In May, I attended a hip-hop music concert with a friend of mine at the Trinity Dome in Philadelphia, a large venue with spacious doors and a distinctly baroque column design (Baroque-era architects were well-known for using columns to help support a building’s roof, a trend that, despite itself, continues to this day). Headlining the show was Outkast, a hip-hop duo which found its origins deep within the American South. I had only a fleeting familiarity with Outkast before the concert, and to say I was in for a surprise would be a severe understatement.

Now, I have been a fan of hip-hop music for many years, and my own rap group, Murder Academy, has put out two micro-payment-accessible digi-albums in the past three years. I even had a black family living next to me one summer, until they somehow got gentrified out of their house. To call me anything less than an expert on the subject would be preposterous. And yet, when the lights went down at the Trinity Dome and Outkast stepped out onto the stage, I found myself quite perplexed. Perplexed, ashamed, and horrified.

Outkast’s songs were irritatingly fast, words shooting out of Antwan “Big Boi” Patton’s mouth like so many slug-marbles. Would it have killed him to slow down a bit, to luxuriate over his phrasings? One has to wonder what Mr. Boi was trying to hide.

A less-than-laid-back singing-style could be excused, however, if they had handled their instruments well. But as the night wore on (And on, and on), it became all-too-obvious that no instruments were forthcoming. Yes, you read that correctly: they did not even play their own instruments. Why, I’m willing to bet Andre 3000 only barely knows how to finger-pick a banjo. As for the lyrical content of their songs, there was not one mention the Battle of  Gettysburg the entire night.

Despite the gross and terrible failings on the part of the  ”performers,” the crowd was in ecstatic, Nuremberg-esque glee throughout. Something was wrong here, and by the time I had started shouting “Bullshit! Bullshit!” at the stage as loud as I could, I had figured out what that something was: racism.

If there was any trace of country, bluegrass, southern rock or hamboning in Outkast, it must have been playing at a frequency too high to be heard by humans, because I certainly didn’t hear it. What I came to hear was not formless ramblings by a pair of mush-mouthed hacks. What I came to hear was hip-hop. Real hip-hop, the way it was meant to be performed: with fiddles, cowboy boots, and songs that focus on praying near a river, not songs that focus on “sexual intercourse.” Why are so many black musical performers today disowning the sweet, supple twang of southern music that birthed them? Is western society collapsing around us? Probably, is my bet.

This self-conscious de-miscegenation extends past the out-and-out rejection of rap’s bluegrass roots. With increasing frequency, this new generation of rappers are also purging their behavior, dress, and mannerisms of any similarities to their rich southern roots. Some hip-hop artists today will smoke marijuana blunt cigars, of all things, while most early rap pioneers sated themselves with chewing tobacco. And when was the last time you saw anyone on BET suckling upon that staple of the virtuous rube, the single stalk of sweetgrass? The utter lack of straw hats in hip-hop fashion is too blatantly racist to ignore, and when I see an album cover depicting a gang-ster brandishing an uzi— when anyone with the slightest knowledge of American musical history will tell you that the weapon of choice for REAL blues musicians is the bell-ended musket— it makes me wonder how rappers could have so quickly forgotten where they have come from.

And the fans are hardly better. Going out of their way to flaunt their culturalist bigotry, they have turned starkly away from their miscegenated past. At the soul-scouring experience that was the Outkast concert, I did not see one single bottle of sarsparilla in the crowd. And before you ask, yes, I did sift through the dumpsters after the show. So either no one under the age of twenty-five drinks sarsaparilla anymore, or an entire subculture is going out of its way to make a point.

So what happened here? I’ve been asking myself that question again and again over the past few months. The explanations flow like wine, yet they taste like Franzia: chat rooms and message boards have offered up a place for misplaced radicalism to germinate; Myspace, iTunes and YouTube created a “popularocracy” to form, unfairly rewarding musicians that people like without anyone asking what I think; blogs and text messaging are also to blame, probably. There are so many contributing factors at work, and it may be quite some time before the great minds of our day can sort out exactly what triggered this terrible, savage urge to change what instruments a band is allowed to play.

In the final analysis, the only way things will get better is if people realize that music is about your heart and your soul, not about electronic beeps and boops. There’s a reason country music doesn’t pre-record its backbeats— you can’t pre-record the human soul.