Hip-Hop Is Dead?

You can kill a revolutionary, but you can't kill a revolution. - Huey P. Newton

Hip-Hop lives on, bigger than it's ever been. A lot of people might read this and think: How can he say hip-hop is bigger when everything from sales to creativity is down? Hip-Hop music is for the youth – as you grow old, the music doesn't grow old with you. That's the same reason the music you like the most is from your youth. The target audience stays the same, so if you are outside of that audience don't expect the music you hear to cater to you. Just because the song on the radio and video doesn't reflect the golden era of hip-hop doesn't mean the song is trash. Different regions that grew up on different music other than the golden era of hip-hop, are making music for different fans that didn't grow up in the golden era. So if you stuck on NY Kool G Rap and Primo beats (either have sold a million records) you stuck. That's all I can say.

I love both of the above as much as anybody. I think you measure an MC and producer by the bar they set but you don't sell records using they style. So sounding like the golden era for sake of sounding like the golden era of hip-hop doesn't make any sense to me. I feel like the artists in the golden era didn't look at the era before them to create something great. All they did was try to be different, this caused a big explosion of great hip-hop music that some say has yet to be matched. Why would we want to match that music? I love it but I don't want to make an album for 400,000 people who are to hard to please as it is. That's the sales of an average classic album that came out of New York. When you look at these other areas outside of New York they average album, not to mention classic, sell like 1 to 3 million. So when you try to make your music sound like the golden era hip-hop you are holding yourself back. Make music that sound golden to you and make your own era. That's why the South is winning.

A lot of people are mad at the South, but not me. I love what it doing for hip-hop. They creating they own era that's why they are being embraced by the public. They having fun making records that they like. They not trying to make hits, they doing what they did in the golden era and it's working. 50 Cent is doing the same thing: What he want to do and he winning. So forget about what's "real hip-hop” and what's not because hip-hop change everyday. Every time a new rapper come out from a new city or region with a new style they expand hip-hop whether you like they music or not. Every time this happen it make it harder for New York who are the first to ever make hip-hop music. This makes our music as fresh as the word FRESH.