» EXPRESS: Is hip-hop really dead?
» COBB: It’s not dead, probably though it is on life support. The vitality of the culture is still in existence but there’s a real question as to how much of it exist in the U.S.. What I usually tell my students is that hip-hop culture exists clinging by its fingernails to the very periphery of the music industry of rap, and so there are places where it is real. There was a Cuban rapper who said to a friend of mine that you all created hip-hop in America but it doesn’t live there anymore. And he had a good point.
» EXPRESS: It could be just a phase?
» COBB: I don’t think so though because within the music so much of it is gimmickry and so much of it is apathetical to its origins. Rock has gone through that same stage but the commercialism and the dependency upon the major labels and the extremely narrow range of marketable personalities that are pushed out in front of the public every year make it seem to me like the music is being driven more by CEOs than it is by people who are loving what it stood or stands for.
» EXPRESS: Luckily Jay-Z is back to save it.
» COBB: I always say when people talk about trying to save hip-hop it’s like thinking that you can keep the Titanic from sinking with a mop. It’s a whole bigger array. Hip-hop is vapid and commercial for the same reason that Wal-Mart put your local hardware store out of business. Or why your storefront churches are dwarfed by the 20,000-member megachurches and so on. It’s just the nature of the time we live in. Hip-hop’s relationship to globalism is a canary; it’s just a canary in the mineshaft.
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» EXPRESS: Maybe the Internet will help the artists regain some control?
» COBB: I think so. I think one of the things that I’ve really liked is coming across people that will email me an mp3 of their music. Recently there was a brother who sold me his CD on the street and I got home and it was really good. There are people who are out there doing it and hopefully the Internet will enable you to get more access to them. But if you’re talking about people who are likeAsheru or [Talib] Kweli or Mos [Def] or Jean Grae … I don’t know.
» EXPRESS: There was a period in your life when you didn’t listen to hip-hop. What was that like?
» COBB: It was good in some ways because it coincided … one, with the death of Biggie and Tupac and with getting married and having a daughter. So it was really a question of what I wanted around her ears.
The thing that I found was that it pushed me in different directions in terms of listening to other stuff. I got more into blues, classic soul, neo-soul and jazz too; the whole spectrum of black music. Even black rock stuff that I probably wouldn’t have gotten into at that point. But I was going back digging up old Living Colour and I was somebody who was like a hardcore hip-hop head. All that stuff that was really important but I had just given so much of my energy and attention to hip-hop that I didn’t listen to it.
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» EXPRESS: Did the hiatus help you write the book?
» COBB: It did. When I came back to [hip-hop], it was with a different perspective. There had been such a total break, to the point where even middle-of-the-road hip-hop just sort of disgusted me. So I couldn’t get past it because I was like this is the same arena where we’re behaving in ways that are so representative of the problems that we have in our communities. And it exacerbated the problems. So when I came back to it I think I had a different perspective.
» EXPRESS: Is that the MC’s responsibility?
» COBB: Talib Kweli was saying once he thought people were looking to the rapper to be the leaders. And at the time Nina Simone [for instance] was not a leader. At that point, she was an artist. She was talking about these particular issues but she wasn’t the one that was organizing the holding lines. We look at James Brown to say I’m black and I’m proud; we don’t look to him to lead the rally — because first of all no one would know what he was talking about but significantly, he operated in his own arena.
» EXPRESS: We need more definitive leaders, then?
» COBB: It’s not just a condition within black America. It’s an overall celebritization of American culture. Going back ten years ago you could encounter an array of people on a magazine cover — this person who is a leader in business, this person who is a leader in the sciences, now regardless of the content of the magazine you have an entertainer or an athlete on the cover.
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» EXPRESS: At this rate will we ever reach that second golden age of hip-hop?
» COBB: I think so, but it may happen in the context of an actual political movement, which would be better.
We had some degree of that when hip-hop was in its golden era when people were mobilizing around South Africa, and dealing with what Reaganism meant to black America, and HIV was emerging, etc. And even as we still confront a lot of those problems, it’s like the music has sort of fallen asleep and forgotten about that. So when we have a movement of people that are organizing around those things, the music will come along.
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Photo courtesy NYU Press
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