I take it seriously, but I don't expect it to change the world. No music changes the world, people do. The soundtrack to those changes is immaterial to the work done by people affecting change.
I'm also not really buying into anyone telling me that hip hop is one thing or the other. I always rejected that whole east coast west coast narrative, conscious vs 'rap' narrative etc. That's all people looking at the music (and not really the music but the people making the music) and making broad, inaccurate judgements.
Further, I would say that Hip Hop was never life and death anymore that anything else is life and death. People use Biggie and Pac's deaths as some type of mark against hip hop. It isn't. Their deaths were about the lives they lived, not rap music. The only difference between their deaths and any of the thousands of other young men taken from us too soon because of gun violence is that they were famous rappers.
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