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Maybe it’s the nature of lan­guage, or maybe it’s the nature of mar­ket­ing, but, for what­ever rea­son, it’s not uncom­mon for descrip­tors of pop­u­lar music to lose all mean­ing. Some recent and famil­iar exam­ples include the words “alter­na­tive,” “indie,” and “emo.” Another is “old school,” the mean­ing­less­ness of which was an inevitabil­ity, given its depen­dance upon time. Con­tem­po­rary uses of the term “old school” could be in ref­er­ence to artists whose careers are still active, such as Nas or Jay-Z. The thing is, “old school” was orig­i­nally a con­trast to “new school.” At the very bleed­ing edge of “new school” was a group known as Run-DMC. Nowhere is the con­trast more observ­able than in the clas­sic bat­tle (although “mas­sacre” is more like it) between Bizzy Bee, rep­ping the old school, ver­sus Kool Moe Dee of the new school. As the Beast­ies said, “That’s one you should know.” Bizzy Bee spends con­sid­er­able time doing the “ball with the ball, the dang-a-dang diggy” thing, and ask­ing the crowd their zodiac signs, favorite restau­rants, if they like cocaine, etc. Kool Moe Dee takes the mic, destroys Bizzy Bee, and changes the world. (MP3 — NSFW at all, but an absolute must hear.)

Gen­uinely “old school” hip-hop has its own mer­its, to be sure. For starters, the aggres­sion com­monly asso­ci­ated with rap music is more or less absent. In its place, fun is empha­sized, and at its most fun, hip-hop is about as fun as music can get. Some of those really early tracks are infec­tious, uplift­ing, spir­ited, and dance­able. Con­sider “Rapper’s Delight,” for exam­ple. It’s not the most sophis­ti­cated song in the world, but it can turn a party out. Those songs stand on their own and can make great com­pi­la­tion appear­ances, but that “old school” stuff doesn’t do much for albums.

Grand­mas­ter Flash & The Furi­ous Five’s old-school album, The Mes­sage was released in 1982. It’s not a great album, although it’s worth check­ing out as a piece of Amer­i­cana and music his­tory, not to men­tion sheer nov­elty. It’s really incon­sis­tent, with a few good songs, a cou­ple real stinkers, and a bunch in between. It con­tains to songs that are bet­ter clas­si­fied as R&B, and both are a lit­tle weird. One of those is “You Are,” which is explic­itly Chris­t­ian in con­tent (I take some the­o­log­i­cal issue with the state­ment that “Jesus is the Father,” but, hey, I didn’t really expect to find a thought­ful treat­ment on the Trin­ity here, any­way, and the mes­sage of for­give­ness is a good one). The other is a sincere-but-creepy trib­ute to Ste­vie Won­der, called “Dreamin’,” which con­tains the repeated line, “Ste­vie, you make me won­der, I’m dreamin’ about you, Ste­vie.” As a whole, the album is sequenced like a party: a cou­ple all-out party songs, an elec­tro num­ber for the break­ers, a gen­tler dance song, a cou­ple slow jams, and, then, tacked on to the end, “The Message.”

“The Mes­sage” is the meat, here, and a huge moment for hip-hop. In response to my Kanye post, my friend Steve won­dered about hip-hop’s prophetic voice. Hip-hop’s true start was as party music, and maybe there’s some­thing prophetic about par­ty­ing in the midst of poverty and vio­lence, but noth­ing explicit or inten­tional about hip-hop — as far as I can tell — could be called “prophetic” until “The Mes­sage.” The prophetic voices in hip-hop have become more nuanced and diverse, but arguably never more potent than this.

My reac­tion to Steve’s com­ment was ambiva­lent. I think peo­ple gen­er­ally have dif­fer­ent expec­ta­tions of hip-hop music than other pop gen­res. It seems like it’s scru­ti­nized with a dif­fer­ent set of stan­dards and expec­ta­tions. I’m pretty sure it’s unfair, the way I think the scrutiny of PEDs in base­ball is unfair in con­trast to other sports. Then again, just because it’s not fair doesn’t mean it’s not right. We expect more from base­ball, because it’s not just any sport, and our inter­ac­tion with it, in all its pas­toral slow­ness, is dif­fer­ent than what we can get from other (in my opin­ion, lesser) sports. I think, maybe, we expect more from hip-hop because we can expe­ri­ence it and con­nect to it in ways that dif­fer from other music. The beat still speaks to us on that primal-yet-spiritual level of which all music (and only music) is capa­ble, and, at the same time, the plainly deliv­ered lyrics hit us cere­brally. My dif­fer­ent responses to Kanye’s misog­yny through­out My Beau­ti­ful Dark Twisted Fan­tasy and Grand­mas­ter Flash & The Furi­ous Five’s “The Mes­sage” con­vince me of that.

I believe hip-hop does have a greater capac­ity for a prophetic voice than most gen­res. It speaks to us, lit­er­ally and plainly, but still artis­ti­cally and poet­i­cally. As fans, we should keep our expec­ta­tions rea­son­ably high, but we should also cel­e­brate those moments when the prophetic voice is asserted. “The Mes­sage” is one of those moments.