It was a phenomenon meant to take over the world, kill the guitar and destroy the English language. Even as an endangered guitar player with zero grasp of street talk, I couldn’t help but think hip-hop was a great thing, a genuine revolution led by, but not limited to, music.

That music, a parasite to disco that became the host, transformed its down-trodden practitioners into millionaires. Everyone in hip-hop had a story, a heart warming story of rags to riches. Every one seemed more than a musician; entrepreneurs with clothing lines and record labels, portfolios of cribs and wagons. The sheer decadence of it all was something to revel in, a pomposity to rival stadium rock.

As with rock music, hip-hop suffered its share of losses as well as its hits. Drugs and guns were its appendages, living fast and dying young the axiom to many, but despite all this, despite everything it stood for, hip-hop successfully led western culture into the new millennium. It gave hope and purpose to many who were not able to luxuriate in the vicarious dreams of street life. It bought language, music and artistry to those who might not have considered a life of poetry, narration and wit. It gave a voice and a banner to millions who were struggling to be heard.

Hip-hop’s success was the story of music many times over; a bond that bought a divided community together and infected the masses with its new cultures, new ideas and new styles. Everything has a time, it is moving to timelessness that few artistic expressions achieve, yet, more than punk, glam or garage, hip-hop was the next really big one that was supposed to be more than a passing trend.

I believed in its durability because it had lineage, a thing no music could boast since Little Richard spawned a thousand imitators. From Kurtis Blow to Run and Biggie, from Eazy E to Snoop and Tupac, a cross-generational legacy was being formed on both coasts of North America.

The numbers hinted at durability too: hip-hop toppled country on the 1998 Billboard charts with 81 million record sales in that year alone. Time magazine declared it America’s top selling genre, and Roc-A-Fella, Def Jam and Bad Boy became household names. For a while it made everything else seem antiquated, as if other music had somehow diminished because of its lack of bite.

But just as the seventies did for rock‘n’roll, so the new millennium has done for hip-hop. For music is always a reflection of our times, an expression of the zeitgeist rather than the thing itself. The social conscience has changed, perhaps we’ve all seen one crass-daddy to many, and homophobic, violent, profane, promiscuous, misogynistic and racist voices are struggling to be heard.

If one day is to be remembered during the demise, September 11 2007 stands out. Kanye West, a rapper of limited gangsta credentials, and 50 Cent, he of nine bullet wound survival, went head-to-head with their album releases. Fiddy, who said he would no longer make solo records if he was outsold, lost out to the soft rapper with the new samples and new ideas.

It wasn’t all 50’s fault of course – he didn’t kill hip-hop on his own. Eminem certainly helped, the imaginary credentials many thought they saw in the music’s black stars were challenged once it became apparent a white boy from Detroit could master the art. Just as many purists might say Elvis defamed the real rock‘n’roll through his more palatable exposition, so the same charge may, in time, be levelled at Marshall Mathers III.

Yet, more positive than pinning the blame on any group of unfortunate souls who arrived during the dissolution, let’s instead attribute the success of rap music (a broader concern that has blossomed into something more artistic, more creative, more musical and more diverse) to hip-hop’s fall.

Through Kanye, Dizzy, Andre 3000 and many others, the art of rapping has broken free of its stylistic shackles and is now experimenting with new rhythms and new flow. Productions have moved on from Terminator X’s scratches and Dre’s beats, and ‘chat’ has joined the wider music community. Just as rock, flamenco, punk, bangra, funk and dance have diluted each other’s borders in the technological age, so rap music has engaged with these worldly influences to create new subgenres.

Now, far from being the expression of a few from a small neighbourhood in New York, rap is something more accomplished and an art form we can expect to survive future fads. Rapping is an instrument once more, free from hip-hop’s beat, and can be used without connotations of crime, anger and drugs. Who knows, one day we might even see an X-Factor/Idol victor who hasn’t sung a note.

Those programmes, for many, are the embodiment of the decade now drawing to a close. But I would like to remember this last ten years for the death of hip-hop instead. More than the iPod, metro males with guitars, or the never ending parade of reunions and comebacks, that loss has given us the most innovative definition of our time, perhaps the one new sound we can take to the next era. It may not be a gansta’s paradise, but rap is here to stay.

Picture by stuttermonkey