If Timbaland’s Done With Hip-Hop, Then Hip-Hop’s Done With Him

From Jay to Missy to Aaliyah, Timbaland's production skills have been very good to hip-hop and r&b, and hip-hop's been very good to him, allowing the heavyweight beat genius to enjoy a lifestyle he couldn't have dreamed of as a child. But now, more than a twenty years after he first began working in the game, Timbaland's saying that he's finished with hip-hop.

"I was done with hip-hop a long time ago," Timbaland said in a recent MTV interview. "Once my generation left, I left. I do it, but there's nobody from my generation besides Jay who's doing it. I look at Lil Wayne as being from my generation. Some people are still acceptable. Kanye is acceptable from my generation."

First off all, way to include Wayne in "your" generation even though he's eleven years younger. If you're going to play the "these young kids don't know what music really is" card you can't decide someone's not part of the new generation just because you like their work. Second, "acceptable"? F**k that. But that's not even close to the real issue here. It's a little sad to hear Timbo delve into grumpy old man territory, effectively telling every young rapper out there to stay off his lawn, but what really pissed me off is what he said next:

"After my last album, I know where my bread and butter is at. I know 75 percent [of the people who buy my album] are women who love Timbaland and most are the women who watch 'Desperate Housewives' and all those others. I did this research. It's the women who watch 'Sex and the City,' 'Desperate Housewives' -- all the real go-to-the-bar women like Timbaland, and mostly European women. It lets me know that my fanbase is mostly women and they are from all cultures. So it's not a person who loves mostly hip-hop. It's a person who loves everything besides hip-hop."

In other words Timbo did some market research, concluded that hip-hop was no longer as profitable, and promptly crossed it off his list. What?! If you take hip-hop seriously, and if you're reading RefinedHype than you must, it's not something you can just walk away from, something to be thrown away once the financial numbers don't add up. I know this might sound crazy, but maybe, just maybe hip-hop fans didn't buy "Shock Value 2" because it wasn't very good. Na, that couldn't be the problem.

Now for the record I've got nothing against Timbo making his money by recruiting Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry and other pop princesses for his new album, but to discard hip-hop in the process like an outdated People magazine is f**ked up, and not a black or white choice he needs to make (no pun intended). Here's what I wish he had said:

"Hip-hop is my first love and it's given me everything I have, but right now both artistically and financially I'm pursuing more of a pop sound. I've come to realize that my fans extend far beyond hip-hop, and I want to give them some love too. So while I'll never forget hip-hop, that's just not the direction I'm going in right now."

If he had said that I wouldn't have any problem at all, but dismissing an entire culture in one broad sweep because it no longer meets his financial goals makes me seriously wonder how much he ever loved hip-hop, and by extension hip-hop fans, for all those years that we supported him. It's like we'd been married to Timbo for twenty years, had a couple kids with him, thought our relationship was solid, and then one day he walked into the kitchen and declared he's leaving us for a younger, richer woman. Ok, that was kind of a creepy analogy, but you get the point. So while I'll always bump "Big Pimpin" as loud as my speakers will go, I've got no interest in supporting someone who could so easily throw away the culture and music I love. So enjoy your Desperate Housewives marathons while they last Timbaland, just don't come crawling back to hip-hop when things go wrong.