Word: def
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...work together for my brand. Of course I learned that's not easy to do because the labels are in competition with one another. There was only one year [1995] that they all listened to me, and that turned out to be a great year for everybody. Geffen, Loud, Def Jam and Elektra got together and bought this thing called the Wu Family Tree, which is a bin they put in record stores. It had the GZA record, the Wu-Tang record, the Method Man record and so forth. Everybody in the bin's sales doubled the month...
Unfortunately for them, they didn't exactly beat anyone to the idea. The past two years have brought an explosion of acts that came real and kept it that way. The Roots, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, Common and Jurassic 5 have all blown up lately, not to mention fellow L.A. wildmen the Black Eyed Peas...
...fall, complete with 10,000 entries not found in the third edition of eight years ago, the following sentence is now legitimate English: "The dot-com brainiac went postal, big-time, spewing baba gannouj all over the food court, when some butthead with no sense of netiquette stole his def domain name...
...Black CNN," and even original gangsta rappers NWA said "it's not about a salary it's all about reality..." Does this still hold true? What's happened to the "bearing witness" side of hip-hop? And how do the more mainstream artists view those like Mos Def, Common, the Roots, KRS One, Black Eyed Peas etc. - the acts that arise in every generation who rededicate themselves to the core values of the socially conscious rappers of the early years - are they the conscience of the hip-hop nation...
...young hip-hop DJ and four young hip-hop producers because I felt it important to engage people directly rather than be an armchair critic who ain't even trying to turn this apolitical madness around. It is SAFE, to me, to cling to Common (my homeboy), Mos Def (another one of my homeboys) and the other so-called socially conscious rappers. That is what the bohemians here in my Fort Greene neighborhood LOVE to do. But I RARELY see these same hip-hop bohemians in downtown Brooklyn shopping on Fulton Street on a Saturday, and I definitely...