strata of hiphop’s fossil record(s): mega crews, kazoos, storytelling, studio bands, disco instro's, electronic, punk rock, tv theme songs, battle rhymes, dj cuts, love raps, message raps, reality rhymes, triple x-rated, booty music, slanging rhymes, consciousness raising, cautionary tales, bling bling, parodies, black nationalism, five percent pedagogy, jazz-hop, hip house, Linn drums, 808 bass, James Brown breaks, s-s-s-s-sample crazy, diss records, answer records, weed records, diggedy diggedy, reggae/rockers, rapid fire, slow drawl, g-funk…

We stay reinventing ourselves and casting off yesterday's styles like scuffed sneaks to keep ahead of the commodity curve -- it ain't fly no more when everybody else is up on it. Can't we have nothing just for US? We gon' drop it if it don't smell right no more. This has been the ethos in effect since the great murder, the supreme kidnapping. The masses of us have left Jazz, Blues, an tap dancing in the dumpster of the African American experience, to be picked up and raised by others, brothers and sisters having to go tour Europe an Asia where folks of different hues pack the venues.

Hiphop started out different, saying, "We will *kill* this culture before we let it be co-opted". And yet that is EXACTLY what has happened... Can’t stop. Won’t stop. We keep it movin’, like NWA, 100 Miles and runnin’. But years before they appeared the Last Poets told us that TIME was runnin and passin and runnin and passin and runnin, and maybe we ain’t as fast as we thought.

peace & blessings,

x.

"I'm on the Zoloft to keep from killing y'all." - Iron Mike