After an initial listen, this track caught my attention, and here's why: Hip hop is going through some growing pains right now, and it was this Termanology song "Tight Pants are for Girls" that really kind of brought it all together for me.
[A little background] We now officially live in the age of the Black Hipster.
One of the central aspects of hip hop identity has always been masculinity — sometimes to a fault (see Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y.") — and this is central to the Termanology track. All of these hipster rappers wearing tight pants cannot be men because they do not conform to ideal of masculinity set forth by hip hop, which has had cats in baggy gear since the early 90s. Where Termanology's attack becomes slightly muddled is that he seems to be including both the mainstream (T.Pain) and the hipsters, who I would argue, are still largely separate (except for Kanye, who bridges the gap between the two, and whose outlandish style-posse photo graces the Black Hipster article).
At it's essence, the rise of the Black Hipster draws into question the entire type-a, alpha-male persona developed by a large number of rappers over the past two+ decades. Not to say that hipsters are any less prone to misogyny or braggadocio, but they are presenting a b-type, to the stereotypical MC swagger, part of which is tight pants...
The styles of hip hop have grown from street art -> industry -> global enterprise and overwhelming club/pop phenomenon, all while maintaining an independent presence in the streets, transforming hip hop into a hydra along the way.
The beast basically has 3 heads:
1)the pop version of hip hop, a dance/club music devoid of any trace of the actual elements of the art form called hip hop
2) the street shit that really never stopped getting made, but just stopped getting served up to the mainstream as heavily (with a few exceptions)
3) the underground rap set that utilizes hip hop's form, but opens up the tradition to experimentation, both in both structure and subject matter.
Now that is an over-simplification, but for the sake of not getting lost in dissecting the various stylistic and geographical minutia of hip hop, let's say that pretty much everything fits into one of those 3 categories.
If you look at hip hop from the late-80s forward (After the releases of KRS-1's Criminal Minded (the first hip hop album with a gun on the cover) and N.W.A.'s Straight Out of Compton(the album that made record companies realize there was more money in gangster rap than other forms of hip hop)), the essential dialectic forces in hip hop were gangster vs conscious rappers and/or underground vs. mainstream. They talked about each other (mostly the underground dissing the mainstream), but they co-existed and gave their audiences a choice.
With the addition of the third branch of hip hop, which is really only hip hop in genre according to big box record stores, but which represents probably 95+% of what the average person is exposed to called rap.
The addition of the new, media-dominant form shifted the dialectic, and the new mainstream pushed both the street music and the backpack rap into the same subjugated space, which, with a dose of frustration, is pretty succinctly explained by Termanology in this track.
The growing pains of this change are resulting in a backlash against hipster style's infiltration and assimilation into hip hop. After all, the Cool Kids are doing mixtapes with Don Cannon, who has been holding down the street side of the mixtape biz for a minute.
Further evidence of the backlash against hipsters is one of ATL's next dope MCs, Gripplyaz, who dropped this banger "Fuck That Hipster Shit" earlier this year.
There is a certain irony to the attacks, like Termanology's, that the hipsters don't represent real hip hop though, because if you dig back further than the rise of the hip hop industry in the early 90s, heads in the 70s and 80s were rocking tight pants all day.
So while folks may not like how tight pants look with their brown Tims, heads certainly can't knock tight pants for not being hip hop. If anything, most of these hipsters are taking it back to where it began, at least style-wise. And while I'm not running out to cop some junk-hugging jeans, I think the more important battle should be creating a sustainable independent industry that supports artists of all kinds, not just folks who fit a certain mold. That's the only way the art form itself is going to weather this age of big business, corporate music and media saturation.
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