Hip hop: Idealised and Reality.

There is a common discourse that suggests the commodification of hip hop has lead to its demise. The forefront of contemporary hip-hop now being a sumptuous lifestyle of materialism, sex and drugs. This is often in paradox to the ‘hard times’ they sing about. Nostalgia for the past represents hip-hop as underground, as organic and true. We only have to see this is such books like Jamel Shabbaz’s “A Time before Crack”, and his earlier picture photograph book “Back in the Days”, to believe that the everprecense of the misogynist gangster male and the degraded woman was once a mythic element, and perhaps it was. Contemporary reality, for our generation, is often skewed by the idealised representations of the past. We miss out the horrific racism of the past, connected with hip-hop, and glamorize hip-hop’s roots. I have seen this is other subcultures as well, well in most subcultures actually. One specific event springs to mind. The common discourse that Woodstock of 1969 was an amazing event of peace, free love and rock n roll. Because none of my generation (unless you believe in reincarnation) were at the event this is what we are lead to believe through the filtering of information over time. However, after watching Woodstock 1969, a four-hour epic documentary into the many facets of the event, I see that Woodstock was very different. It was 3 days of people living in the mud, going to the toilet where they could because there was a huge lack of toilets and eating what they could because there was next to no food. It rained the entire time, only letting up for Jimi Hendrix’s performance right at the end in which we see that there are literally only a handful of people left. The crowd has scattered by now, no doubt due to the demise of the site they were on. Maybe they were all too high to realise their surroundings or were really ‘at one’ with the mud, I don’t know but it sure shows me the filtered down versions we get of the past. Although Woodstock and hip-hop were revolutionary to a people, the revolutions still had their problems; we all too often only get the romanticised versions.