The numbers don’t lie:

Though music sales are down overall, rap sales slid a whopping 21 percent from 2005 to 2006, and for the first time in 12 years no rap album was among the top 10 sellers of the year. A recent study by the Black Youth Project showed a majority of youth think rap has too many violent images. In a poll of black Americans by The Associated Press and AOL-Black Voices last year, 50 percent of respondents said hip-hop was a negative force in American society.

Of course, when reporters speak of “hip hop” or rap, they are speaking of a commercial version of the genre that most serious artists have been dismissing for decades — at least since KRS-One proclaimed that he was “teaching poetry.”

So the search for reasons for hip hop’s demise probably tells us more about the needs of those searching than the vitality of the music itself. Personally, seeing The Coup funk the house at the Abbey Pub in Chicago last June was about as good as it has gotten.

But much of the criticism of mainstream artists is undeniably valid. As we noted before, in discussing Tim Hardaway’s hate speech and Byron Hurt’s new documentary on sexism and homophobia in hip hop, the central issue here is whether men can build their identities through compassion and intelligence, rather than dominance. As KRS-One put it:

You seem to be the type that only understand
The annihilation and destruction of the next man
That’s not poetry, that is insanity
It’s simply fantasy far from reality
Poetry is the language of imagination
Poetry is a form of positive creation
Difficult, isn’t it? The point? You’re missin it