Hipper to the Hopper

Intrigued recently by Chris Rock’s list of the top 25 Hip-Hop albums of all time – a list compiled in 2005 and published in Rolling Stone magazine with insightful and often funny commentary. Toward the end of 2012 I again came across a Hip-Hop list in Rolling Stone, and this time it was the top 50 songs, “joints,” of all time. The list was assembled by a veritable collection of artists, record producers, industry professionals, and music journalists, and again compelling. I began to contemplate my own experience with hip-hop, remembering my first exposure to it. This unique and all-pervasive art form had an immense influence on me, my identity, and what I wanted to do with my life. Free and without charge, it gave me the key to a wicked kind of self-expression, an invaluable, inexhaustible gift that has never diminished.

Compilations of lists are problematic by nature, almost to the point of meaninglessness. I’d like to offer mine in no specific order. Each one is inter-related to the other, each experience unique in and of itself. Hip-hop MUST be introspective, otherwise it is something else. A track begins and ends with the individual. As with reading, we digest and process the words and beats in real time. Specific preferences are relative to the experience.

It has occurred to me that older songs should take precedence over the newer. Older tracks paved the way, cleared the bush, established the parameters. Subsequent generations must necessarily lose an element of originality. Sure there will always be innovations here and there, but going into hip-hop in the early 80s would be far more revolutionary than going into it in the early 90s, 2000s, 2010s. Now it is the dominant form of all music – universal – the soundtrack of my life.