is rap music conservative?

or, the crumbling artifice of professional criticism

This is a bit of a companion piece to my essay on Lauren Oyler.

I read this essay recently called How Did Hip-Hop Media Get So Bad by Israel Daramola. I would say that the thrust of the essay is about how most hip hop media and rappers themselves are conservative or lean conservative with the implication that this is all bad, though he never outright says that.

I found this very curious, but I’ll quote him here:

The main problem, to my mind, is one of artistic and cultural literacy. It would be ahistorical to say that rap music itself has never flirted with conservative ideology. Despite its punk roots, it has always gloried in conservative ideas about women, masculinity, homosexuality, and wealth accumulation. In the past, these things fueled the more racialized fight between terrified white suburbanites and the political figures that pander to them and the creators of a new, crass, black art form they didn't understand. The mainstreaming of hip-hop more or less ended that fight, and now in its place there is something much more convoluted and potentially more damaging. Reactionaries who once demonized rap music as an art form are now free to invite rappers and rap pundits to stand alongside them in defense of the rancid values that the two groups have always shared. Combine that with the average fan's inability to interpret a rap song (or any media really) in anything but the most literal way, or to understand hip-hop culture as anything other than a reality show about gangbangers, and you have an audience that's primed to be led down a reactionary path. That path could include anything from degrading women for entertainment to amassing support for Donald Trump's re-election campaign. Despite these attempts to push against the grain of "wokeness" and "cancel culture," they've just ended up right at the beginning, promoting Christian-based hegemony and Moynihan Report-style myths about blackness.

What I find interesting about this essay is I’m actually not sure what point he’s making.

Is he saying that rap was once progressive? He says it flirted with reactionary/rancid politics, but are there any rappers who he would describe as espousing progressive values?

There’s Immortal Technique and Zack de la Rocha, sure, and lots of rap songs have social justice concerns, especially regarding the black community and especially the poor black community. But even when Tupac, for example, was rapping about black empowerment and anticarceral politics, the next song on the album might be homophobic or misogynistic or, to boil it down simply, about economic individualism.

Many rappers have rapped about the excesses of hip hop culture and the rancidness that often comes with it, but those same people often write the same kinds of songs.

And, listen, you don’t need someone like me to tell you what rap is like. I rarely even listen to rap, to be honest. But I find it baffling that someone would say that these conservative aspects are new and brought about by youtube accounts and podcasters with the implication that this all happened under our noses since the election of Donald Trump.

It’s possible, even, that rap music is a reflection of the culture it came out of. That’s not to say that black culture is conservative or reactionary, but that it’s more complicated than pundits would have you believe.

In general, black people are more religious and more conservative than other Democratic voters. For all that white leftists like me might wish that the average black voter was more on the socialist vanguard like Martin Luther King Jr or WEB du Bois, many of them seem to be a lot more like Booker T Washington.

I’ll explain a bit. Washington believed that the black community should focus their energies on education, industrial work, and the accumulation of wealth as a path to equality and empowerment.

And while this isn’t true for every black person or black community, I think anyone who has heard a rap song will recognize aspects of this messaging. And I do think that the research demonstrates that this view reflects a broad swath of black voters, with education being the biggest difference.

But education is becoming the new class demarcation in America, at least for political views, with more education leading to a leftward drift in political ideology. This is most pronounced in white people.

But what I find interesting about this essay and why I relate it back to my Lauren Oyler essay is that there seems to be a growing disconnect between the average person and the people who make a living writing about culture. And so Defector can run a piece without a real thesis that mostly just ties rap music to conservatives that will mostly only be read by other culture writers while millions of people listen to the podcasts Daramola decries as rancidly reactionary.

It’s why Kanye West’s new album has been universally panned by professional critics despite being his best album in about a decade. And for all the words they used to say that West was over, that his new music was unforgivably bad, what they were really saying is I dislike his politics and don’t want to be associated with his antisemitic rants. And since most people who listen to rap don’t read Pitchfork or Rolling Stones or the New York Times, these critics were largely signaling to one another that they were on the same team, politically.

This is the biggest song from the album, streamed hundreds of millions of times, and maybe you hate it, but I think it’s critically nonsense to say that it’s a bad song or incompetently produced. And, yes, this is a song about fucking, but Kanye has always been vulgar and absurd, but he’s also a sonic genius, not a lyrical one. And the way Vultures I interacts with and calls back to his entire career is fascinating and wild and fun.

And to be clear, you can like music by a terrible person. I promise. It doesn’t mean you need to engage with or even listen to this music. But we also don’t have to lie.

And I could just leave it all right there, but I actually have a more cancellable opinion to say first.

Rap Music is Country Music

Now, I know you almost just threw your phone or laptop across the room or maybe immediately opened up the comments to rant about that statement, but we’re talkin politics, baby.

And, well, if I say I don’t listen to much rap, I also have to admit that I listen to essentially zero country music.

But both are uniquely American artforms and while both dabble with politics, I’d say, at their core, they espouse broadly American values. Country music tends to be more openly patriotic but both also have a strong anti-government current running through them, or at least suspicion of the powerful. Country has long loved the outlaw and mythologized them, just as rap music has the gangster.

And while there are examples of country musicians who espouse broadly liberal views, the genre is more associated with conservatives.

But I would say that rap music and country music are two genres for and about the underclasses and often made by people who came from that underclass. And so both dabble with class politics, with injustice, disenfranchisement, which is why both mythologize the outlaw, the criminal.

But I would say that both genres have a deep core of individualism. Neither country nor rap tend to be about the proletariat rising to overturn the system, but rather atomized individuals doing whatever it takes to get ahead.

This is why combining rap and country shouldn’t really surprise anyone. They share more DNA than most other genres, I think.

Are rap and country conservative in nature?

I guess maybe, but the American character is, in my opinion, socially conservative. We may bemoan it and dislike it, but there’s little evidence that the average American is on board with the social messaging of The Nation or The Majority Report with Sam Seder (is this too niche into the leftist media niche?). Along with that, though, I think the American character is much more economically liberal than anyone wants to believe. Yes, even GOP voters.

But I wonder again what the point of the Defector article was.

A friend of mine said that political art is always bad after reading it.

I agree in a very narrow sense but broadly disagree.

I’ll explain.

If you’re making art to be political, you’re probably starting wrong. If your goal is to convince someone of something, write an essay. Art that comes from politics first tends to be didactic and rather unpleasant, whether it’s The Newsroom or Atlas Shrugged or whatever anti-muslim drivel dribbles out of Kid Rock.

But great art is often political.

Whether it’s Ursula K Le Guin’s oeuvre or Rage Against the Machine or Final Fantasy VII, politics often drives or at least informs some of the best art we have. And I can hear someone already typing that conservative art can’t be great, but I’d encourage anyone who thinks that to check out these dead fellas named Fyodor Dostoevsky and Cormac McCarthy.

Now that I’m finished, feel free to yell at me.

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My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King