All across America in cities like Detroit, Houston, New Orleans, St.Louis and of course Killadelphia poor people, mostly Blacks are merc’king each other like the shit is some new fashion trend. There was that brief period in the late sixties – early seventies when the Black Power movement had been shut down and he ghettos were filled with horse that poor people, mostly Blacks, realized it was so much easier to prey on their neighbors than to look to achieve anything substantial outside of their communities. This was the mentality of poor people.

Now since all Blacks weren’t poor people there were still plenty of Blacks that had no problem doing crazy shit like going to school, getting vocational training, and even voting to improve their quality of life. These Blacks still had family members that lived in the ghettos and those ghetto dwellers wanted to be part of that progressive movement as well. Heroin was fucking shit up something serious and a bad situation was just getting worse.

Then Hip-Hop culture was born as a reaction to the lack of opportunity and services provided to ghetto dwellers. The artistic movement that was fusing music and art and dance and fashion was getting into the eyes and ears of a larger global community. With this opportunity some of Hip-Hop’s best poets used the music to describe the conditions that they lived in daily. For my money, there will never be a more realer, truthful song than Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’.

Eventually, the folks that make money off everybody by colonizing people and committing genocide got wind of the Hip-Hop artistic movement. With promises to make the artists, mostly ghetto dwellers, wealthy and secure the colonizers were given access to Hip-Hop’s secrets and it’s mythology. The Gods of Hip-Hop which had been Peace, Unity and Love were replaced with money, sex and drugs. The genocide had begun.

Hip-Hop would be used to lure generations of poor Americans, mostly Blacks, into a false sense of wealth and security if they could only use their power for expression to rap. This was the bastardization of Hip-Hop. There are endless ways to express oneself in the true meaning of Hip-Hop. Graphic arts, design, dance, speech and musicality are all forms of expression. The fact that the colonizers used speech was directly connected to their genocidal agenda. Picture the pied piper leading his followers to jump from the edge of a cliff. This would be the future for Hip-Hop’s rap music.

We find ourselves now in an era where the music of Hip-Hop is literally devouring itself from within. The murder of a rapper (Stacks Bundles) was allegedly committed by another rapper (Charles White), while the creative and even consumer apex of Hip-Hop appears to rapidly dwindle every day. Maybe this is what has to happen to rap music and to Hip-Hop in order for it to survive. Maybe all the possibilities for commercial profit have to wane so that the colonizers will discard the carcass like they did to so many others. Maybe then we can return the peace, unity and love to the music and the culture that needs it so desperately.

R.I.P. Hip-Hop

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