There was so much actual news happening in late October that I missed Barack Obama‘s chief rap scold, Thomas Chatterton Williams, making a really late observation about hip-hop music:

The biggest, baddest hip-hop rebels — from Cam’Ron to Fabolous to Mobb Deep to the late Biggie Smalls — are remarkably bourgeois at heart, with 1950s-era dreams of parking gas-guzzling Cadillacs in front of cookie-cutter tract homes in New Jersey. If anything, hip-hop is the enemy of a radical challenge to the capitalist status quo.

Or as President Obama put it years ago, the problem with hip-hop is that “the underlying values are so square.” Must be hard to be a culture critic when the subject of your criticism can articulate the underlying problem with the culture more concisely and effectively than you can.

Of course, if we bring both Williams’ and Obama’s observations to their logical conclusion, that hip-hop is not subversive, that its underlying values are a reflection of mainstream American culture, then Williams’ larger point about hip-hop’s cultural pathology as an explanation for persistent black poverty makes no sense since, by his own admission, what’s bad about hip-hop–its materialism, its patriarchy, its respect for violence as a solution to problems–is endemic to mainstream American culture.
Meanwhile try to say “biggest, baddest hip-hop rebel Fabolous” without laughing. Trying to do so while eating or drinking is not recommended.