No, crack was not "hip".
Crack was for those people from the '70s who liked to do coke at Studio 54 and all those types of clubs, but were getting too old for that shyt in the '80s.
They tried to keep the party going into the '80s with this cheaper high that allowed them to keep up, but it backfired.
Now, selling crack may have been hip, but it's not like Run-DMC and Eric B. & Rakim were gonna be all like, "Hey man, let's smoke some crack" on their records and shyt.
Crack fukked up the black community more than racism
The crack epidemic was a PART of racism.
From the C.I.A. helping Nicaraguans like Oscar Danillo Blandon to help " The Real Rick Ross" flood inner cities with cocaine, while at the same time, handing out Draconian sentences out to people who sold it, to ignoring the fact that 80% of cocaine/crack users at the height of the crack era were White and not using that as an excuse to come down in White communities.
It didn't exist in a bubble outside of racism, it was just another chapter in the 400 year long book of racism.
After selling poison to ya own black folk, going back in chains isn't so bad after all.
Cats were selling shyt to their moms and the aftershocks of that (gangsta rap, b*stard children being the norm, glorification of being a prison bound underachiever) is felt to this day. Now People hate positivity of any form and embrace negativity cause it's "real" and has a edge. Being raised in single mother household in turn created these feminine ass simps that plague the social dating scene and ended true masculinity as you know it.
Crack single handily turned the black community to a matriarchy, as well as other outside forces.
The black community was already a matriarchy. Crack was different because it took mothers out of the home and kids had to be raised by their grandparents, which led to a lot of the bullshyt we see now.