s I eagerly flipped through the March issue of Rolling Stone, anxious to read the interview with Avril hitmakers The Matrix, I was struck by an intense gaze and curled fist spread out over two pages. “Ten Ways to Save Hip-hop” read the headline; the accompanying photo was none other than Chicago’s Common, connoisseur of “conscious” hip hop. I didn’t even have to read the article to know what was coming: a canonical, authenticity-obsessed screed, filled with knee-jerk anti-consumerist chidings and modernist pitfalls (I mean, this is Rolling Stone).


Few in the hip hop world irritate me the way Common does – by painting himself as a neo-bohemian savior of hip hop, he only displays how hopelessly out of touch he is with the genre’s current climate. But my dislike for Common goes beyond his curmudgeonly and hypocritical attitude towards the vast majority of rap music. He is an ambassador for a position that I see as not only misguided, but potentially dangerous to hip hop. Common’s article outlines many familiar “conscious rap” critiques of popular hip hop: too gangsta, too violent, too homogenous, too vulgar, too many guest rappers. These arguments are simple, and sometimes well-founded. More pernicious, however, is the rampant mythmaking and revisionism going on below the surface. Hip hop’s older generation is seeking to canonize itself, attempting to build a new history of rap on the foundations of their current values. Here eyerolling ventures such as the elaborate historio-cultural system cooked up by KRS-1 and others find a host of allies. At the root are older hip hop fans, a category that includes many of the mythologizers themselves. They just don’t like the new stuff; it’s too ephemeral, or too violent they say (as they ignore the party raps and proto-gangsta jams they no doubt loved just as much back in the day).


Such generation gaps are nothing new. The curious collaborators are the old guard of white music media, of which Rolling Stone is a large part. Even places as whitebread as VH1 stage countdowns of “The 50 Greatest Hip Hop Artists of All Time.” Hip hop music is such juggernaut that the establishment has had to take notice. However, such notice comes in varied and uneven ways. Those that keep the fragile rock canon from collapsing under the weight of its own pretense praise and promote rappers who buy into their rockist aesthetic. Thus, Rolling Stone and VH1 can keep their credibility by recognizing (finally) the greatest musical force in America while continuing the valorization of impediments to great music. Process over product – musicians MUST play their own instruments (and do it well), MUST write their own songs (or risk being set up as an anti-Britney strawwoman as Avril Lavigne was in March’s Rolling Stone), MUST create music that elevates the mind and spirit. Their output represents the search for the true ESSENCE of rock (or hip hop); their discography displays a continual PROGRESSION toward that end. And, of course, put it in an ALBUM, for chrissakes, one with a smashing opener, a contemplative closer, and a perfect sequencing of tracks in the middle that recreate the album’s theme through sound and pacing. No artist has ever met all these requirements, rock or rap. The guys who came closest to finding the “essence” of rock made a bunch of songs about dragons and wizards. Yet even after rock, after punk (which was itself canonized into irrelevance), after modernism, the mainstream press still holds on to these values, and transmits this faulty system to its audience.


So we come to Common’s complaint (paraphrased): “These rappers today, I tell ya. They bang out beats on their keyboards in 15 minutes, or they just get a hot producer to do it for them (please ignore my Neptunes-produced single that bombed). Then they just rap about girls and robbing folks – no positivity! They don’t care about hip hop’s history or culture (of which I am a vital part). They don’t even care about their whole album (which should be their art) – they just hope they have two or three jams that will get some play in the club.” It’s true, hip hoppers care little for these regressive and outdated rockist values. Yet somehow it got from the streets of New York to radio and television worldwide within a generation. PLEASE SAVE IT COMMON!


Lucky for Common there exist plenty of well-meaning rappers who subscribe to the Rolling-Stone-friendly version of hip hop. And any article discussing authenticity and hip hop would be remiss to not mention the Great White Hope for rap – The Roots. That’s right, not Eminem (he’s a stickier subject). The Roots is the rap group every white person can love. They’re continually held up to those who remain skeptical of hip hop as champions of their genre. They’re a band! They’re conscious! They use studios like a rock band! They self-consciously construct albums! Hooray, hip hop is saved!


Wrong. The Roots do not represent a “saved” hip hop. They represent hip hop hopelessly compromised by rockist values. Perhaps the Roots are the best possible outcome of this scenario – they don’t make horrible music, although much of it is bland and boring. It’s safe: despite a reputation for experimentation, The Roots never push hip hop to its limits. They merely show how hip hop can easily conform to Rolling Stone’s version of valid music. Common’s latest album, Electric Circus does the same: getting all psychedelic in Hendrix’s studio isn’t the future of hip hop, or any other music. I won’t call it selling out, because Common and The Roots sell far fewer albums than 50 Cent (although Common’s making plenty of really real riches for that travesty of a Coke jingle). Nevertheless, this vanilla hip hop is being billed as Chunky Monkey, even though it’s obviously bereft of fudge and nuts. If you like that stuff, fine, just don’t pretend it’s adventurous because you threw a few stale peanuts in there.


The future of hip hop has nothing to do with rock. Rock isn’t the future of music. If anything is, it’s dance music. Hip hop has not been loathe to appropriate dance music’s synthy sound palette, club-based distribution, or designer drugs, and the move has brought the style great success – financially, but also creatively. A competitive singles-based market keeps MCs and producers constantly forging ahead into new sounds and new styles. Punjabi-language MCs burning up American charts? Dancehall a radio staple? This sounds like the future to me, a future I couldn’t have envisioned a few years ago. The only thing that needs saving in this climate is Common’s career.