Has Hip Hop Been Formed Into A Weapon Against Black People?
If so, who has "turned our gift into a curse"?
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I’ve said before that I am a member of the original Hip Hop Generation. Meaning, I remember a time when there was no rap, and a time when there was. I remember listening in awe to creative brothers, mainly from New York at the time, spittin’ dope rimes over hard hitting beats.
I remember how it started as “B-boys” rhyming over “Break Beats” (That’s what the “B” stands for—Break Boys).
In those days, the only way to command respect in Hip Hop was to spit the most creative verses, over the hardest beats and have the dopest style. Nowadays, I can’t even understand most rap.
I have seen rap degenerate from fun, witty poems spat with great verbal dexterity over jazz samples, to gangster rap, and who knows what else nowadays.
The most respected modern artists seem to be the ones who can get farthest out of their minds on drugs, get the most tattoos on their face, and mumble the most incomprehensible slop.
And yes, I’m ol’ skool. But I’m not out here yelling at the youngsters to get off my lawn. It really does seem that somehow, somewhere, someone has turned “our gift into a curse”, to quote Candace Owens in a recent appearance on the Breakfast Club.
Now, I wouldn’t touch the P-Diddy stuff with my worst enemy’s hand, but I don’t doubt that there really are figures behind the scenes in the music industry that purposefully get artists into compromising positions so they can control their output.
This is actually a well-known intelligence tactic. In fact, compilations of such materials are known as Control Files. I don’t know if artists are strong-armed, brutalized, or just paid enough money to debase themselves, but I do know Hip Hop has fallen. Especially among female rappers.
How did we go from honest, highly-skilled Queen stuff like this:
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