Yes, I have been a participant, a documentarian, and an activist within and around hip-hop culture for 44 of these 50 years. Hip-hop taught me how to use my voice (Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power”), and hip-hop taught me about Black political and cultural rebels like John Coltrane and Assata Shakur and Nina Simone and Malcolm X. Hip-hop taught me to question police brutality (N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police”), and hip-hop gave me delectable snippets of Black history absent from my formal education. Hip-hop instructed me to study jazz (practically anything by A Tribe Called Quest), and hip-hop gave me my first and only full-time job as a writer at Quincy Jones’ Vibe magazine. Hip-hop led me to pen three cover stories for Vibe about the most famous rapper ever, Tupac Shakur, and hip-hop has given me so many words and phrases with which to guide my life to this day…

But when Dr. Dre’s landmark album The Chronic appeared all over MTV in 1993 and sold about 6 million units, it was not just the end of the Black Power era in hip-hop, but also the beginning of a Hollywood-like reproduction of the same movie over and over again.

Today, in 2023, three decades since The Chronic, we’ve gone from fighting the power to recreating and mass-producing the worst aspects of that hugely successful record: endless use of the n-word for Black people; endless use of the b-word for women; a seemingly endless hatred for queer and transgender people; an intense obsession with guns, with violence in all forms, with drug-selling and drug-taking, with money and material things; and anti-anything that even remotely questions the images and words we put forth…

Black self-hatred, hatred of women, destroy, self-destruct, kill or be killed, anything for a dollar, even if it leads to real-life drama, or murder. Gone, for the most part, is the agitating for political change, the diversity of voices; instead, rap’s activist roots have been completely eclipsed by its lowest common denominator: nihilism and greed.