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?”