What is Hip-hop?

To a corporate concern, culture can be distilled into beautifully blended balance sheets, profits margins and investor complacency. What does this have to do with the streets that birthed this movement? Nothing. It is what it is, though, because the naming rights were sold to the highest bidder. Its definition became an external thing instead of being generated from within. Hip-hop became safe enough to sell a car, a bar of soap or a cruise, it became the soundtrack of the evening news. A rich record company exec’s idea of what it should be, not what it was or could be.

Hip-hop is under attack and the last thing it needs to save it from itself is another gangster rap. With no sense of history, bitches and niggas can only serve as detriment to an art form that is now thriving on the criminal and the pornographic.

There are still enough of us with love for you to keep the history alive in the present, though. Cry foul when we hear another bullshit lyric and a factory beat. When it first touches your soul, hip-hop tends to take hold and hold you accountable for what you perceive. That’s what’s up with its ever evolving ability to describe me individually and still reach out and touch you and do the same for your affinities.

So here’s my fantasy. Hip-hop needs a hero. A flame-throwing lyricist with no fear and deep content. A radio station DJ with the balls to recognize a hit and find no fear in playing it. A consumer who loves to hear the differences that have been missing and a producer with a heavy hand. Hip-hop needs the return of the new again. Not another “ready for the radio” jam.