The good, the bad and the ugly in hip-hop
Chris Tobo speaks out about Hip-Hop.

I LOVE hip-hop. I like any kind of hip-hop that I think displays talent, craft and that sublime way it gets hooked into your brain.
At its best, hip-hop is an amazing tool of vocalization and an original form of music (yes, it is music), instinctively imbued with rhyme and meter.
Some of it has even been laced with deep sociological import and political message.
Yet in comparison to a lot of other forms of music, hip-hop is often laced with incredible amounts of sexism and/or violence. And not just in terms of talking about those things, but promoting them in an indulgent way.
It’s the stuff that would normally make me turn away in disgust.
So why this double-standard when it comes to hip-hop? It’s a question that really makes me think a great deal and I don’t really have an answer to it yet.
It may be so simple as being a case of cognitive dissonance where I’m making an exception for one but not the other based on mere preference. Or it may be just that it’s fun to listen to in an aesthetic sense.
Maybe the best answer might come in the form of good hip-hop being “honest to the individual’s voice,” regardless of how seemingly distorted or uncouth that voice may be.
But still, when it comes to the complications I shrug it off so much more easily than so many other forms of art and performance.
I’ve noticed that among a lot of hip-hop fans, even those of us with a more progressive/feminist leaning hip-hop is held to a lessened double standard.
As a hip-hop fan, it’s easy to feel like your choice is either to put up with misogyny and homophobia or don’t listen to rap music.
The relative rarity of artists completely devoid of all of these problems mean that in order to enjoy the art form fully, you are forced into a double standard.
However the problems within the genre can’t be written off, because it’s not so much a hip-hop or rap problem as the hip hop/rap version of the problem on the whole.
It may sound more gruesome and blunt because the function of the language is direct, but really it’s broadcasting the same views oozed politely and passively at the office.