An All Hip Hop Editorial...

By Tolu Olorunda

“I spit the truth in lethal/
… It’s not the mic; it’s the mind I speak through/”
— KRS-One & Buckshot, “Connection,” Survival Skills, 2009.



Hip-Hop as a whole, as a cultural community, has always had a problem accepting criticism—whether constructive or conjured, exact or exaggerated. It’s in our bloodline. We suffer no critics, antagonists, or haters the opportunity to reduce our art-form to a spectacle. We respond with the quickness. We trot out the best amongst us, the brightest in our midst, to push back, blow back (military style), against anyone perceived as unjustly attacking it.



The reason is clear: Hip-Hop has stood the test of time as one of the only artistic developments, throughout the history of humanity, to come to life without the help, supervision, or even awareness of an adult population.


Youth of color, relegated to the ghettoes and barrios, took the dead scraps they found lying around, breathed life into it, and created a cultural force of irreducible significance that would change, and perhaps even save, the world.



Three decades later, Hip-Hop is still standing. And though it is true that without the groundwork laid by Muhammad Ali, The Last Poets, Langston Hughes, Phillis Wheatley, Zora Neale Hurston, Gill Scott Heron, and many other pre-Hip-Hop poets, artists, and folklorists, Hip-Hop might have never come to be, it is also true that up until the mid ‘80s, most adults still openly expressed doubt about this budding phenomenon of creative genius they saw some potential in.





And those were good old folks. There were those who simply despised it, because, to take their word, it presented nothing original—it simply borrowed from pre-existing traditions, remixing what was old into new, upbeat, catchy, repetitive loops. To an extent they were right.
But never before had street kids, most without astute academic backgrounds, created their own cardinal directions to map out a future of possibility and hope:


1) They would paint pictures of the legacies they intended to leave behind


2) set music to it


3) carve out dance steps to supplement the sound


4) and prophesy upon the waves and melodies.



That was genius! Immitigable genius.

Still, some adults couldn’t see the forest from the tree stumps. They hooted and hollered, cursed and castigated the young folks they saw selling their future in a fleeting pursuit of, to invoke Lauryn Hill, every tree bearing the wrong fruit. But as the late ‘80s roster unveiled a line-up of rhetorical acrobats, back straightened and eyes widened.


The world began paying attention.

The ‘90s came and didn’t disappoint—up until it lost track of purpose and position, surrendering to the will of divide and conquer, drafted by enemies of Hip-Hop culture.
The new millennium, however, produced...Full editorial here