Concerning Hip-Hop…#1

Concerning Hip-Hop…#1

I Love Hip-Hop! That is the simplest way I can explain it. The first time I heard it, Slick Rick & Dougie Fresh’s “Lodi Dodi” was the first song I ever listened to, was like the first time I took my first hit of weed…I was hooked. Yet while I smoked weed, I didn’t smoke it all day, but Hip-Hop, I wanted it pumped into my ear drums 24/7! Listening to cats like KRS-1 & Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy and The Jungle Brothers talk so passionately about their roots and their culture made me want to go out and learn about my own history and culture! Even though I am 100% completely proud of my history and culture, it didn’t fill me the way Hip-Hop did, so I accepted Hip-Hop as my culture. Which is why I’m completely disappointed with the state of Hip-Hop.
I think the one thing that disappoints me the most, is the “urban” clothing industry. First, I want to say before anything, is that I believe ALL Phat Farm, Rocawear, G-Unit Clothing, B.B.C., Apple Bottoms and ANY clothes made from a Hip-Hop artist should be manufactured in the ghettos of Los Angeles…Detroit…Chicago…Baltimore…New York! EVERY stitch of Sean John Should Read, “Made In Brooklyn!” But they don’t, they all read made in China…or Mexico…or India...or some other country with no real labor laws! Yet they charge you as if it was actually made in the U.S.A. What amazes me is that most, if not all, Hip-Hop artists come from poor areas, projects, or ghettos. A lot claim to have sold and/or used drugs. Then after they used Hip-Hop to get rich, they become the exploiters of poor people in a ghetto on the other side of the map. You got 14- and 15-year-olds in a factory sewing clothes instead of on a corner selling dope! I know one company is called rocafella, but that doesn’t mean you have to act like him. How can you follow the same corporate blueprint designed to keep poor people poor? You’re like the slave who mimics the master because he doesn’t know any better! Got you addicted to money, fame, and the illusion of power like a two-bit crack addict! Hip-Hop can take back the ghettos, here and around the world, whenever it wants to, because the ghettos are listening, but someone convinced these cats to follow along with the rules, instead of creating their own.
I’ve read many stories about, and read interviews with a lot of Hip-Hop artists, and in many, they claim to have looked at the ghetto around them, or at the drugs they were selling, and thought to themselves, “Doesn’t anyone know how fucked up it is around here? Doesn’t anybody care?” Well right now, there is a 15-year-old kid sewing up a pair of ugly ass jeans, and he’s thinking, “Who wants this shit? Doesn’t anyone know what’s going on around here? Doesn’t anybody care?”

History or His Story?

History or His Story?
So I was talking to my 17-year-old niece and I was asking her about her studies at school and what she planned to do when she finished high school. She said the usual things that she thinks she’s supposed to say, and then she proclaimed that she wanted to learn Spanish when she got to college. I inquired why she was now interested in learning the language when she hadn’t been before. She sadly told me that she was tired of how people who do speak Spanish treat her when they find out that she doesn’t speak Spanish, they make her feel ashamed. Hearing this, I was taken back to bitter memories of my youth, and I instantly felt sympathy for the young one, and anger flashed red in my mind. I recalled all the instances I had been asked, “What kind of Mexican are you?”, or “how can you call yourself Mexican when you don’t even speak the language?” Older people, upon finding out I didn’t speak Spanish, would always look at me like I took a shit in my hand and offered them a taste. Then I would have to hear about how sorry they felt for me. Even as a 10-year-old child I wanted to hurt these people, leave scars so they would remember my anger, for they all tried to imply that my mother was a bad mom for not teaching me Spanish, and that pissed me off more than anything!
So I asked my niece, “Do you know what language we spoke before we spoke Spanish? What language was spoken in Mexico before the Spanish arrived?” She of course did not know. I told her that her great-grandfather used to speak the language when he was drunk, and only when he was drunk because he was taught to be ashamed of it, taught to be ashamed of who he truly was! She just stared at me wide-eyed. I then asked her, “Do you know how they taught us the language?” Again she didn’t know. I told her that the Spanish soldiers would ask the Aztec children questions, and if they answered in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, the soldiers would start cutting things off, a finger or a hand. If the child was unable to speak the Spanish language, the tongue was usually cut out after the head was chopped off! Our ancestors were raped and tortured into speaking the language these people are so proud of.
Once I learned the history of my culture, the true history, nobody ever made me feel ashamed ever again. Any time anyone would try, I would simply ask them the same questions I asked my niece. 99% of the people I talked to were ignorant of their own culture, and I would always ask, “What kind of Mexican doesn’t know his own history?” Spanish is not our original language; our original language is almost gone and the people who do speak the language are treated like dirt in their own land! If you believe in hell, than the Spanish conquistadors are burning there and they are laughing their asses off, because not only did they conquer the Aztec nation, but they have completely erased our original culture and replaced it with their own. A “Matrix”, in some form, really does exist! It’s like one of those hologram pictures in the mall, the ones you have to stare at for a while before you can actually see the real picture. If you look long enough, hard enough, at the world around you, you will see it! But then again, I know people who can stare for hours and never see what’s right in front of their faces!