Getting back to the Original question...

The DPz said in that article in the new Complex magazine (as well as other places) that they didn't want to be associated with acts like Mos Def and Talib (and The Roots, since they are constantly working together) because they want a more "Urban" audience i guess. They didn't want to "ban all white people", they just wanted more black people people to see that they were'nt just some black militant book readers.

I have heard tracks from the new "Walk Like a Warrior" album (They came to Atlanta and had a listening session) and you can see they are going in a different direction than on the first album. I can't blame them for wanting to get that "Jay-Z dough", but to totally alienate the fans (and fellow hip-hop artists) that brought them this far is crazy.

In more than one article they've mentioned that they wanna get closer to the streets. My interpretaion of that after listening to the new stuff has been this: They are gonna dumb down their music and not be as political as they have been in the past. Evidence the fact that they have abandoned most of the production team from the first album and enlisted more mainstream kats like Kanye West to do the beats. They wanna shift focus from the audience that cares about lyrics or content, the "book readers", if you will, and focus more on those people that just like hot beats. They constanly have said recently they "they are just like regular black people". That "they sold crack" and "do regular stuff" too.

They aren't the only artists that have come out with this opinion. The Roots themselves talk about this in the recent issue of The Sauce. And DJ Hi-Tek made it clear in interviews that he's more likely to hang with Too Short than Cody Chesnutt. But should the artists just say "thanks for getting me in the door, now screw off! I'm HARDCORE like Clipse and 50 Cent Now!"

They should be careful or they will fall into that discount Arrested Development and Digable Planets shelf at the music store...