“It shows you that old hip-hop is still around. People think that the music has gone very mass appeal, and it has, but Jay and Kanye are still doing what they’ve been doing for years,’’ he says.
Tickets for the Garden show top out at $247.50, but if you consider the caliber of the artists, that’s not extraordinary. Like it or not, that’s a common price range among heavyweights, regardless of genre. Certainly, Madonna and the Rolling Stones have done it. And when Carole King and James Taylor teamed up for a tour together last year, tickets went for as much as $350.
“If you think about it, Jay is worth $45 or $50 on his own and definitely Kanye, too,’’ Pup Dawg says. “It’s an event that people want to be a part of it and people want to say they were there.’’
The success of the album and tour trumpets a commercial peak for rap, but it also raises a critical question of just how far the genre has strayed from its streetwise origins.
“When I was growing up listening to rap, you always felt like you could see rappers in the street. And you could - at the car wash or at the mall. You could always relate to rap because it was inner-city music,’’ says J-Zone, a producer, DJ, and author of a new book about hip-hop culture called “Root for the Villain: Rap, [Expletive], and a Celebration of Failure.’’
“Somewhere along the line, entertainment has gone from what we can relate to to a distraction from our everyday lives,’’ he adds. “Rap became almost Hollywood in that if you’re an average person, why would you want to be reminded of your life? It’s like, ‘I want to see somebody else riding a jet even though I can’t afford to have health insurance.’ I think people are in awe of a life they’ll probably never see.’’
