HER and the Heart

Yo Hip-Hop started out in the heart
Now everybody tryin' to chart
-Lauryn Hill "Superstar"

If you take English courses at U of C right now then you might know this guy named Daniel. He's got long hair and I'm guessing some form of ADHD. If you have a class with him then you've heard his opinion and probably chuckled a bit too. His cypher (my word), he tells me is "Punk Rock," and he likes to tailor his points to this style at times. So I think if Daniel is punk than I'm hip-hop, straight up though both of us look like goddamn hippies.

Hip-Hop and punk got a lot in common. Both are from the ground up type operations. Hip-Hop is a major force in post colonialism, along with dub/reggae music and punk too, it was/is the music of the ghettos. Peoples disenfranchised found solace in these forms of music as it didn't take much money to get your start. Computers have democratized the form of hip-hop much further all the while putting the record-spinning DJ on the endangered species list. The anger of punk and hip-hop and sometimes reggae is also a connector, the coolest example of this for me is the label Def Jam. Chief label architect Russell Simmons may be the tamest dude on the planet right now but back in the day he had the foresight to hire metalhead Rick Rubin to produce/"reduce" the rappers that would end up breaking the form on a worldwide level. The scant beats and blaring guitars were one thing but Def Jam artists were also encouraged to be as ridiculously controversial as they wanted to be. It worked with the fratboy mentality of Beastie Boys but more importantly it really worked for Public Enemy who sold to white teenage boys black radicalist music. I was one of those teenage boys (albeit 15 years too late).

Run DMC, Public Enemy, Kid Rock and the Wu-Tang Clan are, for me, where hip-hop started, and yes it started in the heart, like love at first listen. The Wu started me on the term cypher, but it was NaS that completed it for me with this line: Wipe the sweat off my dome, spit the phlegm on the street / Suede Timbs on my feets makes my cypher complete. That rhyme has been bitten many a time including once by Jay-Z midway through his beef with NaS. I like to think of a cypher as something that we all have. There are certain things that go in to us, that identify you and all that shit.

Biting is another great hip-hop term and I'll let Lil Wayne defend it:

Now hey kids
Plural I graduated
Cause you could get through anything if Magic made it.
And that was called recycling
Or rereciting
Something cause you just like it
So you say it just like it.
Some say its biting
But i say its enlightning
Besides Dr. Kanye West is one of the brightest.
And Dr. Swizz can stitch your track up the tightest.
And Dr. Jeezy can fix your back up the nicest.

That's respect, and generally when a rapper uses another rapper's lines it's out of love but not every rapper hears it that way. Long before the whole east-coast/west-coast feud. Biggie Smalls had beef with NaS via Raekwon and Ghostface Killah. There's some lines about bleach being thrown in people's eyes that speak to this and there's an interlude on Raekwon's Only Built for Cuban Linx called Shark Niggas (Biters) where Ghost says that B.I.G. bit NaS's album cover. I'll let you decide for yourself:

Another term I think everybody needs to know if they wanna know hip-hop is Hearing Every Rhyme (HER). Common's song I Used to Love HER is one of the most important songs in the genre. People talk about HER in rap songs all the time and it sparked one of rap's best and most symbolic beefs when Ice Cube took offense to the song. Back then Common was Common Sense and he was part of an underground movement in hip-hop to bring the genre to an intellectual level that was true to the start, ie the heart. I still love HER, just like I still love Alberta Beef but it's not always an easy love. The Dirty South is awesome and very much a return to Rick-Rubin style reductionism but there are some dumb-ass dudes from that area, poeple that, as Lupe Fiasco would call it, "Dumb it Down" (youtube this song along with the Common Sense piece). Canadian hip-hop drives me nuts too, it's generally good and it loves its traditionalism but a lot of these Canadian MCs sound like they're a good 20 years too late. Australia apparently has this problem too and the accents don't help. I leave you with one final song to check out and that is the Hilltop Hoods' She's So Ugly, another song about HER but from freaking Australia. The lyrics are smart but can you handle the accents?