Hip-Hop Revival

You ever noticed how music can completely change your mood? Change the way you talk, think, breathe, walk? I have.

I remember when I first fell in love with this lifestyle called hip-hop. It was a beautiful thing. I was about 12 years old. I borrowed a tape from one of the girls at my middle school. I rushed home and popped in my cassete player with the big ass headphones and sat on my bed. The cool southern drawl that oozed from the tiny speakers and into my psyche was life changing, mind numbing, and addictive all at the same time. The horns blared through the sides of my face and made my eyes glow. The voices of two of the coolest men on the planet, in my eyes, ran roughshod through the streets of my adolescent, troubled brain. I KNEW at that very moment, hip-hop was in my soul.

That first experience listening to Outkast's "Player's Ball" solidified what I already knew. There was a world outside of my two parent, turbulent household in a middle-class hood. I knew in my home, the rhetoric of the "Ghetto CNN" wouldn't be welcome. My parents didn't want me hearing about glocks, rocks, and hoes. Even though one glance out of my window would have shown me all of that. Bloods here, dope boys there, and a crackhead living across the street. I walked to the bus stop over needles, broken liquor bottles and used condoms thrown out of windows. Hip-Hop was my escape, my dream, my salvation.

I keep hearing a lot of chatter about hip-hop dying and it pains me...

The argument is that southern rap has oversimplified hip-hop to the point that it's nothing but dumb songs and "snap music". I don't believe that. Hip-hop has always had simplicity and complexity. It's always had songs about stupid stuff. (Come on guys, "Gin and Juice" is NOT a complex ass concept...I dare you to say it's not a classic) Hip-hop is universal. It's just as broad as the range of colors that tint the skin of the diaspora.

Hip-hop is not some king sitting on a throne dictating orders to people. Hip-hop is not some overly pretentious, bourgeois negro sneering down its nose at the impoverished. Hip-hop is the suburbs and the slums. It's just as much snap music as it is "The Purple Tape". It's beautiful in so many ways.

Hip-Hop is not dead...it's just sleep right now...
Rest brother....rest