Author: Tate, Greg
Title: FLYBOY2 The Greg Tate Reader
Publisher: Duke University Press
Year: 2016
Link: https://worldcat.org/en/title/934705645
Pages 4-5:
... a lot of us back then also all believed hip-hop was the unstoppable revolution to come. Not hard to understand since like jazz in the sixties it seemed to present a breathtakingly novel reformulation of its avant-garde baadass attitude every other week. .... Like a lot of folk, I also knew the party, the hip-hop movement, was truly over when Puffy, a major talent scout but no talent, got the nerve to get on the mic -- and went platinum! This became the handwriting on the wall if only because it signified that Black Mediocrity was now as commercially viable in hip-hop as Black Genius, the same fate that had already befallen jazz and soul in the eighties. But hip-hop, like Black Music always has been and always will be, is the most accurate arbiter of the zeitgeist, of the consciousness of the people and the age.