Madison the white city isn't going down without a fight. It's not really a hip hop thing; it's not really about race, either, even though the debate has been largely held on racial grounds.
No, it's a class thing, and it's been going on for well over a century. They did it to the Germans first, by cracking down on their peaceful - but noisy and raucous - parties.
Today our city fathers are busy trying to ban hip hop nightclubs because of "violence," which translates as people being having fights in the street outside a hip hop event. Never mind that people have fights outside UW-Badger events every single day. A few years ago a bar banned athletic wear, but chose to enforce it along obviously cultural lines, allowing Wisconsin varsity garb full access.
Hip Hop's crime is bad taste (in the judgement of Fred Mohs and the Downtown Madison inc. crowd), taste as adjudged according to the aesthetic minimalist standards that built the Overture center.
It would be an entirely avoidable waste if we (as a city) hold this debate without remembering the previous rounds in this fight. David Mollenhoff's incredible book of Madison history tells the story. In the 1870s, hordes of Germans settled in Madison, and unsettled the "native" city fathers.
The Germans' main crime was being ethnic. They held enormous beer parties in Brittingham Park on Sundays, parties that tended - like Club Majestic's hip hop nights - to spill into the surrounding neighborhood. Worse, the Germans favored raucous, low-class polka music. The kind with tubas that can be heard for blocks around.
Madison's big cheeses know that upscale, wine-sampling, art-buying tastes don't stand a chance in the free-market of arts and culture, so they need to enforce the standards with the support of government.
If hip hop fans started wearing sedate clothes, started driving quiet imports, and managed their disputes with lawyers instead of fists, the city fathers would be all smiles.
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