Burr!

That is how Gucci Mane announces himself, with that inane tagline that he has embraced, much in the same way that other hip-hop artists have resorted to yelling their own names. Cleverly, Gucci’s line indicates that he is “so icy,” aka he has blown a few hundred grand on jewelry so heavy that it will inevitably give him back problems.

Gucci Mane is a lyrical screw-up in the worst way. Listening to one of his songs, while enjoyable in a humorous, ironic or belligerently drunk sense, is agony if one takes the care to listen to anything the man is saying.

This is a conspicuously relevant commentary on the nature of mainstream hip-hop itself nowadays. Lyrical relevance, the kind of poetry and social commentary that used to define what it was to be a respected hip-hop artist, has been replaced with hooks and production value. The catchy has come to outweigh the meaningful.

The result of this has been a culture of popular music no longer concerned with quality or depth but one instead concerned with quantity and catchiness. This is evident when considering that people like Lil Wayne can be in prison for a few months and manage to release a full-length mix tape, or the fact that he also manages to produce hip-hop sings, which were once largely lyrical endeavors, without ever writing anything down.

Perhaps the least fortunate aspect of this trend is that I myself, knowing that many of the songs I’m listening to are the inane chants of a millionaire without a high school education, continue to listen. This is because I, like countless others, have fallen into the mindset that, regardless of whether a song is truly “good,” if it’s catchy and has lyrics bad enough to be considered funny then I will listen to it. This is fine to a point, but it fosters neglect in artists that are truly that, artists.

Underground hip-hop has managed to maintain what I will call lyrical integrity and there have been artists tagged as “underground” that have broken into the mainstream conscious, such as Blue Scholars and Common Market. But, again, these artists’ success has been regionally limited and, outside the northwest, they still don’t receive the kind of recognition they deserve. These kinds of artists, following in the tradition of hip-hop legends like Mos Def, have maintained that element of the poetic in hip-hop.

This is perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the genesis of what has become mainstream hip-hop. There was once a kind of universal notion of what hip-hop was; it was a kind of poetic insight into social issues that took the form of music. In short, it was an art form. Now however, that form has debased itself in such a way that it glorifies the things it used to critique and has lost that element of sophistication, or, at least, that raw level of emotional connection that manifested itself in lyrics, in poetry.

The kind of things the Wu-Tang clan once lamented are now glorified by people like Gucci Mane, and the kind of bitter, brutal realities that we were able to see in those lyrics have given way to a glitzy façade. All of this is a bastardization of what hip-hop can be, and all of this is announced with a strident BURR!