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Life & Arts

Hip-hop strikes out this year at Super Bowl

The Beat Box

Zach Lee

The taste of victory is sweet, but like a milk chocolate Easter bunny, it is usually hollow. It must have been Easter on Sunday. On the surface, Super Bowl XXXIX was a substantial victory for hip-hop, with a plethora of rap stars of today and yesterday making appearances, but beyond the surface, it was little more than chocolate-flavored air. 

The Black Eyed Peas performed "Where is the Love?" during the pre-game festivities, but that was just a thinly -- very thinly -- veiled attempt at ... well, I'm not sure what the producers of the festivities were attempting, but it wasn't pretty. "Where is the Love?" is not only a cheesy song; its 2003 release date is also a testament to the fact that the group isn't even good enough to come up with a second cheesy song in two years. Strike 1.

P. Diddy was a whore long before he rode Biggie Smalls to superstardom, but he contracted another case of publicity chlamydia with his participation in the Pepsi ad which also included Carson Daly (hey, they must be drawn to each other). Things like that make me wonder who really looks up to him. He doesn't even do anything remotely interesting in the ad, but he still gets several people to emulate him -- kind of like what he's done for hip-hop. Strike 2.

The final straw is the long-gone-from-the-spotlight MC Hammer. Granted, he's never been much more than a dancer with a couple catchphrases, but like it or not, he's also a large piece of what many people consider to be the birth of hip-hop. So when he ridicules himself, he also ridicules hip-hop. In a commercial for Lays potato chips, he lets a couple of punk kids throw him back over the fence after a crotchety neighbor tosses him into their yard. Sure, he's a little comical in retrospect, and it's actually refreshing to see someone in hip-hop's history step back and laugh at himself. The problem is that his self-degradation was for money. Strike 3.

It's not Easter yet. In the meantime, we can sigh, deal with the dearth of creativity in hip-hop and look forward to Spring Training.
 

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