> > ... The proletariat is multinational, and hip hop
> > is its music of resistance.
>
> It's curious then that, like rock'n'roll, it has been so
> rapidly and radically banalized, and its many of its practitioners
> (and betrayers) given such admirable material rewards by the
> resisted established order.
Not curious at all; this is the central feature of aesthetics in the multinational era. Aesthetic works of quality are never identical to political protests or mass movements; they follow a different logic of resistance, occupy a different social space. The paradox is this: that in a corporate-run world, where the sound-systems are produced in Malaysian sweatshops by Japanese electronics firms and marketed by this dense undergrowth of for-profit producers, people nevertheless somehow resist this messed-up system we live in by tuning in to the alien space vibes of Dr. Octagon. Whether artists consciously resist the total system or not is the measure of their personal political commitment; whether their aesthetic works resist the total system is the measure of their aesthetic quality (that's why artists can be politically reactionary, or personally bonkers, but aesthetically progressive).
-- Dennis