ETHOS

By Paul Pennington

“I’m in your girl with her heels in the air n****”
~”Conscious” brotha from the Legendary Foundation

Now personally, I am not a huge fan of labels—in relationships, art and anything else people love to smack a label on. In hip hop music we can see labeling of “conscious” or “underground” emcees as a by-product of the commercialization of the genre. The irony in this assessment of rappers such as Common, Talib Kweli and Mos Def, is the seemingly commodified and packaged identity that these characters are given. I say this in the sense that while these particular artists do not box themselves into the packaged product akin to the “commercial” artist, the backpacking fans manage to pigeonhole their heroes into altruistic lights of positivity and revolutionary thought.

Let’s Get Free…How?….Well, um let’s um burn flags, um eating our vegetables like mommy said…that should work…yea and let’s disregard capitalization…just so the white man knows we don’t play his silly games.

I have major contentions with these notions for several reasons. The first comes in definition. Who was the linguistically-challenged (read: idiot) individual who decided that “conscious” was the proper adjective to describe this particular sect of artists. Most sources define “conscious” as being self-aware or general cognition…wtf?!?!?!?…Are we seriously going to put some people on a pedestal because they ostensibly maintain a level above a vegetative state? Well, in that case every rapper in the game, is conscious unless there is an unknown artist named LIFsupport, with the tentatively-titled Pull The Plug EP, coming this summer (don’t be the idiot who actually googles that ish…please) (more…)