Last week in this space, I made a joke about Clipse, and how it would be nearly impossible to secure a ticket to their show at Webster Hall. It didn’t seem like an outlandish statement. They released the most talked-about hip-hop album of 2006, and they wound up ranking high on year-end lists everywhere. But apparently, none of this means anything. Tickets sold so poorly that Bowery Presents, the company that runs Webster Hall, moved the show to the much smaller Bowery Ballroom. And as of this writing, tickets are still available.
The whole situation is strange, and brings up some important questions about the way people feel toward hip-hop. Is it that people are still buying into the old adage that live hip-hop is always disappointing? Are we looking at proof that, come the end of the year, music critics feel compelled to have at least one rap record on their year-end lists for fear that Jessica Hopper or Sasha Frere-Jones will call them racists? Or were reactions to the record simply so knee-jerk that all the hype now seems misplaced, just like we see in indie rock circles all the time?
There’s probably some merit to all of these possibilities. But the larger point to be made here is that the hip-hop community and the real, show-going rap fans are not as easily swayed by the music press (both alternative and mainstream) and their weekly whims as fans of other types of music are, which makes a lot of sense. So for all of our flailing around and desperate attempts at cross-cultural relevancy, our thoughts on the genre seem to mean very, very little, which really isn’t all bad. If this were true across the board, maybe the Cold War Kids wouldn’t be selling out shows every night.
The whole situation is strange, and brings up some important questions about the way people feel toward hip-hop. Is it that people are still buying into the old adage that live hip-hop is always disappointing? Are we looking at proof that, come the end of the year, music critics feel compelled to have at least one rap record on their year-end lists for fear that Jessica Hopper or Sasha Frere-Jones will call them racists? Or were reactions to the record simply so knee-jerk that all the hype now seems misplaced, just like we see in indie rock circles all the time?
There’s probably some merit to all of these possibilities. But the larger point to be made here is that the hip-hop community and the real, show-going rap fans are not as easily swayed by the music press (both alternative and mainstream) and their weekly whims as fans of other types of music are, which makes a lot of sense. So for all of our flailing around and desperate attempts at cross-cultural relevancy, our thoughts on the genre seem to mean very, very little, which really isn’t all bad. If this were true across the board, maybe the Cold War Kids wouldn’t be selling out shows every night.
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