Rolling Stone stays failing.

A$AP Rocky, a leading scourge of get-off-my-lawn rap

Regular readers, if there were ever any, may by now have worked out the main reasons I still post at all on here. The first of these is when I'm struck by a wave of guilt over the fact that I don't actually write enough and am letting my innate laziness get the better of me. The other is when I get tired of wondering whether a better, more eloquent writer than myself is going to state something that's plainly fucking obvious (or obvious to me, at least), leaving me with no choice but to say it myself or go slightly mad with frustration.

Rolling Stone has just published its list of the 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs Of All Time. Before moving on to the meat-and-potatoes of the whole thing, let me quickly point out that it's one of those shitty, cynically-formatted click-bait features that are becoming more and more common nowadays (hi, Complex!) and which feel like part of a massive conspiracy to waste everyone's time. But since people are no longer prepared to do anything so déclasse as...oh, I dunno, support the creators of physical media for which they pay once and can then read at their leisure at no further cost, then the subtext here would seem to be; eat those data charges and STFU like Sean Price.

And so, to the main event. The judging panel for this glorious exercise consisted of a broad selection of the great and good from the rap game, an assortment of hacks and a few randoms like Tom Morello and Vernon Reid, all of whom were asked to pick their favourites. Right now, elsewhere on teh internets, there is probably some over-earnest rap blogger twisting himself (it's always a "he") into a blind rage over the exclusion of deadprez, Immortal Technique or Lupe Fiasco, whilst wondering how it's possible that Talib Kweli would attach himself to a "greatest ever" list that makes room for Jay-Z (twice), Kanye and Missy. As it happens, I have few issues with the actual content itself. Taken as an arbitrary list of 50 great rap songs, rather than the definitive 50 Greatest Of All Time, there's not an awful lot on there that I'd argue against. On the other hand, the guiding principles behind it (or what I imagine them to be) are absolute fucking cocksnot – cosy, easily digestible rap nostalgia, lazy list-based journalism, and rock-crit values attempting to impose themselves on rap. Again.

To be honest, I've given up all hope of the rock press and its associated critical community ever managing to deal with rap on its own terms. You may as well try juggling smoke. Here’s what I mean. Take a random sample of English-language music publications from the last 10/15 years, possibly longer, and I'd bet large on at least half of them regularly defaulting to Public Enemy as the artistic yardstick whenever they cover hip-hop; "[rapper x] channels the spirit of Public Enemy", "[rapper y] will have the listener yearning for some of Public Enemy's righteous anger", et-fucking-cee. It won't matter a tuppenny fuck who they're writing about, and it's still happening. Now, try to imagine almost every review of a rock record you ever read trying to tell you it wasn't as good as Exile On Main Street. For clarity’s sake, Public Enemy are responsible for some of the greatest, most exciting music I've ever heard, but it's like this - they haven't made a truly great album in over twenty years. Public Enemy fell the fuck off ages ago. People might not like hearing it, and I don't particularly like saying it. But it's true.

Why should it matter, though? Who cares about the collective opinion of a bunch of people who'd probably insist that rap's been struggling against a long slide into irrelevance ever since PE failed to top Fear Of A Black Planet, as they make yet another drearily obvious attempt to establish A Canon, to re-order and re-shape rap into what they think it ought to be instead of accepting it for what it is? After all, they can comfortably tell you where rap was at twenty or even thirty years ago, but I wonder whether they'd have too much of a clue about where it's at now. I mean, doesn't anyone else think it funny that all these people seem to agree that the definitive high-water mark of the genre happens to be the exact point where the rock press finally declared that, yes, it might actually be possible for rap music to be more than just a craze, perhaps even something that could exist on the same plane of artistic worth as rock? And that that point was in 1982?

Which brings us to the rappers. Now, I'm not even remotely inclined to give them the same hard time I'd give the hacks. These are people who grew up on rap music, who lived and breathed it and, for the most part, continue to live and breathe it. Anybody who follows Dante Ross or ?uesto on Twitter can tell you that those two guys alone are on some super-heavyweight rap nerd shit - matter of fact, the latter's preamble might be the most worthwhile and entertaining thing about this whole shitshow. But I look at that list and factor in the age of all the rap dudes involved, and balance that with the strong likelihood that certain of the songs have vast nostalgic appeal that perhaps outweighs the usual consensus notions of “greatness”, and I still think, “Really..?” A bunch of rappers – this bunch of rappers - think Juicy is better than Hypnotize? Or that Paid In Full is better than I Know You Got Soul, and Strictly Business better than It's My Thing? They think – and this is really fucking suspect - the Jay tune that UGK got on is better than any other UGK record? Or any other Jay record, for that matter?

Although I doubt whether The Symphony or the remix of Flava In Ya Ear would be there at all without their input, I find it extremely hard to believe that the pros wouldn't have broader taste than this. Nah, this is something that has been skewed by a bunch of casual listeners who default to the same obvious choices every time and cannot fucking bear to deviate from the same rigid critical metric they've been pushing for the last three decades; the people who commission and occasionally write all those ridiculous “[X] Albums For People Who Don't Know Anything About Hip-Hop” pieces about a form of music that's existed on record for over 30 years. Just think about that for a minute. Imagine someone writing a piece called “[X] Albums For People Who Don't Know Anything About Rock” - in 1986. Seriously, if you still need to be led by the hand through hip-hop in 2012, then perhaps it isn't for you. Likewise, when your value judgements suggest that you stopped seriously listening to rap about twenty years ago, then you really need to fall back from any debate regarding what's what, and leave the arguing to the people who still give an actual fuck about it. You're welcome.

Jay Sean - a transatlantic success story nobody's talking about

While everyone (well, not quite everyone) over here has been considering burning questions like; "Is Lady GaGa is packing heavy ordnance?", "Has the arse finally dropped out of the Lene Lovich knock-off industry?" or "Is it time to stop making gags about the newly-reconfigured Sugabugas being the Trigger's Broom of pop?", a UK-born singer with a fistful of hit singles and two hit albums to his name has quietly climbed to the top of the US singles chart, breaking the Black Eyed Peas six-month stranglehold on the number one spot. Not that anyone's making much of a fuss, like.



Jay Sean's Down is a cracking little slice of state-of-the-art pop/r&b with an irresistible hook and a cameo from Yung Money Weezy in full-on Lollipop autotune gurgle mode. It'll be number one over here in no time. Some kid will perform it on the next season of American Idol, and millions of other kids will go screaming nuts. That's how pop music works nowadays, for better or worse. But, yet again, its success once more raises the question: how the fuck is it that a UK artist with actual, bonafide hits can, after getting tucked up by his/her UK label, go to the US, put their career in the hands of the Americans and subsequently clean up? It makes absolutely no sense. It's not as if it's anything especially exotic we're talking about here.

Jay Sean first popped up on my radar in 2003, when he was the featured vocalist on Rishi Rich's excellent Dance With You. For a little while afterwards, it seemed as if Rishi's wired-for-desi take on r&b production signalled the first wave of an emerging voice in British black music, fusing dancehall, r&b, Bengali/Punjabi pop and hip-hop in a way that seemed purpose-built to cross over to mainstream audiences who'd grown up with these sounds all around them. Even Timbaland appeared to be taking notes. Most likely to surf that wave seemed to be acts like Kray Twinz, certified dimepieces like Veronica Mehta, or your boy Jay Sean. Jay went on to have a succession of hit singles with the kind of smooth, likeable, if not particularly startling, pop-tinged r&b that's never struggled to find an audience in the UK. Massive crossover stardom seemed to evade him somehow, and after Virgin Records continued to put his second album on the back burner (after his first had gone Top 20 over here and sold two million in India alone), he did a bunk. The subsequent self-released sophomore joint was a bigger hit than his major label debut, and gave him five consecutive Top 20 hit singles. So why is it that, at a time when it's almost literally staring into the abyss, the UK music industry can't make a superstar out of a homegrown artist who quite clearly can sell records? Or at least as many records as Florence And The Machine?

I used to wander around Rusholme, Manchester during the 80s and see posters for concerts by acts like Alaap and Heera; massive stars in the Asian community over here, yet completely unknown elsewhere in the UK. Perhaps the crossover potential was always going to be limited for acts whose sound was so heavily dependent on South Asian instruments or tunings that sounded odd to Western ears. Nevertheless, at this time it wasn't unusual for bhangra acts to sell upwards of 30,000 cassettes a week - you'd think it might have occurred to someone somewhere in the industry that this could be something worth paying attention to. Nope. Even when an act did cross over, like Apachi Indian, it was widely perceived as a novelty, and it seemed nobody over here ever thought it worth the effort to engage with the Asian community and its music the way Chris Blackwell did with reggae.

Anyway, with the emergence of people like Bally Sagoo, a sort of post-bhangra sound began to emerge and, as the next generation of Anglo-Asian or British-born Asian kids came through, you began to hear music that wasn't really Westernised as such, but in fact reflected the community it came from in much the same way as jungle did, or - perhaps more relevant to the topic - acts like Soul II Soul did in their early days. But, although you can hear the end result of this blasting out of a tricked-out Beemer somewhere in just about any major city in the UK, it's still massively under-represented in the pop charts. Clearly, the scores of desi kids who eat this stuff up are buying it from the little shopfronts and market stalls in their manors - one of the few places where something resembling old-fashioned record shops still flourish, perhaps - but while UK labels look at that market and either don't know how to get into it, or just can't be bothered, Cash Money seems to have seen the growth of urban-desi culture in the States, looked at Jay Sean's impressive numbers, put two-and-two together and thought, let's get it.

Still, let's be honest, though - good as it is, there's little to differentiate Down from any number of releases by the likes of Ne-Yo, Trey Songz, Chris Brown, J. Holiday, Lloyd and them. The strings don't sound as if they've come from an R.D Burman soundtrack or anything like that, and there's barely anything idiomatically desi about the song or its production. But all the same, here we have a UK act abandoned by majors, as ever too preoccupied with the latest half-witted micro-trend from the Shamden/Poxton/Boreditch axis of Barleyism (do any of them actually want to sell records, do you think?), who has effectively managed to sell coals to Newcastle. Given the desi propensity for supporting their own, he might even manage to avoid the one-hit wonder tag that Mark Morrison and Craig David ended up with when they tried to pull off the same trick. At least the next time a so-called urban act is dropped by a major, they can look not just to Est'elle, but to Jay Sean too, and know that all hope is not yet lost.