A Quote by Bakari Kitwana
After many years of hip-hop as a nation we should have the sophistication to accept that their are distinctions between the corporate manifestation of hip-hop, sold as a commodity and package with sensational race, sex and violent imagery, and the hip-hop culture that kids are living everyday at a local level, which often doesn't dabble in that terrain.
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Somewhere down the line, the evil ones stole the legacy of hip hop and flipped it to a corporate type of hip hop. They decided to tell everybody 'Well, this is what hip hop is,' instead of coming back to the pioneers and getting the true definition of what hip hop is and what it was and what we been pushing for all these years.
I think hip hop is dead. It's all pop now. If you call it hip hop, then you need to stop. Hip hop was a movement. Hip hop was a culture. Hip hop was a way of life. It's all commercial now.
To me, that's the biggest problem with hip-hop today is the fact that everyone believes that all of hip-hop is rap music, and that, when you say "hip-hop," it's synonymous with rap. That when you say "hip-hop," you should be thinking about breakdancing, graffiti art, or MCing - which is the proper name for rap - DJing, beat-boxing, language, fashion, knowledge, trade. You should be thinking about a culture when you say, "hip-hop.".
Hip is to know, it's a form of intelligence. To be hip is to be update and relevant. Hop is a form of movement, you can't just observe a hop, you gotta hop up and do it. Hip and hop is more than music
Hip is the Knowledge, hop is the Movement. Hip and Hop is Intelligent movement
You gotta understand a lot of hip-hop kids are going to have the hip-hop mentality. And it's sad because they're not educated enough to understand what hip-hop culture is really about.
I wake up hip-hop,
Go to sleep hip-hop,
Dream 'bout hip-hop,
'Cause I AM HIP-HOP.
The question 'Why white kids love hip-hop?' forces us immediately to deal with the historical weight of race in America. On the surface people see hip-hop and race as nothing new. I think the ways young white Americans are engaging hip-hop suggest something more.
I guess the difference between the Korean hip-hop scene and the American hip-hop scene is that in the American hip-hop scene, you know, they have their Jay-Zs. They can become conglomerates through hip-hop. In Korea, it doesn't happen.
This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It's all hip-hop. You can't say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.
My definition of hip hop is taking elements from many other spheres of music to make hip hop. Whether it be breakbeat, whether it be the groove and grunt of James Brown or the pickle-pop sounds of Kraftwerk or Yellow Magic Orchestra, hip hop is also part of what they call hip-house now, or trip hop, or even parts of drum n' bass.
In this time, we incorporate money and media, and it's split up like apartheid, where when you say "hip-hop," you think just rap records. People might have forgot about all the other elements in hip-hop. Now we're back out there again, trying to get people back to the fifth element, the knowledge. To know to respect the whole culture, especially to you radio stations that claim to be hip-hop and you're not, because if you was a hip-hop radio station, why do you just play one aspect of hip-hop and rap, which is gangsta rap?
I was a hip-hop head. When I really found my own lane in music, it was hip-hop. I wanted to make hip-hop music. And I did, I made a lot of hip-hop music.
Skateboarding is a part of Hip-Hop culture. I think it's the fifth element of Hip-Hop - emceeing, deejaying, b-boying, graffiti, and skateboarding. Skateboarders live and die on the streets. It's expression - it's everything that Hip-Hop is.
While a lot of hip-hop was inspired by jazz or James Brown samples and was made to be played live in the clubs, I made hip-hop that was made for MCs to eat the mic up. It was an aggressive form of hip-hop. It was made just for hip-hop. It's not made to sing or dance to, though you can if you want.
Hip-hop was my first real love, one that was my own and wasn't my parents' music. Initially, I was inspired by hip-hop fashion. Over the years, I kept the hip-hop sensibility, but make it my own.
Socially, hip-hop has done more for racial camaraderie in this country than any one thing. 'Cause guys like me, my kids - everyone under 45 either grew up loving hip-hop or hating hip-hop, but everyone under 45 grew up very aware of hip-hop. So when you're a white kid and you're listening to this music and you're being exposed to it every day on MTV, black people become less frightening. This is just a reality. What hip-hop has done bringing people together is enormous.
