I am a child of hip hop!  I grew up on Sugar Hill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run DMC, Curtis Blow, Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince--man all the kids who paved the way for artists to express themselves lyrically through the genre of rap.  I remember putting pen to paper cause I wanted to be fresh like MC Lyte and Queen Latifah and Moni Love--cause those sisters could spit a rhyme and make you feel empowered, strong and sexy all in the same verse!

Hip hop used to mean something.  It celebrated African heritage and honored black culture in America.  We wore the leather African medallions around our necks and A Tribe Called Quest taught us about what it meant to be part of the talented 10th.  They quoted authors in their lyrics like W.E.B. DuBois and George Washington Carver.  They weren't afraid to be black and proud--and once we saw it was alright to do that--neither were we.

It wasn't cool to be dumb in hip hop!  You had to know something, about your history and about your past--and artists like KRS 1 and Chuck D. told us where they were going in the future! 

Hip hop was inspiring and created a culture of awareness for a generation of kids longing for something to listen to other than their momma's Teddy Pendergrast albums and Betty Wright 8-Tracks.  But hip hop didn't stray too far away from blues and the sounds of R&B, cats like EPMD sampled Roger Troutman and Zapp along with borrowing a little funk from James Brown!  Even when the genre went gangster, Dr. Dre still paid homage to George Clinton and the P Funk Allstars! 

Hip hop said something, hip hop meant something, hip hop was something....

But I believe in my heart that the progressive culture of the movement of hip hop is dead.  Lil' Wayne and T Payne killed it last night on the BET Awards show.  Perhaps my beloved hip hop had been on life support all this time, and I was just too busy growing up and raising my family to see it.

I watched last night in horror at what was Lil' Wayne's performance on the awards program.  He rapped verse after verse about absolutely nothing.  What was he talking about? How much money he had, how many women he slept with, how many cars he drives--and he did it all in a white t-shirt and pants that were so big, he had to hold them up with one hand.  And to top it off, I really couldn't understand what the hell he was saying the whole time.  I tried putting the closed captioning up, hoping that someone would translate his lyrics for me--but all I got at the bottom of the screen was "????????????????????????????????????????"--even the damn captioner whose job it is to transcribe television language for deaf folks couldn't understand what the hell he was saying.

And the crowd went wild--folks were standing up and clapping and dancing! FOR WHAT? He looked like he had just got out of jail, like he hadn't brushed his teeth, was high and hadn't bathed in 90 days!  And he closed out the show.  He was the headliner!  I was astonished to find out Lil' Wayne sold 1 million albums in one week!  What the hell?????

Just before Lil' Wayne came out rapping about nothing--Jermaine Dupree came out and spit a verse during a performance with Nelly. Here he is, Jermaine Dupree, the founder of SoSo Def records and the pioneer of Atlanta's own version of hip hop music--a man who is 40+ years old--he is singing about his tennis shoes and how nobody better not step on his tennis shoes--and how he got the fliest tennis shoes that ain't even out in the stores yet!  WHAT THE HELL? At 40 years old, he ain't got nothing better to talk about than some damn tennis shoes!  And the crowd went WILD after his performance!

I was mortified. What happened to my beloved hip hop? The language and the culture that told me I could be anything I wanted to be? The lyrics that told me to fight the powers that be? Now, I'm concerned with tennis shoes and how many cars SOMEBODY else has!  Artists are fighting over who is the fliest and which performer is banging the latest R&B starlet instead of speaking to the movement of Barack Obama or the travesty of Don Imus!

The music that once put black women on a pedastal and called us "queens" now displays us in videos wearing bikinis and calls us bitches and hoes!  The best selling book by a black woman last year wasn't written by Sister Solja, it was penned by Kareen Stephans and talked about the glamorous life of being a video hoe!

Nobody is using the vehicle of hip hop to speak to the people anymore and empower a generation of teenagers to do more than just sit up and watch videos and play Wii!  It's all about "look at me" "look what I got" "I'm better than you". 

I watched the BET Awards and shook my head "no", except nobody was in the room asking me any questions.  Shawn damn near had tears in his eyes when he declared, "Baby, it's a new day. Hip hop as we know it is dead.  Nobody cares about the art anymore.  These boys just run out on stage, talk about anything, get a good marketing campaign behind them and people buy into what these advertisers are selling."

"Yeah," I told him, "they are talking fast and saying nothing.  While Lil' Wayne is selling a million records a week, a Grammy Award winning forward thinking group like The Roots can't break the gold record category."

RIP Hip Hop, we had a wonderful life together, you are long gone from us now, but I will cherish the memory of Tupac, Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince, Ice T, Dr. Dre, KRS 1, BDP, Queen Latifah, Moni Love, Tribe Called Quest, Dig-able Planets, Leaders of the New School, Eric B and Rakim, and all those great pioneers who used the microphone as a weapon to tear down racism and stereotypes--and then used that same microphone to build up a generation of young black teens!