Been a lot of talking lately about The Takeover of Hip-Hop by White Folks. Nah, B. You wanna know why that's not gonna happen? Because until systematic racism and white supremacy no longer create the conditions that compel young black people to make so-called gangsta rap, which is and has always been the most important subsection of the genre, essentially dictating how the culture remains "authentic," which is what continues to make it "Cool" to the very folks who are said to be in the process of taking it over, hip-hop is gonna stay blacker than the back of Forest Whitaker's neck. (If anything, R&B may be in the process of becoming whitewashed because niggas, per usual, seem to have become bored, as we are wont to become, with the "classical" idea of "Soul." You know, all that chivalrous punk-smoove pillow-talk shit that has been in decline, as far as Negroes are concerned, since at least 1988, when no less a genius than Prince had to bow down and submit to the force that is hip-hop. It's like your Robin Thickes and JTs can keep that. Popular black R&B is now being made by people who are trying to sound like sad robots. It has never sounded this "soulless" before—which is not necessarily a bad thing, word to Partynextdoor.) All of this has been on my mind of late with regard to Questlove's recent Vulture essay series. Which was, I gotta to say, some straight-up huff B. Don't get me wrong: Questo is and will always be the man. But the big homie could not have chosen a worse time period in rap to frame his argument, which is essentially that it sucks. (Yeah, I know that's awfully reductive. I realize that he touched on myriad other points such as: the historical "usefulness" of "Soul" in black music, and how "Cool" was a way for black folks to confront the world in a manner that was meant to discourage attention, but, paradoxically, often attracted it; and that hip-hop has become the lens by which America chooses to view black people as a whole, which is problematic indeed.) To speak to the notion of "Cool" for a moment, the great Albert Murray used to say it stems from our unique sense of survival that is in essence improvisational, exemplified best within the great American blues idiom. But this dynamic was supposed to have shifted post Obama when we were supposed to be post racial (the insinuation taken to its logical conclusion being that we were also post "Cool"). But Chicago says otherwise. And no one speaks to that that city's segregated ultraviolent lawlessness more eloquently than Lil Herb, whose hardscrabble street chronicles calmly embody the will to survival in the teeth of unspeakable bedlam.
With the raw embattled voice of a wordsmith far beyond his years, the 16-year-old Chiraq native attacks this jittery Omen-like behemoth of a track like his very young life depends on it. And judging by the bleak visuals on display here depicting a panoramic view of endless drug transactions, fast cash, police sweeps and spontaneous gunfights, life-or-death situations are surely something he's accustomed to. "Got thousands everywhere/There's money piling everywhere/Why the cops hot on our block?/Man, there's violence everywhere/Boy don't try us, why you think you hear them sirens in the air?/Hollows flying, mommas cryin'/There's homies sighin' over there," Herb spits with a resignation that's as jarring as it is heartbreaking. This is grace under pressure. This is swignin' the blues. This, alas, is "Cool."
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