Artist Statement
I was influenced by old school hip hop and the connection I made with it from an urban setting – it was eye-opening. I use slang local to the S.W.A.T.s, Southwest Atlanta, the language of the music I write about. I love the music and the art form, but I don’t feel the same way about it today. I feel conflicted. I’m trying to understand the people who make hip hop, the people who listen to it, and how they receive it.
This is both an argument for hip hop and a criticism, from a place of love.
My criticism is this: I want to see and feel more love in it.
Hip? Hop?
Heeyyyy Hoooo…Heyy… hey
What is Hip Hop, is this Hip Hop
our Public’s Enemy without the Clock
hassss Hip slipped and Hop mic dropped! on itself?
Down in the Dirty South heart, da slick slang slung is “Boi sssSTOP”
Now here is where I start…
At these piercing points of views about the musical artform that started with a microphone
turntables mixing and scratching record albums for the culture
ohhhh how Hip Hop has changed from generation to generation drastically
No Message So Old school is now
OutKasted beyond Sugar Hill’s fields over Afrika BamBada ”sdada’sdastically…
Yet the beats and rhymes ride pro tools programmed drum patterns with over autotuned vocals dat links & lays in lukewarm looped samples from old school classics are rock steady flowing & streaming the digital waves & airways over and under frequencies all day all night in 2021 until tired folks can’t swim in Hip Hop mainstream anymore.
It’s deep to think how shallow Hip Hop hooks & bending brooks breaking into waterfalls have ended up settling at and for.
The last past year has been so hard for me and unbearable to even comprehend this Hip Hop industry/music business
Also to so many of my invisible folks
that a simple stare and bare witnessing today to it all around us and in us
honestly numbs mostly any true connection with the Music folks listen to now
especially Hip Hop.
At the end of the day just surviving day to day is usually the tedious task, especially that day of staying alive and somehow functioning fully and somewhat still conscious is the goal.
I say pray and stay aligned with the Divine Source of inner Light first and foremost, then gradually believe or not receive to conceive the outer words blurred with reheard sounds breaking entering with beats that pounds grounds around that don’t serve us 2nd.
Hip Hop music is the universal global interpreter with more interpreters of their time of times folks are in, any and everywhere during the struggle or, non-struggle out front or behind bars, spitting 16 bars on iphones in the streets or the pre studio in a dope trap banddo at the deadend street off Cascade rd in the SWATS.
Some folks got something to do and say, and this is how we expressing it, just like the dope game… Hip Hop is Da Rap Game, is what it is and isn’t.
I’m accepting that and seeing Hip Hop is so sore, more and more… that mic hurt.
I’m a 70s baby and was introduced to Hip Hop fully in the early 80s, so check this: I just asked my 9-year-old black God Son about his favorite music. His reply to me was that he loves Rap…that’s his answer…Rap Music! my favorite music is Rap Music with a smile, assurity and enthusiasm, I responded, that’s what’s up! so you like HIP HOP Music? He looked puzzled, with the notion of hearing the name Hip Hop on shows, but that’s it.
He had no clue what Hip Hop was or connections or reflections.
I thought about it all and offered that Hip Hop is Alive with Creative intelligence, it just seems to have demystified itself a great deal.
Despite negative energy in people places and
definitely SoSo DEF thingsss
even if that negative thing
is pushed in the back and played with by influencers on the playground popular swings
repeating raps beatboxing slurred words and over-sampled sounds that seems
like Hip Hop…
Now The 9-year-old has come to me with the new Rap song that’s getting a lot of airplay and streams called “BeatBox”, they all go crazy when they hear it. To me it has a beat you can party to with a bunch of unhumbled mumbled words in some kind of music structure that’s catchy to these folks in the Rap Game.
It will not go down in Hip Hop history with Tupac’s “Dear Momma”.
I’m seeing myself and Hip Hop like Religion…
it’s all in transition
we all are listening to and for the WORD
with special words transforming our possibility to
change and evolve for the better in oneself to self kind
but has your music in your heart changed?
Damnnn. My mind is running wild and rambling like these mumble rappers, they say they saying something but are they saying something?
To each ear its own and to what they listen to and find out to inspire is the intention, like “soundings,” a word that Howard Thurman mentions about how the mind should search deeply sincerely into the other person’s mind, to see what your mind finds that it connects the Spirit and soul to very strongly and bring back to yourself to better the relationship where that present point is at between the two…
where the great possibility is…
to catch the Positive Vibrations
to connect to the higher Source of ALL..
all at once…
at a connected point together…
I just got that overwhelming sensation and tingle I have always sensed since I was younger when I was intrigued by something and I just dove into thinking bout what it was and opened up to start a thirst quenching quest to get questions answered because of that burning positive desire to say, oh I understand now and I see how, when and why and for what and where my interest at hand started at and most important was the “Who” idea it is…
I never really got the answers, I just got it in the ass and heart. I got whooped and the older I got, the worse the whoopings got too, all out of ignorance out of meaningless resentment, unconsciousness, shame, blame, greed, petty kick backs, being kicked out, kicked on flipped out on with lasting negative social residue without resolution.
Unrested, unjustly condemned
left with just some stained mental view
of something placed behind colors of cultures
pieced pushed broken pieces and all put together with other broken glasses
creating a picture in some kind of frame… some type of frame.
Heeeyyyy Hooooo Heyyyyy Hey,
I say just listen for yourself and you be the Judge and Jury.
I only ask that WE just give Hip Hop
Justice for All it’s worth.
Hip? Hop?