And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost

I used to really enjoy hip hop, but I haven't avidly listened to it in about a decade. When asked why not, I would usually attribute this to it largely having little content anymore. After the 90s, beats displaced lyrical content and street cred as the selling point for a song – and even for an artist. If you pushed me harder, I might tell you that there is nothing original being produced in hip hop anymore. The trope of growing up in the hood and making it, while resonant in their own American Dream sense, have become blasé to my desire for originality. And the all too common motifs of sex, drugs and guns has become has long since ceased to perk up our desensitized ears.

In truth though, I'm disappointed to say that there never was much of anything original about hip hop except the style itself and its art form as a normative outlet for black expression. Maybe I'm over-reducing it. But in terms of content, the beats have all been sampled, and even the lyrics call to mind those of blues – the cultural antecedent to hip hop. Even the messages in what are regarded as some of the deeper songs are repackaged to a generation not only that hasn't been exposed to their earlier forms, but doesn't even know they exist. The result is a culture that keeps re-inventing the wheel and as such never really makes much progress.

Take the recent song "No Church in the Wild" by Jay Z, Kanye West and newcomer Frank Ocean. It's definitely catchy, but it's hook is what get people talking:

"Human being to the mob/
What's a mob to a king?/
What' a king to a god?/
What's a god to a non-believer?/
Who don't believe in anything?/"

Woah, pretty deep right? It's saying that there's a hierarchy in the world that everyone is subject to, but non-believers throw it all off because they don't subscribe to the same system of values that orders the universe. Or, looking deeper, the object of each line has the capacity to supersede its subject... a mob can overthrow a king, a king can command his subjects to worship a different god, the non-believer can have a religious experience by the grace of God. Analysis aside, this isn't really new. Machiavelli has discussed this classically, as have other thinkers. But what makes this song so profound to a number of people is the fact that they likely weren't exposed to the literature in which such sentiments have historically been expressed. And if they were, hip hop (knowingly or not) repackages such truths in a concise, catchy and mnemonic form.

I suppose there has to be merit in this. In the literary tradition of writing with one's audience in mind, so too must the vocative mediums of truth and cultural expression similarly adapt to an audience that not only doesn't know history, but doesn't have the attention span to learn it. Maybe history is irrelevant as long as its truths are preserved. But what are truths without context, and what is context without resonance? As Galadriel tells in the opening of Lord of the Rings, "...some things that should not have been forgotten were lost." One merely has to read or see this trope played out in its numerous extrapolations in book and cinema to see how it ends. Or, if one lacks the patience to read a book or watch a movie, just listen to any real ballad. The real message is inscribed in the riffs between verses.