The rhetoric that hip-hop is dead has been a repeated concept for years. A lot of fans fervently defend it, especially today, highlighting the rich, vast underground. Ultimately, for them, as long as the music is still strong, everything else will solve itself. However, artists like Nas and Q-Tip weren’t so inclined to dismiss the music itself. Instead, they looked at how capitalism hollowed out the essence of the culture and turned it into a husk of a genre.
In a 2004 interview with Believer Magazine, Tip mused about his creative process and the state of hip-hop. Interviewer Touré noted how the underground nature of the culture eventually ballooned into the mainstream, growing “into this monster.” When prompted about the idea that hip-hop was dead, Q-Tip readily admitted that it looks a lot different than what he grew up with.
“Yeah, it’s been co-opted. It’s interesting because hip-hop, the spirit of what it was, the spirit that made it so important, that made it so pertinent, pressing, and any other good ‘p’—that spirit has died at the hands of a sword-wielding businessman,” he explained. “Sliced it up and given the rations out to certain other businesspeople. And they’ve all been eatin it up and spewin it out to the land, and we’ve been kinda like accepting it, you know what I mean?”
Q-Tip Explains How the Music Business Hurt the Culture of Hip-Hop
However, Tip’s perspective isn’t without a healthy dose of optimism. Because he was tapped into underground movements, he doesn’t get consumed by mainstream media. Ultimately, he saw the possibilities as endless. His comments still reflect true today.
“But it’s good ’cuz where you have that, you always have an underground. And where you have that, you always have somebody right now, somewhere changing it. So I think it’s an interesting, exciting time,” Q-Tip said. “I feel like the appetite for music is huge, and I feel like there’s just a lot of possibility and I’m really excited about the fact that that spirit has died and now we’re left with the challenge to… it’s hard.”
Nas’ cynicism in the mid-2000s detracted from Q-Tip and his belief in the future. The Illmatic rapper saw American music as a whole as rotten by the business of it. “The object of the game now is to make money off of exploiting it. That’s what it’s all about, get this money,” he shrugged in a 2006 interview.
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