Who would've thought that a street form of music – that many said wouldn't last, created by a collection of disenfranchised Black and brown kids from the Bronx – would grow into a billion-dollar industry, while producing generational wealth for the written-off, inspire every cultural inch of the globe in some way and would surpass rock as the most popular genre in the United States? Well, we thought it – and you would have thought it too if you were there.
Hip-hop is older than me, so I was born into a culture still in its infancy. And I'm from Baltimore, not the Bronx, meaning I don't necessarily have a connection to the genre's place of origin. Still, I do, as the two cities are connected by poverty and pain. We speak the same other-America language, you know – the schools are broken, cops and politicians participate in lying contests, and making it to 25, sometimes 21, is a pipedream because if the cops don't get you and stick up, kids don't get you, then the system would.
