Hip-hop’s television takeover

[Ubiquitous]

The ceremony for the 60th Grammy Awards is still two weeks away, but
already music’s biggest TV night has made history.

For the first time, hip-hop artists dominate the majority of nominees
chosen in the academy’s top categories, including record, album and song
of the year.

But that sound you’re hearing isn’t champagne corks popping in
celebration. It’s exasperated sighs that the Recording Academy only just
discovered what the rest of the entertainment industry noticed back in
the flip-phone era: Hip-hop, once an outlier, is now the status quo.

From Broadway’s “Hamilton” to Hollywood’s “Straight Outta Compton” to
television’s “Atlanta,” hip-hop’s broad influence on American pop culture
has defied countless predictions that a nervous white mainstream would
never fully embrace a trend born out of the urban, black experience.

Consider hip-hop’s television takeover. Today, rappers are not only
backing films about the black experience, but also are creating,
producing and starring in top-rated cable and network series and breaking
out of music categories at film and television award shows.

“Atlanta” creator and star Donald Glover — who under his stage name,
Childish Gambino, is up for five Grammys — made history when he won a
directing Emmy in September for his breakthrough FX comedy, a cable
ratings success, about the everyday trials and tribulations of an
aspiring hip-hop entrepreneur. No other black director had ever won an
Emmy in the comedy category, and Glover was the first director since Alan
Alda in 1977 to win for a comedy in which he also starred.

“I wanted to show white people you don’t know everything about black
culture,” he told the awards ceremony audience, some of whom had already
watched him win two top Golden Globes for the show earlier in 2017.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, who shattered records and expectations when his hip-
hop musical “Hamilton” swept the 2016 Tonys, is now executive producing a
forthcoming Showtime series, “The Kingkiller Chronicle,” based on
characters from the fantasy books by Patrick Rothfuss.

And hitting Showtime this month was the already critically acclaimed “The
Chi” from “Master of None’s” Lena Waithe, the first black woman to win an
Emmy for comedy writing, and hip-hop star Common, the first rapper to win
an Emmy, Oscar, Grammy and Golden Globe. (Before Oprah and Meryl Streep,
he gave what had been the Golden Globes’ most inspirational speech — “I
am” — delivered with the poetic rhythm of a lyrical rhyme when he and
John Legend accepted the 2015 original song award for “Glory” in Ava
DuVernay’s civil rights drama “Selma.”)

“I was surprised by it all,” Common said about the accolades.


It was one of many in a string of “crossover surprises”: Fox’s hip-hop-
themed drama “Empire” became a surprise success with white audiences;
soccer moms across America were surprised they couldn’t stop humming
Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” in favor of something — anything — else; and a
biopic about once-feared gangsta rap pioneers N.W.A, “Straight Outta
Compton,” became a surprise hit at the box office.

The surprise, however, is that anyone was surprised.

“Hip-hop is the soundtrack of at least one, probably two generations
now,” says Common (aka Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr.), who is an executive
producer on the Waithe-run series about everyday life on the South Side
of Chicago. “People used to be afraid of it or consider it the music of
gangsters or thugs, or whatever. But now, it’s part of everything … and
everyone under the age of 40.”

From the jaunty 1980s McDonald’s jingles that still haunt Gen Xers today
to raunchy rapper Method Man’s current role as a congenial TV game show
host for the millennial-skewing “Drop the Mic,” hip-hop is now part of
our cultural DNA. Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill and Eminem are to a
generation what the Beatles and Stones were to boomers — the artists of
their youth. And in some cases, the actors of today were the rappers of
their parents’ generation.

Ice-T, the once-controversial “Cop Killer” rapper whose breakthrough film
role was in 1991’s “New Jack City,” has played a sex crimes detective on
NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” since 2000. “If you’re 17 now,
that means I started when you were 2,” he said in the past. “So you don’t
have a reference point for me as a rapper. Your mother does, your father
does….”

Rap, after all, was the genre that gave us TV and film personalities like
Queen Latifah, Will Smith, LL Cool J, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Redman,
Method Man and Tupac — and we’re not even into the 2000s yet. Their
popularity would eventually give rise to more and more shows about or
starring hip-hop figures. When ABC recently canceled “The Mayor,” about
an aspiring rapper who becomes mayor of his hometown, there were no
outcries over the dearth of black leads on TV — people were too busy
looking forward to “The Chi” and the upcoming March premiere of
“Atlanta’s” second season.

“When I used to get my Entertainment Weekly and I’d look at the fall TV
previews,” said Method Man (aka Clifford Smith), “there was so many years
when there weren’t any black shows premiered. I remember one year, there
was only like one new fall show premiering that featured people of color:
‘The Cleveland Show’ — and that was animated, and the lead voice was done
by a white guy!”

Lee Daniels’ “Empire” was the clearest example of hip-hop as a crossover
bridge to break color barriers when it premiered on Fox in 2015 and
obliterated conventional wisdom that a “black” drama was for black
audiences. After all, why would an entire generation raised on Dr. Dre’s
“The Chronic” consider a show about a hip-hop family dynasty as anything
but meant for them?

Instead of waiting for Hollywood and television studios to let them in,
many hip-hop artists formed their own multimedia production companies or
began crowdsourcing funds to create their own content.

Ice Cube (aka O’Shea Jackson) alone launched an entire genre of black
comedies for the post-Run DMC generation in his “Friday” and “Barbershop”
film series. The stone-cold gangsta who had referred to himself as the
“[N-word] you love to hate” reinvented himself as everyone’s dad in the
“Are We There Yet?” films.

Taking cues from pioneers like Ice Cube, Pharrell co-executive produced a
love letter to 1990s hip-hop, the coming-of-age film “Dope.” Beyond his
work with Common, crooner John Legend — who came up in the hip-hop world
— co-produced a WGN America series about slavery, “Underground.” Rapper
50 Cent was behind the Starz series “Power.”


Ice Cube and Dr. Dre avoided the curse of the corny rap biopic (e.g.,
“Notorious”) by co-producing their own story in “Straight Outta Compton.”
“NCIS: Los Angeles” star and five-time Grammy host LL Cool J now co-
produces his own game show, “Lip Sync Battle.” Clearly his 1990s self was
on to something when he rapped about “Rockin’ [his] peers.”

Queen Latifah (aka Dana Owens) and Will Smith also created their own
production companies after experiencing success on their respective hit
series, “Living Single” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” Netflix
recently teamed up with Smith for its biggest gamble to date, “Bright,” a
streaming version of a Hollywood blockbuster. Though critically panned,
the production was streamed an astonishing 11 million times over three
days when it was released last month and has been greenlit for a sequel.

Demand is high for the cachet, the perspective and, of course, the money
that a rap celebrity and elder statesman like Jay-Z brings to a
production. “Selma” and “Wrinkle in Time” director Ava DuVernay recently
worked with Mr. Bey for his “Family Feud” music video, a short released
on his streaming service, Tidal.

It’s not just recognizable star power from the music world that’s drawing
viewers toward shows and films that take their cues from the rap world.
HBO’s “Insecure” and the CW’s “Black Lightning” are heavily steeped in
rap references — such cultural shorthand would have been unthinkable 15
years ago beyond BET or MTV.

Reality TV on those Viacom-owned networks has served as a major stepping
stone for hip-hop stars transitioning from music to TV — and beyond.

Let’s face it, when “Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party” is renewed
for a second season (which kicked off last year), a barrier has not only
been broken, it’s been entirely erased. “I don’t know who’s going to be
more fried by the end of this show,” joked the perfect hostess with the
“Gin and Juice” rapper in the first season.

VH1’s reality show “Love & Hip-Hop” gave us Cardi B. “The Surreal Life”
and “Strange Love” made Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav a household name 20
years after he was last a household name. “Run’s House” and, yes, even
“The Vanilla Ice Project,” a home improvement show, were canaries in a
coal mine for the acceptance of the brash likes of Nicki Minaj on Middle
America’s go-to show, “American Idol.”

Rappers who are used to saying it all — unedited, with abandon and on the
fly — make for the best and most unpredictable reality stars. As for
scripted television and film, the tradition of storytelling at the base
of rap as far back as Kurtis Blow and the Sugarhill Gang is what makes
hip-hop so attractive to narrative-hungry mediums.

Says Common, “rappers are storytellers, and that is a timeless tradition
no matter who is watching or listening.” And clearly, this year, the
Grammys finally are.

--
Dems & the media want Trump to be more like Obama, but then he'd
have to audit liberals & wire tap reporters' phones.

[Rhino]

And what a sad state of affairs *that* is for anyone who actually likes
music. In my opinion, hip-hop is a form of music that was concocted so
that non-musicians could call themselves musicians too. It is my sincere
belief that most rappers could not do a recognizable version of Row,
Row, Row Your Boat or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star because they are too
musically difficult. That's why there is no melody in rap: it's all
monotone chanting. THE PERFORMERS CAN'T SING A NOTE TO SAVE THEIR LIVES.
I doubt many of them can play an instrument either, which is why they
base everything they do off of samples from actual musicians.

I don't say this to disparage black people either. Black musicians like
Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and countless others were -
and are - brilliant musicians who wrote/write brilliant compositions. It
is only rap/hip-hop and the poseurs who create it that I loathe.

Rhino

[Ubiquitous]

In article <p3ftin$40p$1...@dont-email.me>, no_offlin...@example.com
wrote:

Fer sure!

On a related note I couldn't help but notice most modern music seem to
exclusively use autotune now a days.