Aging hip-hop becomes conservative – Slog



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Jay-Z at something in the water last April. Do not let the soft hair and the Bob Marley shirt fool you - Jay Z is surprisingly conservative.

Do not let the soft hair and the Bob Marley shirt fool you – Jay-Z is surprisingly conservative. Brian Ach / Getty Images Entertainment

On Aug. 13, rapper and billionaire Jay-Z announced that his company, Roc Nation, had a big deal with the NFL, which had essentially done two things: first, Roc Nation would tackle the problem of NFL music (described as "live music entertainment"). strategist ") and, secondly, his racial problems (described as a" social justice campaign "). Jay-Z not only excluded Colin Kaepernick from the second part of the deal, but also claimed that the NFL players were "on their knees" and that we were "stuck on the fact that Colin did not have a job." It was time to take off and take The type of money involved in the deal was not reported .

This week, the rapper also known as Hova – married to BeyoncĂ©, holding a stake in Uber and owning real estate in the Hamptons – talked a lot about the statement that he was kneeling and excluding Kaepernick from the partnership. He was called "sold-out" by NFL player Eric Reid and "cold-blooded" by Kaepernick's lawyer. The oldest leftist magazine in the United States, the Nation, contributed to this direct opinion: "Jay-Z is not a soldier, he is a capitalist." It's as simple as that. He is "a billionaire who wants to be an owner of the NFL team, and clear Colin Kaepernick is the price to pay for admission".

But I want to propose a different approach to the question. The one inspired by the red harvesting ants studied by Deborah Gordon, biologist at Stanford.

The most fascinating discovery reported in his 1999 book Ants at work: how an insect society is organized is that old ant colonies do not behave like young people. Even though the population and composition of an old colony are identical to those of a young (an ant belonging to the species studied, ants harvesters of Arizona live about a year) they act very differently. This means that the colony has a spirit of its own, a spirit and personality independent of its own composition – lots of interacting ants. This means that aging is not just an individual process, but a process that occurs at the emerging level of a colony and a city.

With that in mind, let's move on to hip-hop, a culture that's now over 40 years old. We can see how it has aged over the years. When it was a child (1978-1984), it was fighting for your right to party. When he was young (1985 to 1993), it was about fighting power. During his transition from youth to the middle years, from 1994 to 1997, he soberly stated that the treasury governs everything that happens around me. In the 00's, it was relaxing in the club and smoking without emotion. Today, he has become a conservative, that is to say that it concerns business.

There is nothing like the radical youth politics of Public Enemy in hip-hop. It's too old for this kind of thing. He went from kneeling down. Colin needs to grow, as hip-hop has grown. It is now about forming partnerships with major sports institutions, or having a Republican president call by the head of a European country, to visit his Republican president at the Oval Office, to write help books. , by buying football teams or supporting those who enforce laws that protect property, or by selling technology to a Silicon Valley technology company. As Dre, another billionaire hip-hop, said at the time: "No need to live hard".

But it's not just that Jay-Z is a billionaire. It's also the fact that hip-hop is younger. Yes, there are young rappers (A $ AP Rocky, who has received help from Donald Trump, is only 30 years old), but none of them seems to care about the radical politics. They all feel as old as Jay-Z. They are capitalist, they want to do this bank, they are preparing for retirement.

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