I've listened to hip hop since I was a child, it became my defining genre even though I listen and love a lot of genres of music. This is because it was a music that blew up with my generation. I've studied its history, performed it, written rhymes as an emcee, etc. I'm old enough to remember when "crime rhyme" was just starting to take over the genre - when NYC sold out and emulated the West Coast because that's what the record labels wanted. When Jeru and a couple of others were the lone voices yelling in the wilderness trying to reverse the trend to no avail. Though I continued to like the music with the rise of these acts - because a lot of them had talent at what makes good hip hop - flow, lyrics, cadence, uniqueness, I never felt a true PRIDE in the music like I did before. It felt like a darkness fell over it, and its one that's never left. Once criminality became a central tenet in the music, I feel it started a downward spiral to where being "a real street n" started to overshadow everything else to a LOT of consumers. Where you had to be some form of a thug act to get signed to a lot of record labels. It was detrimental not only to the growth of the genre, but to the minds of countless people. Fast forward all these years later and it's a wasteland. The legacy of the music is that it went from being this completely new genre that took over the world with its innovation and originality and evolved into a stagnant soulless corporate co-opted product largely identified by pointless nihilism.
