Let me tell you about Hip-Hop

Grindin', when you know what I keep in a linin'
Niggas better stay in line, when
When you see a nigga like me shinin' - Clipse

What is hip-hop about? That's something I created this blog with the intent of exploring; you see hip-hop, for me, has been for years now this thing to which I wish to explore and know. As a white Calgarian it's not a genre that I am normally exposed to and thus due to my own cypher I feel the need to speak for it to whoever it is that listens to me, to open their minds as mine has been opened.

I start with the verb to shine. Shining is something that happens when you rock a fat gold chain or a fresh pair of sneaks or some platinum or bling bling (to use a term so dated my mother uses it with her church friends). When you take a girl to Jacob's and play which one's the bluest. Essentially shinin' is when you show off how much money you got. Some people fake their shine and we can see this in Slick Rick's "The Moment I Feared" or Trick Daddy's "Tuck Ya Ice," while others hate on shine like the subject of Big Boi and Gucci Mane's "Shina Blockas."

Generally rappers always present themselves as shinin'. Devin the Dude, Slick Rick, KRS-One, Ice Cube and Kanye West have referenced their broke-ass non-shine before but generally rappers do like Sandy Cohen in American Beauty and present themselves as kings whether they're making money or not. A great example of this comes from Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause LP wherein Rock states that he's making "Matchbox 20 money," which is simply untrue until after the album is released and does make "Matchbox 20 money."

The nature of shining of course leads to hip hop's controversial uses of words like bitch and ho. You see, the nature of rap is that it takes a person from a state of non-shine or faked-shine to hopefully a state of actual shine. R. Kelly and Mike Jones both have expressed how the shine has drastically changed the way they appear to woman, as Jones puts it "back then hoes didn't want me / now I'm hot, hoes all on me." Of course this blog will explore the nature of the word bitch as used by rappers from Common to Ice Cube, Ice-T to Jay-Z but for right now I will make this argument, if rap is about achieving shine then rap is the music of capitalism. Rappers are self-made entrepreneurs that use the resources they have to make their music and when they bring themselves up from poverty they now have to deal with those that want a piece of their action. Thus with the shine comes the bitches or hoes that exchange sex for money, not necessarily as prostitutes but as trophy types that love the rapper in his shine. Of course it could be true love but how does one know?

Of course the terms bitch and ho can refer to a lot of things and not just "in the sense of having a pussy." Biggie's "Me & My Bitch" might just be hip-hop's greatest love song, Common's "The Bitch in You" is a battle rap against Ice Cube and Ice-T's "Bitches 2" deals with the ways in which men can be bitches. I like to think of myself as not a prejudiced person and I think that hip-hop gets a bad rap, pun possibly intended, from other people who probably think of themselves the same way and so I feel that the genre should shine in more than a commercial sense. This is the first blog of hopefully many that will analyze and confront hip-hop controversy.