Hip hop is more than that though. Hip hop is culture.
Breakdancing, graffiti, djing, and mcing. But the Mc preceded everything and everyone else.
I miss conscious hiphop. I miss that pro black afro centric movement in the early 90s when cats were rocking cross colors and high top fades. And a different world was on NBC. Then gangsta rap took over in the mid 90s and that other style of rap died.
Like I think about this Nas line from "Doo Rags".
"nikkaz used to wear rags on they hair when it was fried up
That's when we were lied to, buyin hair products
Back before my generation, when our blackness started disintegratin
'til awareness started penetratin"
Like I think about in the mid 90s with Lil Kim wearing blonde wigs and rappers like Biggie ripping Versace and Moschino...just years later. Not even five years later.
It was kind of on some "we made it we can do this and show off that we made it" type shyt...but how did we go from rocking African medallions and dashikis and Malcolm X hats to rocking versace and moschino? It's like that was the moment in hip hop culture "our blackness started disintegrating"...
Somewhere rap and hip hop lost the culture and lost its way and it's ability to be used as a tool to change society. It already has at this point but what made it truly pro-black and pro-active? That's gone now. There's still people Kendricks Lamar and J-Cole putting that type of music out but on the level it was in the 90s? Nah it will never be mainstream like that again.
But I still enjoy hip hop these days I still find myself enjoying Immortal technique and lost children of Babylon and other rappers of the like.
But hip hop artists have to be more responsible with their influence.
But this can also be said for any facet of oppression