i like this discussion, but i don't have time to formulate a full response to anything right now, so i'm just re-posting what i said in the gen. d. thread that inspired this one, with a few typos corrected and one sentance added:

hip-hop is mostly about hand-waving or dick-grabbing, it's hard to turn that around into chin-stroking, you gotta make it into fist pumping for it to be fun, which is what PE used to do. much as i liked the golden age of conscious hip-hop, i'm not the biggest fan of "conscious" music in general. i think that if someone is genuinly conscious, it should come through in their work naturally. it will guide what they allow themself to say and what they feel the need to stress, and their relationship with their audience. i don't like what i see in certain rappers who are always trying be activist, but are really as mediocre as mcs as they are as politicans. to use music or politics to really effect social change, you really have to be commited and the best at it. so why make fair-to-middling music about uplifting the masses that isn't good enough to reach the masses, then take on some nice-but-innefectual social causes that equally only preach to the converted. maybe if you were really good at one of them, something would change. so if you're an artist, focus on that, and let conscious side come through on it's own. same thing goes for the audience, if you're political, you'll naturally see the politics in artists work, they shouldn't have to shove it down your throat. not that artists shouldn't want to combine the two more explicitly - if you can make it work, that's a tremendous achivement. of course there is a pretty unsettling bias against conscious music today, a lot of people really are afraid of it. but i think what that really is about is that now that hip-hop is the dominant pop music, a lot of people are invested in it simply so that they can reap the benefits of pop culture, and are scared to endorse anything that deviates from the hip-pop format.

"I'm every MC by the name of Jay Dee" - Jay Dee