Posted 3:11 AM by Alfred

What is it about hip hop that makes you think that shit from the 80’s is like so ancient and shit from the early 90’s is just a bit beyond when that shit started in the first place, when actually that shit started in the late 70’s, but shit, 12 years for a musical & cultural movement is just a drop in the ocean, maybe that’s it, I mean, look at movies, a movie from the early 90’s don’t feel nearly as old as a rap record from the early 90’s, not to mention the late or early 80’s. but the converse effect thing is that, on the actual listens to these records and actual viewings of these films, the films look and sound more dated than the actual records do, lending credence to the argument that everything is crucial in the viewpoint, in your preconceived notions, and that art takes time to develop within an idiom, and when you think about it like that, hip hop is a baby, yo, a goddamm baby. A strong baby, granted, a powerful baby, and one that is flexing its muscles in ways that it thought would never be possible even 10 years ago. I mean, I thought shit was corny and unbelievable when I saw my first juicy juice commercial that was trying to do a rap to sell some shit, like, that was some the guvament trying to coopt the underground shit and just failing miserably type shit right there, but now, you don’t even notice that shit, hip hop has permeated the national and global consciousness to such a degree that they can be pimping diapers or Gatorade or what the fuck ever and using hip hop to do it, and it’s slick, it just glides right by, and that’s a result of multitude of things, one the fact that rap is such a mainstream thing now that you don’t blink when it’s presented in a forum of which is not its official designation and two that the people who actually do this shit for a living and know what the fuck they are doing, aka hip hop practitioners, are actually working for the quote unquote man, not that they didn’t always, or at least for a long time, but in capacities of which 10, 15 years ago no one would have thought would have been happening, like in art departments, marketing gigs, advertising, promotion, and not for rap records, but for whatever the hell you can think of, this from an industry, from an art form, that came out of one specific area, at one specific time, a very very very short time ago in the cosmic scheme of things, and when you consider, but shit, look at rock music, that shit blew up with Elvis and started elsewhere, but that shit is relatively young too, so maybe it’s just that society is speeding up so fast that we just can’t keep track of shit anymore, same with technology, with our goddamm cell phones, with computers, with information, with the way we disseminate just about every goddamm piece of knowledge and correspondence changing on a monthly weekly & yearly basis. Shit is a trip.

Kool Moe Dee interview

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