are there members of the hip hop cannon that we have to like or we are not true lovers of hip hop? do i have to like rakim? tupac? biggie? what if i do like something really corny? for the record i don't actively dislike any rappers. who has time to actively not like somebody because of their music? i am not sitting around thinking how much i dislike shania twain... i just don't see why some of you want to enforce your view on people about who they like and what the get to indentify with. for many of us, we did discover hip hop on the radio...that was our first exposure. i am 30 years old but i grew up in houston so my first hip hop songs were rappers delight, the breaks, the message, etc. and i can tell you something else, back then you didn't have choices if you liked hip hop...you liked every fuggin' think that came out. you liked kid 'n play, you liked salt 'n pepa, you like kwame, you liked 2 live crew. It wasn't until there started to be A LOT of choices that people started making decisions about who in the hip hop spectrum appealed to them the most. So now that its 2004 I can say that I don't care for Lil' Flip or very many rappers out of my home city, even though back in the day I was the biggest Ghetto Boys, UGK, Nemesis fan because that was all we had. I think as hip hop grows and becomes multifaceted, not liking 50 or whoever is a luxury that folks now have. can't you see how this is a good thing. and i still don't understand how you establish who sits on the who's who of artists you must like to love hip hop...that is just strange to me. we all have one cat we don't feel in spite of what others say. i never really dug kool g. rap. lisp got on my nerves too much and it sounded like he needed elocution lessons...does this mean i cannot call myself a hip hop head? does i mean that i cannot call a certain rapper wack or say that he does isn't even hip hop to me.
for the record i include it all in the hip hop diaspora. it all exists so that we can contrast things, but at the same time there is something resident in de la and tribe that is not resident in 50, and if that thing is what you associate hip hop with, why can't you simply say 50 is something else? why don't you get to have your own definition. i keep trying to tell you guys that people feel a need to draw all of these definitions because they can no longer just define themselves as hip hop lovers...now they gotta define themselves as lovers of this kind of hip hop so as to not get confused with a whole other identity that falls under the umbrella of hip hop appreciation.

on a personal note though i will say that its hard to like rappers that are crammed down your throat by an entire corporate system meant to make money. its hard to see the art in it so its hard to call it hip hop. there is some toil and artistry that goes into every record...but there is also some "give the people what they want even if the THE PEOPLE ain't your people" that rubs me the wrong way. I have to really sit there and wonder if i really like the music or if yoi am just being reeled in by a media system meant to keep the cash registers ringing. a cat like 50 is very much a part of that. i like a few 50 songs but i would like more if they didn't get so much burn and i didn't have to have the unsavory experience of watching corny people respond to them. its people who don't have a long term love affair with hip hop that do the most damage for 50's credibility and make people want to disown 50. i cannot tell if i would like 50 more or less if it wasn't for the media hype and when all these new people arrive in the fold it can be a little unnerving. i don't know about you but when i go to a club like the Ivar in LA and I see a bunch of people who don't even look like they have any black friends going apeshit over 50 it turns me off a little bit and its harder to like 50 after that. why? because he is supposedly selling the black experience, the authentic ghetto black experience but these people want no part of that and only want to appropriate the swagger. some girls want to feel sexy and so they shake their asses and they don't feel it...i was at a mos def concert last night and stood behind four women who couldn't figure out who the guy on stage was with mos...when i said talib kweli they said who. talib ain't cute so he ain't that marketable i guess. they didn't recognize kanye when he came out either because they didn't know the music well enough to know that the guy running on stage to perform "two words" with mos is most likely kanye. that is a big turn off to me and i don't know why it doesn't turn more heads off. but you see it can happen with any artist. it just makes me check myself to make sure i am not caught up in the hype. like i have to re-analyze my taste when i find myself watching the same videos and listening to the same artists as a segment of the population who is getting bombarded for their surplus income, and have no sense of taste or values and are thus ripe for the plucking. who wants to identify with those people? i don't care if you are from the burbs or the 77 precinct, if you cannot tell artistic integrity when you see it, there is no helping you, but you might be hurting me by exposing me to unitneresting hip hop and me wasting my time trying to "get it". so maybe somewhere inside of me, i feel a desireto attack 50 and exclude him. of course, i don't but its understandable why some do.

point blank though...i find a lot of the vitriol on this thread disgusting...why? because it boils down to someone who wants to dictate the whether my love for hip hop is authentic. and you may not be talking about me because i like most mainstream artists (some more than others of course) in spite of the fact that some of these cats sound silly to me at the ripe old age of 30, but i still don't appreciate the sentiment, because if it was really up to you you would choke the shit out of hip hop...read the sig...i have had it forever but i guess no one is listening.

-h20
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if hip hop ever dies...it will be the day that all of us who fell in love with a new sound that was like nothing we ever heard before stop wanting to be challenged. the day those of us who nurtured it and kept being amazed as it grew and changed and redefined itself, turn our backs on it like a confused and unruly teenager, morning for that sweet little simple child that has long since grown up...it will be the day we make a bunch of unbreakable rules and accept it all as orthodox hip hop cannon, and the next musical form will have to born of a rebellion against all you reactionaries who wouldn't let it grow and change because your "love" was really obsession and and you held on so tight that you choked her. it will be the day that young kids don't want to hear about hip hop anymore because they still listen with their hearts...in reality hip hop won't really be dead anyway, she will just have to undergo another name change like she always has...word to miles and dizzy. - kacy wilson

h20
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if hip hop ever dies...it will be the day that all of us who fell in love with a new sound that was like nothing we ever heard before stop wanting to be challenged. the day those of us who nurtured