Last week, Greg Tate laments the misguided celebratory noise surrounding hiphop's turning 30.

I find it interesting that people fête these anniversaries so anthropomorphically. I mean does the arrival of a cultural movement “à la trentaine” have the same significance as a person's life reaching 30 to merit it being celebrated as such? Are the two lifecycles even comparable? Aren't there more important markers in hiphop's trajectory that banal numerical ones? How about we celebrate those ... whadya think people??

Maybe it's idiosyncratic of me but I tend to associate birthdays with celebrations of people and their specific progress rather than something as broad and now amorphously dynamic as hiphop, especially in its current state of affairs where the ethos of the founding fathers' untelevised revolution has been reduced to a pedestrian appendage of corporate Pop. Furthermore, I find that the numerical significance is not worthy of attention on those merits alone. That's why this whole affair feels like a forced sales pitch or a vapid publicity stunt.

Tate isn't very concerned about whether or not to celebrate, clearly there is stuff to celebrate. For example hiphop playing its part in “rendering people of African descent visible, unforgettable”, providing “more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences” than other forms and its ability to “connect so many Black folk worldwide”.

Nevertheless all this faux celebratory noise from the commercial hiphop industry projects a false sense of security and obscures the distance folk have to go to get over real issues like institutionalized poverty, the AIDs and prison crises, not to mention larger global issues surrounding World Bank, IMF and Shell/Mobil/Texaco and their ilk. So while I don't want to hijack a homeslice's right to party, I have to wonder how you tailgate when your vehicle is smoking.