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PART IV: 2000–2010—NEW MILLENNIUM RAP 559

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The Anthology of Rap
This chapter is in the book The Anthology of Rap
2000–2010New Millennium RapIn 2006 Nas released the album Hip Hop Is Dead with its eponymous single, a sharp critique of present-day hip-hop from one of rap’s most respected artists. The album cover shows Nas, clad in black, dropping a black rose into an open grave. “Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game / Reminiscin when it wasn’t all business, it forgot where it started / So we all gather here for the dearly departed,” he raps to a menacing beat driven by a psychedelic rock guitar riff from Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”1“Hip Hop Is Dead” inspired passionate responses from rappers, jour-nalists, and fans, ranging from affront to agreement. Most of the discus-sions, however, failed to look beyond the bold title. Lyrically, the song is not an elegy but an exhortation. Rather than pronouncing hip-hop’s demise, Nas voices a prophetic warning. In the words of the rapper Common, Nas was issuing “a call to arms, a battle cry almost.”2 Saving hip-hop, Nas insists, means shifting the course of the music away from commercial interests and toward the essence of what made rap great in the first place: beats and rhymes, love and lyrics.Hip-hop began the 2000s as the undisputed face of mainstream music and popular culture; it closed the decade as a smaller, more segmented, though fiercely inventive part of a similarly transformed cultural landscape marked by the atomization of audience and popular taste. The Billboard Hot 100 charts from a typical week between 2000 and 2005 were dominated by rappers (50 Cent, Eminem, Jay-Z, Nelly, Missy Elliott) and by artists strongly influenced by the beats and rhymes of rap (Mary J. Blige, Usher, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani, Mariah Carey).
© Yale University Press, New Haven

2000–2010New Millennium RapIn 2006 Nas released the album Hip Hop Is Dead with its eponymous single, a sharp critique of present-day hip-hop from one of rap’s most respected artists. The album cover shows Nas, clad in black, dropping a black rose into an open grave. “Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game / Reminiscin when it wasn’t all business, it forgot where it started / So we all gather here for the dearly departed,” he raps to a menacing beat driven by a psychedelic rock guitar riff from Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”1“Hip Hop Is Dead” inspired passionate responses from rappers, jour-nalists, and fans, ranging from affront to agreement. Most of the discus-sions, however, failed to look beyond the bold title. Lyrically, the song is not an elegy but an exhortation. Rather than pronouncing hip-hop’s demise, Nas voices a prophetic warning. In the words of the rapper Common, Nas was issuing “a call to arms, a battle cry almost.”2 Saving hip-hop, Nas insists, means shifting the course of the music away from commercial interests and toward the essence of what made rap great in the first place: beats and rhymes, love and lyrics.Hip-hop began the 2000s as the undisputed face of mainstream music and popular culture; it closed the decade as a smaller, more segmented, though fiercely inventive part of a similarly transformed cultural landscape marked by the atomization of audience and popular taste. The Billboard Hot 100 charts from a typical week between 2000 and 2005 were dominated by rappers (50 Cent, Eminem, Jay-Z, Nelly, Missy Elliott) and by artists strongly influenced by the beats and rhymes of rap (Mary J. Blige, Usher, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani, Mariah Carey).
© Yale University Press, New Haven

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. CONTENTS v
  3. ADVISORY BOARD xxi
  4. FOREWORD Henry Louis Gates, Jr. xxii
  5. Introduction xxviii
  6. PART I: 1978–1984—THE OLD SCHOOL 1
  7. PART II: 1985–1992—THE GOLDEN AGE 119
  8. PART III: 1993–1999—RAP GOES MAINSTREAM 325
  9. PART IV: 2000–2010—NEW MILLENNIUM RAP 559 559
  10. LYRICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 719
  11. Afterword Chuck D 789
  12. Afterword Common 797
  13. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 801
  14. NOTES 803
  15. INDEX SONGS, ALBUMS, MOVIES, AND BOOKS 809
  16. INDEX ARTISTS, AUTHORS, AND LABELS 819
  17. CREDITS 829
Readers are also interested in:
https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300163063-007

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. CONTENTS v
  3. ADVISORY BOARD xxi
  4. FOREWORD Henry Louis Gates, Jr. xxii
  5. Introduction xxviii
  6. PART I: 1978–1984—THE OLD SCHOOL 1
  7. PART II: 1985–1992—THE GOLDEN AGE 119
  8. PART III: 1993–1999—RAP GOES MAINSTREAM 325
  9. PART IV: 2000–2010—NEW MILLENNIUM RAP 559 559
  10. LYRICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 719
  11. Afterword Chuck D 789
  12. Afterword Common 797
  13. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 801
  14. NOTES 803
  15. INDEX SONGS, ALBUMS, MOVIES, AND BOOKS 809
  16. INDEX ARTISTS, AUTHORS, AND LABELS 819
  17. CREDITS 829
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