So yesterday I went shopping. I bought Belle And Sebastian’s “This Is Just A Modern Rock Song”, which isn’t modern, doesn’t rock, and is a wanksome seven-minute dirge that barely qualifies as a song. Thumbs down. I also bought the retrospective (read: hits) album by KRS-One, which is excellent. So here’s KRS’ Philosophy.
There’s a book to be written sometime by someone about what happened to political hip-hop in the early 90s, though the accepted basic thesis seems to be ‘the biz couldn’t sell the political stuff to the kids, so they pushed the entertaining gangsta stuff instead’. That’s undoubtedly true, but you wonder also how much impact the movement of many of the big political names towards fringe groups like the 5% Nation had. How much blame must political hip-hop shoulder for its own demise?