jordan's defiance of convention early on in his career was not unlike what the trio run-dmc was doing in its music. the air jordans, along with the adidas "shell toe" favored by dmc, went on to became staples of the hip-hop wardrobe. jordan's shaved head and his long baggy shorts eventually became the style as well, both on and off the court. he was not only a trendsetter and style arbiter, but he was a young rebel intent on gettin' money and dominating the game. these things would become mantras in hip-hop, too, over time.

-the convergence of basketball and hip hop-



hip-hop started out as a counter-culture expression of pain-laced, defiant joy by new york's penniless and angry. you make studio time and instrumental tuition too expensive for me, place me in ghettos i lack any means to escape or improve, cut off the power to my housing block, keep me locked down in a miserable job for pathetic pay and generally treat me as a politically powerless and racially inferior minority? i will mix records together with no respect for their discrete heritage or creators; set your anthems as backing vocals for the rhymes i've spent my fruitless hours of drudgery whetting with pent-up bitterness; paint your greyly hideous constructions wildly, vibrantly beautiful; and funnel the electricity from your streetlights into my decks and speakers, to dance with my peers in new and explosive ways that pay homage to our frantic, cooped-up energy. and i will tell my people that they are beautiful, and that you cannot hold us forever, for this raucous, rhythmic, illegitimate music will bring us together, and in its crude but irresistible power we will find and share our impoverished strength and soul once more.



...now, any musical genre that becomes so successful that it becomes the mainstream inevitably becomes homogenized, its own swollen girth obscuring beneath it many of its most talented originators. indeed, many are those who have been loudly proclaimed rock's death for the last few decades. yet hip-hop has not become commercially marginalized, nor has it run out of fresh, hungry artists with something to say and an interesting, original way of saying it. it's quite the opposite in fact. it is just that hip-hop bears within its body of listeners not just the usual commercial/obscurest rift, but also a mobius strip-like cultural one, and the two intersect.



...perhaps my hopes for a racially unattached hip-hop, where only the music and the mc's ability and personality matter, is both naive and potentially a setback for the black community. yet in their need to keep their music, and themselves, united, they are holding on to both the past and the populist present too tightly, stymieing themselves and their art, limiting what could be a liberating outlet for all the facets of their souls to superficial party music presided over by ineloquent, aggressive stereotypes.

-how hip hop music is slowly transcending its circular culture-