Dialogue
(spoken)
So what is Hop Hop? Is it the twenty inch rims,
Diamond bling and Tims, gangster sounding pseudonyms?
While we can be quick to judge its limits, we must take a moment to inspect how an awesome American musical genre, Hip Hop, came to develop this way/
astray/
Like I said earlier, Hip Hop was used to celebrate/
But when the acts started being pushed more down town, the groovey sounds lock down/
started making money/
And as they started recording, the DJ disappeared from the scene. Capitalism, meet Hip Hop/
then what’s apparent in the album was the rapper, not the music/
provided by DJ spinnin’ wax doubles of funk/
So in time, less and less of the new-age Hop Hop were done live/
all through machines
With no soul/
No jive/
Just like when Jazz met Money and went big band/
The corporations companies and keepers sucked them dry of their talent,
Love for Jazz, and muddled the culture, started putting boxes around it/
Until its reactionary Bebob came out and said “uh-uh~”
Even though there were numerous talented geniuses throughout the history of Jazz,
The revolutionaries only came out forty years or so after Jazz was first born – Miles, Coltrane, Mingus, and on and on.
Hip Hop/
as old as maybe thirty/
is just on the brink of breakin’ out.
Using its full potential to depict and reflect our lives/
Boppers in the beat era did as we will from this day forth. React/
Respond/
And be more active in shaping our own and each others lives/
Because whether we’d like to think that we live in separate, insulated, bubbled lives/
We still touch each other in ways unfathomed, globalization and free trade upgrading the slave chains to be thicker, longer and more intricate.
Hip Hop then, is a reflection of us. Society. Our world.
If the poor artists in the ghetto can only think about money in order to survive
And put food on the table, won’t the perpetuated/ mass communicated/
culture of fake Hip Hop propel them to want the riches,
that the previously successful rappers indulged on?
Really though/ Isn’t that how life is everywhere around here?
Don’t we in fact always remain unsatisfied/ our desires fueled by what we see on TV
And knock each other down in the cold competitive capitalist society?
While the world is bridging on economic and environmental collapse, the middle class is still holding on to the notion that if we work hard enough
within the system then the world order will provide/
not realizing that this pyramid can only sustain and develop only when the base gets bigger?
And when the Keepers use all of what’s none of ours – or maybe all of ours – and start taking away human rights across the board/
Will we then team up with the lower class to resist? Will it be too late?
Will we then just follow blindly as they usher in complete new world order
And let them decide what to do with our lives?
How much of this is already happening?
How much of Hip Hop reflects this?
Then I must conclude…that Hip Hop…IS LIFE.