and Juvenile speaking out however ineffectively, but in hindsight that seems to have been just a momentary spasm of political awareness. I'll never agree with Nas that "Hip Hop Is Dead," but it sure ain't what it used to be.
All of this is my way of saying that, while I'm well aware of the impending release of what are proclaimed to be the biggest hip hop albums of the year (at least until December) - the unrelenting exposure on tv, radio, magazines and blogs have made Graduation and Curtis all but unavoidable - I can't say that I'm the least bit interested in either of them. I don't think I'd be all that excited about the prospect of seventeen more tracks from the lyrical mastermind behind Ayo Technology regardless of its release date, but under different circumstances I'd probably be running out to buy Kanye's album. As it is, though, I can't get past what has to be one of the most arrogant marketing ploys by any artist (let alone two). And I'm aware of how ridiculous it would be to expect low key promotions from either Kanye or 50 Cent - they wouldn't be what they are today if it wasn't for their almost cartoonish levels of arrogance. Yet to build their promotions around "Hip Hop's 9/11," as if their album releases were an event somehow comparable to this tragedy, is something I just can't get behind.
R.I.P. Kev, Al, WC, Brian, Amy
9/11/2007 12:01:29 AM posted by Fresh