100 HUNDRED THOUSAND MILLION

Hold on a minute— a white guy in his 30s is going to talk at length about how he prefers rap music from the ’90s to the rap music of today? GIVE ME A MINUTE TO CLEAR MY SCHEDULE IN PREPARATION FOR THIS MOST COMETLIKE OF RARE OCCURRENCES. 

I say this as someone who cried during Michael Rapaport’s A Tribe Called Quest movie, as someone you should not ask about the relative merits of the various Wu-Tang solo albums released between 1994 and 1996 unless you’re in the mood for a filibuster longer than Berlin Alexanderplatz, as someone who not only still owns a complete 13-issue run of Ego Trip magazine but also went and bought a special metal magazine-storage bin at the Container Store to keep said run safe from shelf-wear: White people, we need to shut up about ’90s rap. Because we are ruining it for everybody.

Yes, the ’90s were a period of remarkable invention and omnidirectional growth for hip-hop. Amazing political music. Amazing bohemian-lifestyle-soundtrack music. Amazing I-will-murder-you music. Amazing novelty hits about liking butts. Amazing music that managed to be many of these things at once. Amazing! It was amazing. It was like the air was alive, y’know? Also, the videos. I mean, right? Did you know I can still rap every word of “Bust a Move”? I totally can. Yeah, sure, I’ll stay for one more round. No, c’mon, let me get it. You got the last one. 

Anyway: In his new backdoor book proposalA.V. Club column, ’90s Rap In The Rearview, Nathan Rabin will “explore the trajectory of [his] long, complicated love affair with hip-hop” and, eventually, his “growing estrangement from the genre” as it underwent a series of aesthetic shifts that Rabin stomps right into a sinkhole of problematic assumptions by calling a “de-evolution.” He also mentions his “growing estrangement from the genre” twice in two different paragraphs. Nathan Rabin is really not feeling you, you got that, French Montana? 

There’s also a sentence in here— about N.W.A.— that contains the phrases “incendiary,” “paradigm-shifting,” “captured the zeitgeist” and “demanded to be heard.”  

Rabin is careful to acknowledge that it’s not them, it’s him— that he’s stopped “aggressively seeking out new artists,” and that maybe hip-hop is just fundamentally youth-culture music that he’s now too old for. 

He notes that while the post-’90s era gave us “such subgenres as grime, crunk, reggaeton, hyphy, and N.O bounce…none of these movements resonated with me at all, let alone affected me as profoundly as Native Tongues did.” So he’s forthright about his biases. He even acknowledges that he may not really be the right man for this job, given his numerous “blind spots and weird, borderline unfathomable preferences.” 

But he’s actually totally the right man for this job, in that the purpose of a column like this is to rope off one ten-year period (or ten and change, anyway— gotta grandfather Slum Village in there somehow) in the history of a genre and identify it as worthy of more serious attention than the empty flashy crap that would follow, while reassuring his mid-30s readership that all the present-day hip-hop they’ve been too busy to investigate is not worth their time. Grime, crunk, hyphy, reggaeton, New Orleans bounce, all other rap albums released after 2001 without ?uestlove’s name in the thank-yous? Don’t worry about it! Go put the kids to bed.

Jonathan Lethem once observed that “His best work since Blood on the Tracks” became a recurring canard in reviews of late-period Bob Dylan albums because making that assertion about a new Dylan album freed rock critics from the obligation to engage with any of the confusing and hard-to-reckon-with albums Dylan had been making in the meantime. The idea of the ’90s as a Golden Age has been an equally useful labor-saving device for critics writing about rap. (I’ll save you thirty seconds of Googling by pointing out that it’s a card I’ve played many times, usually when I needed to fabricate an opinion about a jazzy and inoffensive rap record I was being paid $50 to give 3 1/2 stars to. I’m not proud.)

There might be a lot more value— more entertainment value, but also more actual enriching-the-critical discourse value— to a multipart series in which Nathan Rabin forces himself to strap up and listen to all the lauded post-’90s rap records he can’t get into, explores what exactly it is that makes it hard for him to get into them, traces the splintering of the relatively monolithic East and West Coast sounds that defined his early experience with hip-hop into hundreds of regional and post-regional styles, examines he degree to which rap’s embrace by and of pop music has been a give-and-take as much as it’s been a devil’s bargain, realizes that a statement like “[I]n some ways hip-hop has never evolved beyond the innovations people like Prince Paul and Q-Tip introduced when they weren’t even old enough to drink” depends on an extraordinarily narrow definition of “innovation,” discovers that hip-hop’s actually really exciting right this second largely because the example of artists like Kanye West (who Rabin acknowledges as “unique” only to dismiss him by the end of the same sentence as a mere footnote to the towering legacies of the RZA and Pete Rock, like somebody trying to win an argument on SoulStrut in 2002) has emboldened a generation of rappers to shrug off once-rigid categorical divides— conscious/thuggish, aesthete/hardass, revolutionary/hedonist, lyricist/pop sellout—in favor of personas built a la carte. Maybe he’d come out the other side still unconvinced that Waka Flocka Flame’s oeuvre is anything but a bunch of posturing noise. But he might also discover some good stuff he’d been missing. He might turn some other people on to that stuff, too.

But that’s not what this is about. This is about confirming a particular demographic’s sense that hip-hop conveniently went to shit the minute they stopped paying attention to it. It’s about reassuring readers who think Waka Flocka Flame sounds like a bunch of noise that they’re still cool, not providing a service to readers who count on critics to have tastes more adventurous than their own. (And I’m sorry, but that’s the job description. As a private citizen you’re free to feel any way you want about hip-hop— or the novel, or hotel-atrium water-feature design— and you’re free to draw the conclusion that the music ceased to have something to say when it stopped speaking to you. But as a critic you’re supposed to figure out what the new stuff, even the new stuff that is kinda not your bag, even the new stuff that is totally not your bag, is saying to the people it’s saying it to.)

Any white bohemian writer who asserts that a particular form of African-American vernacular music entered decline the moment its central preoccupations ceased to dovetail with those of white bohemians— which is the subtext of every “Not since Native Tongues…” lament, no matter how you qualify it, and no matter how great that Native Tongues stuff actually was— is pop-locking on some seriously thin ice. But the strong whiff of Stuff White People Like(d) this project gives off isn’t the most objectionable thing about it.

I’m guessing the AV Club’s editors wouldn’t green-light a series “exploring” how rock’s best years are behind it, no matter how many Onion commenters haven’t updated their personal desert-island Top 10 since The Moon and Antarctica came out. “Youth Culture Phenomenon X was empirically better when I was younger” is the kind of argument that young, supposedly clued-in critics gleefully mock whenever some arteriosclerotic daily-newspaper hack writes a column about how music hasn’t meant shit since the breakup of the James Gang. (Or Pavement.) It’s lazy and specious when those guys make it and it’s lazy and specious here.