80'S BABIES (PART 2 OF 3)

Born and raised the ghetto's of America, this young, but wise spirit of the hip hop culture inspired and motivated poor, depressed people to get up, dance, smile, rap, spin records, beatbox and even graffiti the city with divine colors and pictures that also included messages of enlightenment. As you can see, hip hop was a rebel, but a rebel with a cause and purpose. spirit embedded in the inner city that would "rather live for a cause than to die just because." The 80's was a very dynamic decade.

The roots of hip hop run deep. I believe Christ himself "rapped" with his disciples, needless to say rap music is poverty's poetry spoken over instruments telling anyone willing to listen, stories of struggle, experience, sometimes funny, sometimes, serious. But the late 80's became the stepping ground for "gangsta" rap music. This lead to the shift in hip hop's consciousness. In other words, hip hop was nolonger an innocent rebellous teen, but a young adult.

The importation of cocaine was heavier than ever and with the addition of a few ingredients you could be smoking it (crack). The crack epidemic flooded inner city streets and eventually reached the doorsteps of dorm rooms and the children of suburbia. Just two years before crack reached it's peak (84) many, will agree that the inner city leaders and programs were making a lot of progress and school enrollment in the inner city was at a high. When crack hit, most people in the city (any urban city in America) were just high.

Hip Hop was now a young adult learning to apply it's creative energy towards something that would reach out to the inner citie's consumed by "Crack."

The good side of hip hop shined bright during this time period creating positive anti-drug music and establishing after school programs to keep the young and curious off the streets. But if there is a good side to hip hop there is a bad side. I won't go into conspiracies of the CIA trafficking drugs directly into specific urban areas of America; I will say this drug provoked many young people that were doing positive things in there community to turn on that same community that they onced loved.

During the late 1980's the hip hop culture stood up with authority and aritst from all over the world began to evolve, telling stories in a more artistic, aggressive manner. Within hip hop, b-boy's and b-girls' danced harder and sharper. Mc's where rapping smarter, quicker and with more substance. Beat's got tougher and louder and most major cities witnessed a dramatic increase of spray painted artwork on larger scale structure. Even the messages and murals painted by "bombers" contained more traces of communtiy concern and messages of youth outreach. "Close the crack house down" was the messages many rappers released during this time period (mid to late 80's)

However, hip hop was one with the people of the ghetto, that meant it represented not only the good (as I mentioned above), but the bad and ugly too. Hip hop is now embedded in the hearts of stick up kids, drug dealers, drug addicts, king pins, and assassins. Every man has a story right? Hip hop provided a way to express your testimony and allow your story to be heard in was what originally a non-violent manner (when it was young).

Now everyone who embraced hip hop began to see the impact it had on the community and the amount of power and influence someone can attain by claiming to be apart of hip hop, at this point hip hop became a hott marketable item. The smell of power, money, popularity and possiblity was in the air for many confident hip hop artist (when I say artist I mean dancers, rappers and Dj's mainly).

The smell of money and contractual power made way for record labels and movie companies to buy artist's and exploit their talent (crooked investors). This marked the the emergence of the contractual slave within hip hop. Many artist just wanted a way out of poverty and accepted anything that had dollar signs on it (message to the reader: read everything before you sign it, you may be giving up more than you thought).

The media tried to put this God given culture to sleep in the late 80's claiming that "it's just a fad" in headlines across America. Obviously the attempt to kill hip hop through media failed.