At first I was mad at myself for having all of these hip hop feels, like I shouldn’t.
(I’m holding off my shower for this, it is important.)
I thought, no. I’m overreacting. It’s okay. Make all of these tummy churns go away. These memories are silly. This is silly. Forget the first time you saw Brown Sugar. Forget the first time you played Lauryn Hill straight through. KMD was just an album. It’s okay. Calm down. Deep breaths. Common has gotten his respects.
But. I’m sorry. These are my feelings. And I just. I’m not mad at anybody right now. I’m not resentful or angsty.
I’m just music. I am feeling hip hop. I am feeling hip hop so fucking hard right now. When you know hip hop, you know it. You trust it. You understand it. You expect it, but respect it enough to give it room and abandon all expectations.
Erykah Badu put it best. Just the love of my fucking life, saved me, and it is not meant to be shoved into years and different sects and sub-genres.
It’s mother fucking hip hop, for christs sake, respect that.
Stop trying to analyze that for your “intelligence” or “superiority”. Leave my hip hop alone. It’s allowed to do what it wants. It’s like my family.
I feel just as protective about hip hop as I do when somebody insults my mother or my sister or my best friend.
I have very serious, strong feelings about this. Nothing as good and true as hip hop and it never dies, fuck you. This is our blues.
Trust. Is key. In this music. Cocky naïveté does not hold well. With me, at least.
It is a culture, truer than punk will ever be. And you’ll never see it until you’ve lived it. Growing up with it is the best way to do it.
With the sassy muted horns and the footstep drums and the silent song in the rhythm of the words, it’s fucking real.
It’s real.
And it gives me heart palpitations to hear false accusations and I guess I haven’t had these feels in a while so that’s why it’s so weird for me. And it’s so intense.
It really is close. It’s very very close. Nobody else liked what I liked musically when I was growing up. So I scoured Cheapo and popped what I could in my Walkman and pretended it was something like Ricky Martin just to get by.
But artists like Common confirmed to me that I was hearing the right things. That I could stick it out another day.
Sure, Blink and Red Hot and Pixies did that for me, too.
But the community of hip hop. I hid it for so long.
No more, man.
No fucking more.
I love it. So much.
It’s so real.
I hope you get to feel that some day.
