conscious heads are people who don't like hip hop, but like a certain sound and certain way of thinking that came from a certain era and certain group within hip hop.
they revise what hip hop is according to their taste and claim that the shit they like is hip hop. all because a few rappers (KRS-ONE) told them so.
this pa**ed week i listened to 2 hour long mixes of hip hop from 1990 to 1998. i realized that if you average it out, music from the golden era just sounds different, but doesn't actually deviate that much in content to what you could find on the airwaves in 2010. in fact new music is smarter, more sonically innovative, 'sensitive' and even funnier than 90's rap. the only reason heads call it transient (there ain't no 'cla**ics') is because it's too contemporary for them to attach it to nostalgia.
conscious heads are conservatives. maybe all the shit they hate and that embarra**es them about hip hop [or 'rap'] is hip hop. maybe hip hop was always meant to be nasty and misanthropic and not easily palatable to your parents. and maybe that's the beauty of it. it accommodated everyone, even the dumba**es no one would take seriously in society. the shit didn't judge and it offered complete freedom of expression.
so the irony is that the shit the conscious heads say is killing hip hop is hip hop and the shit they believe in is just one out of its many faces.
which is why, after guiding you for years, all your favourite conscious rappers are now post-conscious. which is a subgenre of hip hop that is aware of consciousness, but doesn't make itself exclusive to the sound, artists and thinking of what is generally regarded as 'mainstream' (all those features that disappoint those of you with a rigid perspective).
discuss!