For Myself & Others: Downloading Is Back Up
By Bomani Jones, AOL BlackVoices columnist
Think fast -- what's your favorite Big Daddy Kane album?
Missy Elliott posed that question to Heather, a white emcee who was a contestant on "The Road to Stardom," and the poor child had no answer. When asked to name any of Kane's records, she again was stumped. Missy posed that question to point out that rap fans could find Heather and her lack of melanin to be unauthentic if she could not answer such a question.
Missy had a point, but she still was off-base. White people aren't the only folks who couldn't answer that question. At a time when 2Pac's "How Do U Want It" is considered "old school" by "106 & Park," Kane may as well be a prehistoric relic and his classic album "Long Live the Kane" (the answer I would have given to Missy's question) could be placed in a museum between the Ark of the Covenant and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Apologies to those who feel old reading something like that, but it is what it is. It doesn't matter that Kane was ahead of his time. Never mind that Jay-Z, a prot‚g‚ of Kane's, clearly patterned his persona after Big Daddy's. It's irrelevant that Kane could still eat cats for lunch on the mic (peep Little Brother's "Welcome to Durham"). To the younger folks among us, Kane, Kool G. Rap and Slick Rick are old-timers that folks have heard more about than they've actually heard.
That needs to be fixed, and a solution to this issue is out there. Unfortunately, that remedy is on the wrong side of the law. It's downloading, and it may be the only thing to fix this problem.
Think about it: Though rap music is the dominant art form of this generation, kids could more quickly rattle off the lyrics to "Let's Get It On" than they could the words to "Top Billin'." And how scary is it that when 50 Cent says on "Disco Inferno" that his favorite rapper said, "ch-check out my melody," most of his fans have little clue who he's talking about? (That would be Rakim, kids.) There are a host of potential explanations for that, but here's one to consider. Every city in America with more than 25 black folks has a station spinning dusties, and those stations serve as a primer for the hits of the past in soul music. Such an outlet does not exist for rap music. Without rolling the dice at a record store, guessing if an album is going to be hot, and dropping $17.99 for eight tracks, there is no way for someone to learn about the creative explosion that was 1980s hip-hop -- or the early '90s, for that matter.
Without the radio serving as a veritable tour guide, the Internet is the best thing fans have going. The high-speed modem could -- and does -- make life so much easier for folks, and free downloading would be a good thing for everyone in this situation. Instead of going to a record store and hoping that the acne-ridden clerk knows what album has "My Melody" (that would be "Paid in Full," kids), some 14-year-old would be much better served putting that into a search engine and listening to the track. Catalog sales on old hip-hop aren't great, meaning the labels wouldn't lose that much. But even those records were flying out of stores, Koleman Strumpf, an economist at the University of North Carolina, has done research showing that it takes 5,000 downloads to eliminate one album sale. Artists wouldn't lose a thing; because of the horrible contracts most legendary emcees signed back in the day, most would only lose dimes they weren't getting from their labels anyway. They would only gain new fans. The industry could see allowing kids to download old rap records as a public service no different from their programs to improve music education in public schools.
Currently, college radio is the only outlet for someone to learn about the albums that still serve as the backbone of what hip-hop is today without worrying about the Recording Industry Association of America's goons taking him or her to court. At most universities, catching the hip-hop show requires a fairly detailed knowledge of the station's schedule and, even worse, could require being awake from 2AM to 6AM.
It's sad that learning about hip-hop could require that much energy when something much simpler is available. For the good of all, the RIAA should turn the other way while people pipe the classics of yesteryear onto their hard drives. They should do so for the good of artists and fans alike.
March 4, 2005