Word: hip-hop
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...hip-hop nation described in your cover story continues to grow [MUSIC, Feb. 8]. I am inspired by Lauryn Hill's music. When I have to get up at 5 a.m. and stand at the bus stop, I listen to her song Nothing Even Matters, and I am encouraged. A hip-hop nation is being formed by talented, beautiful and ambitious musicians. After 20 years, hip-hop still triggers artists to create on the basis of realistic truth. Hill is a part of my nation! TOMEKA HAYWARD Orangeburg...
Since then, hip-hop has gone more global than McDonald's, and the fever for the flavor of "representing" has waned in hip-hop artists' vernacular. As few as maybe two years ago, the hip-hop vocalist's primary focus involved overtly "keeping it real," understood as portraying an accurate picture of the artist's origin both as an artist and (presumably) as a minority youth-at-risk. Now, no one admits this priority, but everyone expects it as they do from an anthropologist: all of hip-hop culture, condensed in the "real it," should come across...
...sales; if so, all of hip-hop's children live amongst Puffy's opulence and DMX's barks. I, for one, don't own a canine, nor do I want any of my boys that resemble one to get at me. Of course, I do sip $100+-per-bottle Crystal with fellow real ones...
...club, nor do I toil against the pursuit of verdant uncentered portraits of dead presidents in the name of Big Government and Che Guevara. Get yours, if you must; I will not be a red octagon for the capitalist driver or passenger. However, as a long-time hip-hop fan, I do hate two things: lies and wack-ness. Both of which seem to permeate mainstream hip-hop...
...preference for mixtapes rather than champagne or handguns more "real"? And am I actually "representing" hip-hop culture with rhymes that depict those preferences--particularly as a privileged Harvard student? I used to believe so wholeheartedly; but as I meet more and more people who could care less about what a b-boy is, I'm starting to doubt...