Are you fine?
Hip hop is a consciousness, a behavior, a way to view the world.
I mean, everybody knows music is what makes the world go round.
I mean, you're coming to this world on the beat of the drum, on the heart beat.
You know what I'm saying? You constantly have this beat in you.
I mean, that's just how life is.
Every major coming of the manifestation of what you call spirit or God, it's a beat.
Because it's rhythm. Rhythm is what gives the heart.
You see, rhythm is the planet. It's rhythm.
Rhythm.
I think it might be the most powerful vocal in the world.
Ever. Ever made.
Because it has a magical way of touching people.
I mean, it's the most listened to music in the world right now.
It's the number one.
I mean, it's music. It's the universal language, and hip hop has trumped music as the universal language.
There's no place you can go on earth and not find someone to have a conversation about hip hop at all.
There's something about music that moves you.
You have hip hop and these different people and these different griots telling a story.
I mean, it's like Martin and Malcolm gave birth to a whole generation of storytellers and leaders and philosophers and teachers.
I mean, it's nothing more beautiful than that.
And then they have a way of putting it into a music form where you can bob your head to it at the same time.
We've mixed up the terms hip hop.
And rap, rap being a part of hip hop culture.
I want to say, I believe it was KRS once say, rap is something that you do. Hip hop is something that you live.
I think that hip hop now is a much more generic term.
Hip hop is just the umbrella for all of these different genres of rap music.
There's a lot of different genres from east coast styles, west coast styles, down south, to midwest.
You know what I'm saying? There's a lot of different styles.
Hip hop culture is all about, you know, what's going on.
It stems from, obviously, you know, expression and advocating social change and your environments and so forth.
But it still got its pulse from the street.
For those of us who know our hip hop history, the preacher, the holiness preacher,
that whole sing song way that they preached a sermon was really the precursor of hip hop.
That's why, you know, people forget that there's a long line there, that this just didn't come up full blown.
Africa Bambada in 1974 began Zulu Nation after his trip back from Africa and was ordained as Zulu Chief.
He laid down the four principles and the four elements.
The four principles are peace, love, unity, and having fun.
He later did this a record on this with James Brown, actually.
With the University of Zulu Nation, we stand for knowledge, wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, and equality.
Peace, unity, love, and habit, fun, overcoming the negative to the positive.
Science, mathematics, facts, and the oneness of the Supreme Force.
From those principles, Africa Bambada laid down the core elements.
Breaking and seeing graffiti are DJs.
These are the core elements.
When we get in New York in the 70s and 73, 74 in the Bronx with Africa Bambada and Cool Herk,
Herk was considered the father of the DJs because Herk brought the sound from Jamaica.
And he learned how to put the brakes on when the brakes were continuous.
Africa Bambada brought the culture to hip hop because Cool Herk couldn't have played the records
and got away with a lot of parties because it was violent in New York.
You're talking about the late 1970s.
We're talking about right after the Black Power struggle, after the Panthers and groups like that had been neutralized.
We're talking right after civil rights.
You see what I'm saying?
We're talking a period when poverty was everywhere in America, especially in the black community.
In this form, hip hop was born, so it was gangs, violence, drugs, and oppression.
It was all these things were around.
So Bambada, what he did was, he was from the gang in the black states.
He formed what they called the Zulu Nation, or at that time it was called the Organization.
That was the original name.
And it was for all the gangs to get together and no longer wear their colors at the party
but represent as one thing so that we could have these parties.
Later on, those that started to stop the violence movement, all in the same gang, human education against lies, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We took it further and expanded the four elements to nine elements.
Breaking MC and Graffiti are DJing, beatboxing, street fashion, street language, street knowledge, and what we call street entrepreneurialism.
In a minute you say street entrepreneurialism, most people think, well, that means some illegal activity on a corner.
No, it doesn't.
It can also mean incense and oils on a corner.
It can also mean, like what Bill Gates did, dropped out of Harvard and pursued his dream.
You know, me coming up, it was during the golden years, quote-unquote, so, yeah, I was able to obviously listen to the public enemy.
You know, tribe called Quest, whole native tongues, you know, poor righteous teachers, brand newbie and ex-clan.
Whereas, on the flip side, you also had NWA and the ghetto boys and Too Short, which, you know, were coming with a different spectrum.
A lot of people have mentioned, you know, Cool G Rap was Biggie before Biggie.
Big Daddy Kane was a 5% of the nation, an Islam Muslim, a pimp, and, you know, a hustler all in one, you know.
So we had the full gamut, we had everything from Public Enemy to Will Smith to Day-Lie Soul, and these, they were all going tour together.
So you could go to one show and get radical militant black nationalism, you know, fun, loving, heavy-D, dancing, you know, of course, sprinklings of misogyny within all of that, I mean, you know, to be real.
You had Queen Latifah, you had Lauren Hill, all these ways, and hip-hop is many different persuasers. You could go from fun type of hip-hop to gangsta hip-hop to party hip-hop.
There's a certain beauty in that. I mean, this is what all communities have naturally, so why wouldn't that be expressed in their music?
When people like Busy B started and Cool Herk and Africa Bambad and Grandmaster Flash, imagine every day they were told, in three more years, hip-hop is over.
In three more years, this thing you're doing is over, and they kept pushing, and I'm coming up with more and more music, doing more and more moves, this, that, and the other.
And they told me that in 77. In 77, so the courage to be yourself is the essence of hip-hop.
Being hip-hop is the freedom to be whoever you are and making sure that you're original and making sure that you're not trying to be somebody else or copy somebody else's style.
I think hip-hop is funky and eccentric and creative and colorful.
It's not something you can quit. I can quit my mind tomorrow, but that doesn't mean that my life isn't going to still revolve around hip-hop culture because I can't.
That's how I grew up. That's what I understand. That's what I live.
Hip-hop, in my opinion, is the current expression of the younger generation and trying to say, this is my life.
The sense of community that involves and the sense of family and people kind of having each other's backs.
I mean, people say, like, to bring people together. And I mean, for me, that's what, you know, for the most part, it does mean to me, is bringing people together.
I mean, that's what I feel like my whole life has been since I've been involved in the scene in Chicago is bringing people together.
Not trying to sound corny about it, but it became family.
Today, we look at hip-hop as a complete, livable lifestyle, a sustainable culture like any other culture. Hip-hop is its own people.
Hip-hop itself is community, like right now here in the inner city, the ghetto. That's hip-hop.
Hip-hop is a culture that represents the inner city. So whatever state the inner city is in is what's going to be represented through the culture.
Now, if hip-hop is looking real depleted and off-balance, that is a representation or a mirror of what's happening in the inner city.
Hip-hop is an equal scene, the prequel, my generation sequel, psychological effects, culture freedom disconnects, brain wash and mentos, it gets complex, their presence gets me vexed,
fragile minds create unknown times, uncomfortable with universal harmony, down to take control of mother earth, straight, lost in it, you're not the boss of me, not all success or black poets want to floss be, label me artistry, longevity.
Hey man, at 1975, we were at our power as a black people. We could have actually jumped forward in our time.
And the consciousness came in, which I see in the Honorable Elijah Mohammedan videos, Malcolm X, Farrakhan videos, you start hearing about unity, organizing, you start hearing about self-love, you start seeing the African medallions being put on.
When hip-hop came along, that was our birth for the jump forward. That was our jump, when we started jumping.
The main purpose of the coaches when we started was to bring something to our people, the black people. And when I said black people, I'm talking about my Puerto Rican Dominican, other so-called Latinos.
Some inspiration. I got dreams and aspirations, and all I really need is some inspiration. I got dreams and aspirations, and all I really need is some inspiration.
Too many cats, don't get down like that, and too many cats, and never have your back, and too many cats.
That's cool. The hip-hop, when I started out, was a lot about having fun, a lot about saying what was on your mind. It was about being unique and being different.
It was all for the craft, all for the art of it, and now it's, you know, of course, big business.
It's become much more of a business. I call it hip-pop, because it's pop music now.
And when you look back 10 years ago, 1997, and even before that, you know, early in the mid-90s and the late 80s, you could really see there's a big difference between what was going on in hip-hop versus hip-pop.
And once something hits, and it pops, then they oversaturate the hell out of it.
Three corporations own and distribute 95% of all the music in the Western world, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and EMI.
They control what becomes popular by their relationships and ownership of the music, so everything you hear on commercial radio is owned by one of these corporations.
The artists never, you will live and die and never hear an artist on commercial radio that owns his or her own art.
They work through a consolidated radio environment and use Payola or Pay for Play to promote and make popular whatever forms of music they want and to omit whatever they want.
DJs used to actually kind of be DJs. They would select records, take them from the shelf, put them on the turntable.
You could actually call and make a real request, and a lot of times these guys would, you know, find a song just off the album that might not have been the quote-unquote single.
And they would have just played it because they felt it was good music.
When things became much more of a business and institutionalized, it took away all the freedom from DJs, and that, I believe, took some place in time like in the 70s.
So if you hear a song, to make a song go gold, it's been studied that you need 12 weeks of regular top 40 rotation at about $1,000 per song, per station, or a million and a half dollars for an R&B hit to be made a hit.
So what that means is you're hearing the same song every hour in an hour, which means you're not hearing any number of other songs in that same day.
Some stations still happen to be independently owned. Those are few and far between.
Most of them are owned by major corporations, whether it be Clear Channel, Cox, Infinity, and the freedom has been slowly taken away from every aspect of the individual station.
After Viacom came into the picture and brought out BET and VH1, MTV, it seemed as if, at that point, any music with any consciousness kind of got weeded out the picture.
I don't know if you saw it or not. It was this last year when someone had published a list of artists that are banned from being on BET or being represented or having their videos play, anything.
Really, really long list. I looked down the list. I was like, oh, hey, Dean Gray. I was like, which is odd, being that I don't have a video.
But at any point where I decided to put one out, you've already decided, I think the quote was that these artists are irrelevant to our audience and music would be overwhelming.
So we already know that these companies are looking at consumers as cattle and they're idiots and whatever we can push them, we can push them.
Music
You know, I think part of the problem is that the world has stepped in this box and they forgot to step back out. When it comes to music, who decided that music had to be a certain way?
They were able to make us like what we want to like. Theodore Adorno, the media scholar, said that what we think we like is really what we recognize.
DMX said the same thing more recently, that if you feed people dog shit long enough, they'll learn to put barbecue sauce on it.
So it always happens to us, right? You hear a song the first time and you're like, that's whack. You hear it again, hate this song.
I hate this song, but it's got a nice hook. And the next thing you know, you're liking it and we say it grew on us when in reality it was imposed.
So like for instance, now you can't even get like Little Brother to get played on B.E.C.
And I'm sure that a lot of the people, because I've played Little Brother for people that haven't heard of them, and a lot of the groups are natural.
You know, I.M.O.S., the Primaridian, just people that the masses may not have heard and the people like them, but they're just not breaking through with the video that everybody's going to say, oh yeah.
So we don't hear the artists who would use their fame and wealth as so many great ones have done and paid an ultimate price for.
To make change. So Paul Robeson is destroyed. Hazel Scott destroyed. Canada Lee destroyed. Tupac even posthumously destroyed.
Bob Marley destroyed. Peter Tosh destroyed. Anybody who's going to use their art and their fame and their wealth to make fundamental change cannot be allowed to be popular.
The consumer, consumer can be taught anything. Consumers are made to taught to love Britney Spears and Katie Holmes and like Simon Cowell.
Like you know, all these people who you probably wouldn't give a damn about, you do now.
So when all these corporations throw their money into hip hop, they don't run to the artists like Moe Steph, like Kamen, like Ryan Fess, artists that are spitting political or positive messages or spiritual messages. They go to what they know sells.
The culture is following the proper tradition, but you got people that's part of the rap movement that many of the Luciferian corporations are controlling that's trying to push what they want to be.
They're persuasion of what is called hip hop today.
Again, it was somebody who lived the culture. You could tell by the way they dressed. You could tell by the way they spoke and the words that they used. And today I don't think that exists as much.
Songs are very cliche. Like you got a big producer there saying, hey, let's make a song called Lollipop. Lollipop. It's the lollipop. Get lollipop.
I think it's a little cliche. I think it's a little overproduced. Like me and him could come out and wreck it tomorrow.
We're the bubblegum boys, the bubblegum boys, the bubblegum, bubblegum, bubblegum boys, the bubblegum boys. And people will chew it.
Even myself is some songs I made so much fun of when I first heard it. I found myself just saying a couple of lines.
With the bubblegum boys, the bubblegum boys, the bubblegum, bubblegum, bubblegum boys.
Because they've been beating my head from here repetitively.
The bubblegum, bubblegum, bubblegum boys.
Since about 1996, it's been a decline musically, just on average in general. Most of the stuff cats are putting out is wack.
So you've got many of the so-called rappers who are not following the whole elements of hip-hop.
Meaning the B-boys, the B-girls, the DJs, the MCs, the Aerosol writers, graffiti writers.
And that fifth element that holds it all together, which is the knowledge.
The university said knowledge comes from an overstatement.
I feel like MCs in general, being male or female, just are either not interested or just plain afraid of giving their opinion.
Because that's what MCing used to be about. It used to be about you stand for something.
Like you knew what Chuck D believed. You knew what KRS1 thought.
You just had more of an MC. You knew more of what they were about and what they stood for.
It's almost like a revolution of bullshit. I'm not knocking anybody's hustle.
If you out here getting paid talking about what you're talking about, fine.
You know, you're not the one forcing people to buy it. They're choosing to buy it.
Even though you can't say that and not acknowledge the marketing scheme that's involved with that.
You can't say that and not acknowledge how almost every item is being marketed with hip-hop.
And in the face of hip-hop, it's some dude with a fitted hat broke off of three or four big-ass chains, you know, talking about some bullshit.
It's children out here that follow that and they listen that and they emulate that.
You know, be six, seven graders, walk around talking about bird gang, walk around talking about GD, Blackstone, whatever.
Just because they want to relate so bad to what they listen into.
I'm not knocking anybody that does it, but I am saying that it needs to be more than that one-sided presentation.
Very few MCs that come hard, like a quote-unquote hard like that, actually change it up.
Everybody now is, everybody talks about the same thing, you know what I'm saying?
The jewels, the 20s on the rims.
Back then it was just about lyrics, you know what I'm saying?
Who had skills, who could flow.
Now it's like anybody can get a deal, you know what I mean?
It's bling-bling and, you know, crystal this, crystal that, you know what I'm saying?
It's like I'm tired of hearing that stuff, you know what I'm saying?
So to me it's like back with the raw skills, who can really flow?
You know what I'm saying?
And who's telling the truth?
Because a lot of you guys don't tell the truth.
I'm not saying you are bad rappers.
I'm not saying that y'all are bad people.
I'm saying you're being controlled and you're being lied to and you're lying to others.
So stop that because you know that.
Why y'all suckers keep making that garbage music, gaining money in the fame,
plus I see they lose it, lose the true essence.
In addition to them adults, they trade, they sold for platinum and gold, drugs and rock and roll.
Let's take a poll, how many cats got jewelry ice cold, but got their life on hold.
Don't even know the story and told and hands where they be, under religious mind control.
Pretending that y'all paid, pimps and getting laid, drinking Bellevue in the shade.
Our problem is we're stressed out and we're broke.
The whole culture of hip hop.
I've been preaching this since 89 with the self-destruction record, Stop the Violence Movement.
That was huge. Self-destruction was huge.
Hip hop we are the world.
It was. It was a hip hop we are the world.
Back then they were into making hit artists.
They wanted to make you a fan of an artist.
I'm talking about the record labels now.
They want a hit song. They want a hit song because they don't want all the power for the people.
They don't want an artist who can come in their great shop and then make a choice like,
I'm going to teach the people. That would be devastating to them.
What you see on television is a lie.
No disrespect to people like Master P, who I think is really to the south some justice.
Juvenile, who is first record. You have paid for Jason. You got your blog.
Those records are it for me. Those are classics.
And those artists are great.
But when you discuss leadership, and not singling Master P out,
but he's from New Orleans that no longer exists.
I've been trying to express the truth about hip hop.
We are impoverished people. We are in poverty.
You may see us on TV with blinged out watches and this and that, but that's an act.
That's a joke. When Katrina hit, you saw the real hip hop culture in trouble.
All of them people bought up all our records, lived the culture out.
You could turn on BET and see what New Orleans was like before Katrina.
You hear Katrina say, they've been shooting at the cops.
They've been shooting at the cops for 30 years in New Orleans.
Katrina ain't starting nothing new, but now it's exposed.
The image is gold teeth. The image is bodice, bodette.
We're the biggest watch.
You see? Niggas drink that Christiles.
You see? Matter of fact, everybody's a nigga now.
White people, everybody is niggas niggas.
You know, this is the nigga nigga. Super niggas, you know?
Now, everybody blinged out. The imagery is thug life. Everybody's a thug.
True. Put the true on there. What does the TR you mean on you?
What is true with the machine gun underneath the other oozy?
What is that? That's thug life.
Thug life is telling you Tupac says thug is an intelligence of gnar.
That's not what thug life is. The word thug is King's English.
It was created with word sound and word sound is power.
When they call you a thug, it means an assassin.
You assassinate your own character.
Now you're a thug. Your mentality is a thug.
Thug means I don't give a fuck. I don't care about nothing, chief.
Look, I don't care. I'm going out. I was born to die.
Something happened.
They started coming into so-called niggas syndrome.
Or calling a woman out of their names using that B word.
Or glorifying the N word.
And what's going on platinum is the jail industry.
More prison dollars have been implicated.
They just gave almost another billion dollars towards prisons in America.
But they didn't give a dollar towards schools in America.
Do you see what I'm saying?
The worst of schools and the best of prisons.
You see? How do you fuel the prison industry?
You fuel it with niggas.
It's an economy. It's a commodity and an economy.
The slaves were brought here as a commodity.
We were never brought here because of an evil scheme that goes through.
No. We were brought here to work.
And they no longer needed your services to work.
Now they no longer need you to wake up and catch who you are
and take over or begin to be industrial.
So now we have to create a new form of work.
The new form of work is called the prison industrial complex.
How do we walk them to prison through imagery,
through music frequencies and industry?
That we have the largest prison population in the world
that 40% of that population is black.
70% of that population is black and Latino.
All of them are poor.
80% are there for nonviolent drug offenses
and that the prison industrial complex
is the underpinning basis of this economy.
If you study the 1940s,
in the 1940s when jazz came along,
they did jazz the same way.
Same thing.
They put heroin on the streets of America.
It took out the Charlie Parker's, the Max Roach's.
It took out the John Coltrane's, the Billie Holiday's.
It took out everybody, the unseen heroes and sheroes
that you never even heard about, that sung jazz.
It took them out.
So to justify all of that,
you need a popular image of black people
that makes people feel okay with somebody going to prison
for really nonsense.
Or to really re-inscribe.
This is why a lot of people talk about this
and the DNA of this society,
that the historical relationship
between black people in this country
has always been one of pure entertainment,
of cultural appropriation and theft.
I have a tattoo that says Thug Life.
Can you see it?
Because, yeah.
And I got that because of Tupac, of course.
And I remember Tupac before he was born
because we were aware of Effendi.
His mother was a panther.
We were aware of the pressures that she was under.
The fact that she got beaten.
And if the jailers had had their way,
he would have never been born.
So I always appreciated him as he came,
as he was born.
And then you got to watch when his charismatic,
good-looking kid, sweetheart, really.
A nice, nice young man, extremely talented.
And as Tupac himself said,
you know, everybody in Hollywood owes him
because he was the one, he was the anti-Sydney partier.
We finally, and I love Sydney,
but we finally had somebody who was not a good person.
We finally had a black guy
who was a hellraiser.
He was an outlaw.
It's no coincidence that he left Pelican Bay Prison
and died on Death Row Records.
Wow, that's deep.
In less than a year's time,
somebody killed him.
Somebody killed John Master J.
And Effendi blew up.
Y'all not watching what's going on?
Big happened to be caught in the game.
Nobody ever investigated the rapper's deaths.
What happened to him?
When as long as black people keep creating things,
people keep trying to tear it down.
The question, what is hip-hop,
is the same question, what are spirituals?
Nobody says what's classical music.
Nobody really says what's pop, right?
Nobody questions Osmond Brothers,
who are just really a white toast trying to be Jackson 5.
But all of a sudden, they have a right to sing.
Jackson 5, like, are they really black singers?
Did you see him lately?
Forgetting that Michael now is crazy,
but he wasn't always.
Or if he was, we didn't always know it.
Man, I was watching the news the other day.
They really had some, uh,
Ignick Niggas on there.
Yeah, it's a lot of ignorance being promoted in it, man.
I was trying to mince my words
and say it sounded cool, but it's pretty ignorant, man.
And so I don't think morally it's helping at all.
It's pretty degrading.
It looked like idiots.
I call it, uh, I was talking to a friend of mine.
Like, I feel like we're in this neocoon era,
is what I call it, you know?
It's like, you know, it's neocoonery.
It's like, okay, yeah, we're doing the same stuff.
We're googling our eyes and smiling our teeth or whatever.
And we're doing it now,
at least we're getting paid for it, you know?
The press, I guess, of just, you know, being financially stable,
you know, within a lot of black, excuse me, wealthy entrepreneurs,
plays heavier than trying to help the people
and try to, like, really get something of our own that we can claim.
We're living in a capitalistic economy.
So, Survival of the Fittest.
Shoot, that was a mob deep song, all right?
You know, we're living this to the day that we died.
Survival of the Fittest, only the Strong Survive,
which actually is a very classic album, a lot of albums.
But at the same time, the message that's being preached
and being, you know, rooted in our minds
is that whatever you gotta do to get that dough, get that dough.
We need peace and prosperity.
This is the focus that we should be on.
The balance between peace and prosperity.
Some people have peace, no prosperity.
Some people have much prosperity, no peace.
We want to teach our children peace and prosperity.
It's cool to, like, I say, be strict, be helped,
and this and that, you know what I'm saying?
That's all good, but you gotta understand, man,
that we got these kids looking at us.
But it's just time for Miss Robinson's and Big Mama's to come back
and help raise the community,
because we don't have fathers in every home,
and these kids need to know there's a consequence
for all your actions, whether good or bad.
You get good consequences, you get bad consequences.
It's just time to reinforce and remind the community
that it's, you know, good people out here.
Like, in a black community, most of us grew up fatherless,
you know what I'm saying?
Not all of us, but a lot of us in the hood did,
you know what I'm saying?
And hip hop is no different.
The fathers, the fathers of hip hop, they somehow got detached
from the sons, you know what I'm saying?
The sons, the new guys of hip hop,
somehow don't respect the old school.
For some reason, you know what I'm saying?
Like, every other genre of music respects their old school
and the traditional people who did things before them
that made it, you know what I'm saying?
They talk rock and roll, any other kind,
but hip hop, for some reason, they do, but they don't.
You know what I'm saying?
They've been tricked into thinking just like the men,
you know, the men feel as though they aren't enough
for the videos and they have to put this other entertainment in it.
And the same thing with women.
They feel as though what they have to say and give is not enough.
So let me give of something else.
And it's really sad.
And I want the next generation coming up to completely understand
that that's a cop out to me.
You can be more and give more without that.
And there's a certain things being sexy, you know,
but then there's also just being raw and cheap.
And I think it's important that we, as people know the difference
and as women know the difference.
Pushing good.
What was they talking about?
What was they pushing?
Cocaine, refo, backgammon chips.
What was they pushing?
Policies, votes?
No, they was pushing that thing, girl.
They was wiggling that thing.
Y'all like to go that shit.
Also, too, you got to think about when you create music,
the responsibility of the message.
I got a responsibility.
I don't know about what other people have like me.
I got a responsibility for me being like on TV,
for me being in magazines and this and that.
You know, kids are looking up to me.
So whenever I get in front of the camera,
I'm not going to be on the camera like,
oh, motherfucker, oh, yeah.
Now I'm going to speak intelligently and try to, you know what I'm saying?
Let them know being intelligent is cool.
That's gangster, you know what I'm saying?
Go against the grain, finish school,
get your high school diploma, you know what I'm saying?
At least get a GED, you know what I'm saying?
It's talking about sex.
It was like, what are you doing?
Who is sexing there?
I said, what?
I said, let me talk.
Let me tell y'all about some real sex.
Let's talk about it.
The first thing in sex, hygiene.
We went there.
I thought I said, sit on the jeans, you got on this funky.
That was not made for you.
I would explain about the external and internal organs.
So it was like, we don't talk to our children about that.
Imagine if hip-hop started doing that.
Wow.
I think hip-hop now is over 40 years old,
where people will realize it or want to accept it or not.
So hip-hop remains young and juvenile.
You can talk about it as sex and love.
Anything that doesn't touch the surface of a mature 40-year-old conversation.
I'm in relationships.
You know, I come from the day where you were talented enough
that you didn't need 7, 15 women in the video shaking their butt
for people to watch.
And that's what happens if these rappers are insecure.
They're not enough, so let me put something else in this video.
So I think as the new hip-hop generation, you're actually being cheated.
Hip-hop in general is no different than it's ever been.
The biggest, the only real difference is that media technology,
consolidation of media ownership,
and the powers that be catching up politically to what hip-hop was doing
have made hip-hop only known by its most popular form
and that popular form has been intentionally selected to be
the club stuff, the booty stuff, the pimp stuff, the bling stuff,
the self-directed violent stuff, community self-directed violent stuff.
And hip-hop is not being allowed to mature and address social issues
like we used to be able to.
Because now we have a lot of unusual stipulations
when this was supposed to be freedom of speech.
But hip-hop in reality is the same that it's ever been.
There's so much stuff out there.
Political, radical, revolutionary even.
Even just fun-loving and not harmful.
But that music mostly is intentionally omitted or ignored.
We see what happens to Kanye West.
All he really said is that Bush don't like black people.
That's nothing compared to what we really want to say.
We want to say there's a lot of things going on.
We want to talk about this false war.
We want to talk about the fact that Bush is not really the man in charge
of somebody else accusing him as a mask.
The political point of hip-hop is to be able to think freely.
Meaning, do I really have to dress like you to get a job?
Do I really have to talk like you to get to eat and feed my family?
Do I have to go to your schools? Really?
Or can we open our own schools?
Of course with the 90s and the burgeoning radicalism
and the popularity of black radicalism within white communities,
I think made the industry and its true controllers and owners
look at this and say, we have to get involved here.
We can't have white people and black people coalescing
on the basis of radical politics.
We can't have international audiences filled to capacity
listening to public enemies say fight the power with their fists up.
White people, fists in the air.
That reminded them, of course, of the 60s and 70s
where people like the Panthers had, you know, Fred Hampton had
the, you know, white folks from Appalachian Hills
putting on berets and calling themselves young patriots
and putting their fists up.
And of course that's at work to bring about the demise
of the black community.
The hip hop culture in America is largely black
and started from black culture from the ghetto.
And a lot of people want to destroy that, you know what I mean?
We roused up again.
We said say it loud.
I'm black and I'm proud.
We made music that said stand.
This music was so powerful.
The music said stand.
The music said thank you for letting me be myself.
You see, the music told about black power, black pride.
What's going on?
Marvin Gaye wrote a roster song.
What's going on when he came back from Jamaica?
He had still went up to Jamaica where Bob and then was at.
When he came back, he was here in a red, black and green town.
He was singing, what's going on?
Marvin Gaye, when the media and the controlled forces
that control this conglomerate or this force
that keeps this negativity on us and this planet,
when this force saw the birth and resurrection of music
and sound waves, they are afraid of the rise of the black messiah.
That image, I'm sure, frightened them.
So they said, well, we know white people have always
traditionally gravitated to what black people do,
so we just have to make that coalescence
exist on the basis of what it is now.
Bling in and pimping.
So white and black people can hang out now,
but they're all blinging and pimping and, you know, fronts
and all of that.
And that kind of unity is okay because that's not really a threat.
We're doing too much blinging.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm not knocking because blinging has been since Biggie was here.
I mean, back when Biggie and him and everybody had been blinging.
Everybody was talking about blinging and rims,
but we got lost in it.
We forgot what we was here for.
Now, what do we do about hip hop?
Where we going to go with it next?
Because it's shit-hop now, so what's next?
Do we change the frequency?
Because right now we're on a 4-4 count or a 3-4 count,
and we should be on a 6-8.
6-8 will bring us back to our rhythmic harmony.
It will bring us back to the sound of the church.
It will bring us back to the sound of the drums.
It will react our spirits and align our chakras,
because our music made our doing.
When I say hip hop, the hippie-to-the-hippie,
everybody smile and do like this,
because that's the type of music that was us.
It made you feel like this.
Because that was the frequency of the music.
How do we return to this?
Elevate the music you produce,
following the tightly packaged plan, shake it loose.
Pop, pop, excessive, non-radio, and it don't stop.
When the chicken come home, the roots you wondering,
where's the motivation and the boost?
So watch what you say, organize, obey, be true to yourself.
Take care of your health, stack your wealth.
Expression for hire, inspire, catch a fire.
My contributions always take you higher, higher, higher.
But for example, okay, you have a guy
that was raised in our area, Kanye West,
who was bringing records with, you know,
orchestration, you know, just like,
just new levels of musicality.
And now to say all his stuff is positive,
either, it ain't.
But I think it's representation of where, you know,
of hip hop, where the streets are.
But still, adding in there some sense of consciousness.
That's one of the things that makes Kanye West important.
Because he brought back another way of looking at hip hop.
He said, I'm not going to play this game,
that, you know, I was rapist, and I used to sell drugs,
and I shot my mother and father, you know,
and I'll let just old slave narrative
that everybody seems to want to tell,
and I don't believe half of them, you know,
because not that many people survived those streets.
You know, you look at, I was shot eight times,
I was shot 10 times, I was shot 15.
There's a slave narrative.
You know, that's, I learned to read,
and then I realized I shouldn't be enslaved,
as if the people that didn't know how to read
thought they should be. Come on, you know.
It's the courage to be yourself.
It's the courage for you to be you.
And notice the word courage.
Most people ain't being themselves.
And to some degree, and I think it's legitimate,
again, intellectual complaint,
hip hop needs to stop the slave narrative
and get back to, this is who I actually am.
And Kanye West has made a step because he said,
I'm just a nice kid, but I can rap, and I'm going to do that.
Hip hop is forever changing.
So, just when people think that it's done,
it sort of, sort of breaks out of the mold
and does something completely different.
So, I'm looking forward to the changes.
Well, hip hop, like all of the, like all music,
once it gets started, it's going to take on its own life.
In order for it to live, it's going to have to grow
and go in different directions.
And it's doing just like R&B music did,
which basically R&B had blues and so,
then you had Motown, which started making the sophisticated
and pop and jazz and all that.
Hip hop was doing the same thing.
If hip hop never existed, man,
this world would be, you know,
so much worse than what it is right now.
Hip hop music made it possible for Cas to come
from a humble beginning in the street corner
and take it all the way to, you know, an office somewhere.
I mean, look at what Jay-Z's done.
You know, look what Jim Jones has done.
You know, these are dudes from, you know,
some of the most, you know, terrible places in the world, man.
Like, and now, they're successful business people.
They help employ people.
They took people off the streets
and gave them jobs and opportunities.
And, you know, hip hop made that possible.
It also made it possible for black people to do, you know, so much.
And Latinos to do so much.
I mean, you look at the example of Fat Joe,
I mean, who has been his game for so long, man,
like, you know, Latino cat from the streets of New York
who, again, is a businessman
and who has employed people and given people opportunity.
All that came because these individuals picked up a microphone
and said, I got something I want to say, you know,
and this is how I'm going to say it.
Man, it's going to take us to the top of the world we wanted to.
You know what I'm saying? It's going to lift everybody up.
It's going to make everybody, you know,
think about the bigger picture, you know what I'm saying?
That's what it's all about.
I mean, we only got so much time on this earth.
And, you know, as long as God is blessing us with the time,
we need to take advantage of it and lift the next man
and lift the next woman.
And hip hop is definitely, definitely doing that, you know.
So, I mean, it's going to the top.
Hip hop is going to continue to live and strive and evolve
because there's a lot of people that care about it
and also considering the state of our world
and the different things going on in the world now.
I think there's going to be a time coming soon
when we're going to have to, we're going to have to step up
or step off.
And if you're not, you know, changing it
or making it easy or teaching someone after you
what you're doing, then you shouldn't be doing this shit
in the first place.
I mean, nowhere it came from.
No where it started, you know.
Know who made it, who created it.
Know about the Bronx.
Know about Cool Herk.
Know about Cedric Avenue.
Know about Bronx River.
Know about Bambada.
Know about, you know, Grandmaster Cas.
In 87, we looked back at 77 and said, wow, that was dope.
In 97, they looked back at 87 and said, wow, criminal minded
and slick rigged.
That was hot.
Today, they're looking back at 97 and saying, two-pot, biggie.
Wow, these guys, the puppy bad boy, the West Coast, Dr. Dre.
Wow, that was hot in 97.
In 2017, they're going to look back on this very interview
right here.
And they're not really listening to what we say.
They're looking at the wall paint, the furniture, my clothing,
my hat, yours, how we're sitting here like this.
That's what our children are looking at.
So if you are conscious of that, every word out your mouth,
every act that you do is not for you today, it's for your future.
That's leadership for hip hop.
Most people, when they say hip hop, they don't understand
what they're talking about.
When they say hip hop, they just think of rap music,
or rappers.
They should think of the whole culture as a movement.
The movement of doing something for self, peace, unity,
love, and having fun, and then overcoming our negatives
to our positives.
You know, it's a really beautiful thing.
There's a revolution beginning that never went away.
It's just waking back up.
And I just feel good to be able to witness it
because there was a depression point where I had stopped.
I mean, truthfully, I had stopped buying hip hop
because I felt like I wasn't getting what I wanted.
But now, I'm buying it again.
And that's what tells me that it's coming back.
The revolution of hip hop that existed when it first started.
It is us that save us.
Hip hop saves us.
Now, we can take this hip hop thing
and not with a bunch of people around us,
but just a little people in front of us,
that little group, we could probably say this.
Censorship is political, not lyrical.
So when Young Jock got his song removed,
Fuck the Police recently, it wasn't because he said Fuck.
It's because he said Fuck the Police.
And it wasn't even in a revolutionary way.
He was saying, I'm a dope dealer, and I'm going to sell dope.
And if a cop tries to stop me, I'm going to shoot him.
So imagine if you're saying, I'm going to protect
my community against police brutality,
like Hassan Salam did.
You're never going to hear that on the radio.
So as long as they're selling you products
and Mercedes and AK-47s,
you will be there all day and all night.
So I just want to make that point very clearly.
People looking for good hip hop, it's there.
Go find it.
Just like any other piece of information,
you will have to dig because it's never going to be offered to you.
And like Fred Hampton used to say to you,
it's a piece if you're willing to fight for it.
It's a piece if you're willing to fight for it.
It's a piece if you're willing to fight for it.
It's a piece of information.
