the death of rap

A sad article came to my attention after those happy descriptions of the Academic Elf's students. This writer seems to think rap is a dying genre:

"Such profanity once drew attention to ghetto life, forcing conservatives, policymakers and critics into sociological debate; now hip hop is more likely to suffer admission into the American literary canon."

Art moves on, I guess. It would be silly to compose like Haydn in 2004 or to write like George Eliot. Thomas Kinkade is trying something like that. People feel sorry for you.

But are there genres that don't go stale? We still get excited to see some really good musicians go crazy when the summer jazz festival comes to town. And what about narrowly prescribed games like basketball that people play again and again to ever-admiring crowds? Maybe I am getting off track here with the sports example.

It seems like what we admire in the young Arizona freestylers (and in the Dixieland band and the basketball team) is their performance within the constraints of an existing genre, not any new contribution to the definition of art. Creativity exists within genres, although we seem to admire most the people who invent or redefine genres: Cervantes, Beethoven, Elvis, Fosbury.