1. N.W.A. in the Park, in 2030, or any other time, would be exceedingly difficult, as Easy-E died in 1995.
2. Suderman mentions "So, sure, maybe N.W.A. won’t be kiddie stuff a few decades off," which to me is a sign that he hasn't seen the second best video on youtube (or perhaps has forgotten about it).
3. Suderman again:
N.W.A. might not find its way onto the playlists of most future New Yorker readers, but more complicated, mature hip-hop — acts like El-P and M.I.A. — probably will. And if more mainstream variants like Kanye West and Outkast, who share roots with more hardcore acts, don’t make the 2040 equivalent of classic pop charts, well, I’ll eat my Blackberry.
On those occasions when I reflect on the history of hip-hop, I believe there are two impulses which battle against each other, one of which is best represented in "Rapper's Delight:" entirely about the hook, which is easy to discern, as the lyrics are complete nonsense. The other is "The Message" (or perhaps "White Lines") where the hook is secondary to the lyrics. One can then tell a fairly easy story of ebb and flow: Run DMC and LL Cool J, N.W.A. and Public Enemy, the Daisy-Age Hip-hoppers, novelty rap (Sir Mix-A-Lot), Tupac and Biggie, Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, etc; either the hook or the lyrics are ascendant in any particular moment, though there are always elements of the other.
Ross makes the connection back to jazz, but the better connection is to punk, which has a similarly ambivalent relationship between credibility and success. Blondie is a punk band that sells out to become successful; Patti Smith does not, which naturally limits the size of her audience (though includes many of those who like their music more mature and complicated--the same sort of people who presumably like M.I.A.). Nirvana was more successful and reached a wider audience than the Replacements ever will.
I make all these observations as a long-winded way of saying three ideas are getting conflated in the two posts mentioned: that there is a difference between highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow (inasmuch as they exist anymore), and the difference is one of quality; that popularity and quality are correlated (I return, as ever, to the Somerset Maugham below); and that the ascendance of particular forms of entertainment constitutes, on its face, a cultural decline (because, honestly, with everything that's out there, you pick NWA? I don't want to commit the quintessential modern sin and venerate authenticity, but I think there are aesthetic, sociological and theoretical reasons to believe their popularity constitutes less of a decline than, say, The Hills. Also: decline from what?). All those points seem contentious to me, and none of them are established.
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