Or, being truthful about the battles one faces attempting to live a righteous life in a sinful world. Country and hip hop originate from the same roots. It's the same struggle. From different perspectives.
I can get down with this. Both country and hip hop have suffered from the same corruptive influence of pop music and pop labels.
In both genres you have a history of rebel music (rebel music in the Bob Marley sense, NOT the states rights to maintain chattel slavery "rebel") that was corrupted by mainstream labels into derivative pop.
You've got hip hop, and then there's hip pop.
In the country world there's been legitimate fight the power rebel artists, but that peaked in an older era with guys like Kris Kristofferson. Most of the current market has been corrupted by commercial entities.
I remember seeing an amazing blues / folk guitarist and song writer perform years ago and he introduced a song by saying "the record label guys in Nashville wanted me to write a country song for them. They didn't like it. I dunno why, I wrote it slow as I could."
It's sad because there's still a market for real shit, but big labels don't invest in it. Oliver Anthony blew up on the country scene for keepin it real.
Kinda. I remember in the early 90's when there was still essentially NO Hip Hop on radio. And during that time I went from one State with a very diverse population, to another State that was very racially segregated. There were only 2 R&B stations in Virginia, and maybe one pop station in Florida that played Hip Hop. The only places you heard actual rap was on College stations on the weekends. And there was Yo MTV raps, and like 1 or 2 shows on BET.
I mean we can get mad at the community for taking one of the only viable economic opportunities to get out of the f*ckin ghetto, but that seems a bit judgy to me. If they had more infrastructure to facilitate the transition into popular culture themselves (their own radio stations, etc.), it might have been different. But that didnt happen until years later. The 90's Hip Hop boom changed a lot of sh*t, just not the pecking order. It was an infant form of music coming into an industry that had exploited artists for decades. There was no Motown of Hip Hop that actually groomed and somewhat protected the artists' interests.
Makes me realize how privileged we were in the north east, growing up in the tristate area it was blowing up in the early 90s, Biggie was being played everywhere, Wu Tang was busting out onto to the scene and even the moms loved Tupac. We'd be skateboarding in a parking lot every afternoon with a boombox blasting Souls of Mischeif's 93 til infinity.
I didn't really think about it but I guess it took some time to spread out of CA and the NY tristate area before the ATL and dirty south scenes started to come up.
