Hip hop isn't as popular as you think it is

Despite hip-hop's effects on the pop charts, we've yet to see the big networks really attempt to integrate rapping into their pop star competition shows, as Alyssa Rosenberg points out:

 That's Ta-Nehisi Coates. What I think is most interesting about that comment is the presumption  that the big networks would integrate rapping into their pop-star competition shows. No doubt someone out there is already bristling at my use of the word "presumption" and is ready to argue that I am racist for doing so. But it is an apt use for the word means "an act or instance of presuming something to be the case" and Coates does just that in assuming that the big networks will ultimately, ah, "integrate" (speaking of words that come freighted with racial politics) hip hop into these shows.

The big networks might, of course, feature more people using this performance style. I have no special knowledge here but there is a simple reason why they have not and that is that hip hop is not pop music in the most natural use of the word pop for it isn't very popular. That might seem nonsensical for there is a big enough market for hip hop that some of its stars get to be fairly wealthy, although they tend to be less wealthy than they seem.They also lose their wealth and fame pretty quickly. The principle point, however, is that in the highly fragmented market we have today, there isn't anything you could reasonably call the music of popular culture. That makes our era very different from past eras when, for example, a song like Home on the Range was common currency throughout popular culture.

Coates and Alyssa Rosenberg would like to see hip hop integrated primarily for reasons of racial politics. They believe this would be a good thing morally and socially speaking and not because either of them believes in all honsty that this music is just sooo darned good that everyone ought to listen to it. This is a common enough attitude and is a perfectly reasonable position to hold but I doubt very much it is the case for the simple reason that very little hip hop worth listening to. I have friends who used to argue that disliking hip hop and rap was proof that someone was racist. They kept that pose up through the 1990s until they, like just about everyone else, including, in some moods, Ta-Nehisi Coates, got bored of hip hop.

For the truth is that hip hop isn't very good or interesting music.

It's important to remember that the black music of the past was as good as it was largely because of racism. If it wasn't for racism, Charles Mingus would have spent his life playing cello in a symphony orchestra. It is only because he was excluded from that career on racist grounds that he went into jazz. The reason so many brilliant young black men and women went into popular music of various forms in the past was because other career paths were blocked to them. The racist belief that black people were entertaining meant that industry was more open to them than others.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the fact that most of the very little interesting new music is produced primarily by Indie bands made up of spoiled upper-middle-class whites who are comfortably enough situated that they can afford to throw years of their life away at being in a  band is actually a result of our living in a less racist society than what prevailed in the glory days of black music in America.