The title of this post comes from my man El Niño, and I interpret it to mean that (apart from the vey enlightened and the very stupid) we all have a sense of profound lacking, or 'something missing' in our lives. Some of us (with varying levels of success) choose to fill this space up with meaningless pop culture stuff. We all do it from time to time, some more than others.
This hit home the other day when my girl mentioned that a few weeks ago she was bumping Ice Cube's "I Got My Locs On" (featuring Young Jeezy), but that it had a short shelf life for her. I started thinking about how The Roots laid this problem out in the intro to one of their earlier albums (I think it was Things Fall Apart???) years ago. "Hip Hop music is treated as disposable, it's potential is not even maximized in a commercial sense, let alone as art." Or something like that.
Hip Hop is on the cutting edge of consumerism. It always has been. But now it's at such an accelerated pace that it's not cool to dig something forever. Or for a whole year. Or a month, if you wanna be really cool. Remember how HOT Bathing Ape was a minute ago?
We can't just keep on consuming and discarding, consuming and discarding. Or, to speak more truthfully, we can but we risk losing any sense of artistic endeavour and meaning. The 'Ring Tone Rapper' generation don't know that they can have more, it's like Generation Y in reverse. It's crazy.
End transmission.
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