However, now there are problems with the business model of hip-hop: since it’s hard to get fans to buy records, the radio stations that promote the records are hurting. On a cultural level, it’s hard to see exactly who hip-hop speaks to: there was a recent period when that strain of black culture was dirigente for the American proletariat generally, but maybe that’s not the de facto reality today.

On a critical level, I guess you could say we are living in the “closure” of hip-hop: the organizing principles are visible to people who care to look. That doesn’t mean it’s a “specific and closed set of tropes”, but that its signifying power is perfectly general: they represent what they want to represent, there’s not occultation.

Of course there can always be subgenre innovation, like the “New Jack Swing” of Bush I you refer to, but generally speaking hip-hop’s project is realized: it’s not an “heroic” era. You may be right that there will be something else, something very distinctly different, coming out of a new cultural matrix. But in meantime, we can all throw our hands in the ayer.