Hope Springs Eternal

On one of the sunniest days I decided to sit down and start a project (okay a blog).


Everyone should know by now, the underground is floundering. It has not really been too impressive all decade, at the most amounting to emcees rhyming over uninspired beats about how the mainstream rhymes about money and hoes (no kidding?). I've got my scapegoats, like Sweatshop Union. Cats like these seem to want to offer themselves up as martyrs for the underground. But now is not the time to look backwards. Hip-hop is offering up a lot of tasty promises for the coming year. Raekwon's new disc is supposed to drop this month. Mos Def has a new album ready to go sometime later this year, supposedly with a couple of tracks produced by my favorite post-Dilla beatmaker Madlib. New Big Boi, new Andre3K. Possibly new MF Doom, Wale, Trife da God, among others. Ghostface working on a new album? Wouldn't be surprised...

So after, in many ways, a largely disappointing 2008, I guess this blog should be considered an experiment about whether or not hip-hop can pull itself out of its slump, in the face of mainstream rap's efforts to kill its spirit and the majority of the underground's desire to run it into the ground. Will my hope be rewarded or will it just end up crushed by the likes of Asher Roth? We'll see if the underground, and hip-hop as a whole, can get it together.

To come:

B-Real - Smoke n Mirrors
K'naan - Troubadour
and a project entitled N.A.S.A. which produced the disc The Spirit of Apollo