According to a rather interesting article in The New Yorker this week, this is the year of hip-hop’s demise. Sasha Frere-Jones writes that hip-hop has finally, "relinquished the controls [of the pop music market] and splintered into a variety of forms." Check out the whole article here.

N’er did I think that Kid Cudi would have played such a big role in Frere-Jone’s envisioning of hip-hop’s death. Or anything for that matter.

Like nailing down the birth of hip-hop, it’s unlikely that there will be any consensus on if and when hip-hop’s death occured anytime soon. But with musical habitat changing from boomboxes to iPhones, who knows how long the little guy could last at the top of the charts anyway. It’s not necessarily a bad thing either if Sasha has convinced you that the king is dead. If anything his argument that the Jay-Z’s and Lil Wayne’s are no more might actually help the genre in the end. Sometimes you have to cut the wankster branches and give some sunlight to the little guys just pushing down roots.