And finally, if Luke and the 2 Live Crew were played in regular rotation, most of y’all would’ve led the charge to burn down your local radio station.

The point, hip hop heads, is that even though D4L may be lyrically handicapped, most men (that like women) aren’t turning their heads when Thicktoria is showing off her secrets while Laffy Taffy blasts through the speakers at Club Shake Dat Azz.

The folks we need to be mad at aren’t the artists (and I use that term loosely), the people we need to be tar and feather are the individuals responsible for making sure that the face of hip hop looks more like DFB and less like BDP. If Will Smith can rock the same stage as Public Enemy, there isn’t a radio program director alive that can tell me that Mike Jones and Mos Def can’t either.

Anybody who says otherwise is a got damn lie and you tell them I said so.

At this point, I don’t expect corporate America to do right by the culture and you shouldn’t either. You want to see change in the culture? Here’s what you do.

Underground heads: share your got damn music. As a fan of that “pure shit”, I (as I’m sure many of y’all are as well) are guilty of hoarding all the good stuff. It’s fine and dandy that we think Immortal Technique is better than MC Top 40, but if we don’t share the music, nobody else will know. Don’t be afraid to drop your back packs and lean wit it every now and then too. Fake it if you have to, we can’t expect folks to like our stuff when we shit on everything else.

Collar poppers, tip drillers, and wannabe trap stars (read: people who didn’t embrace the term “trap” til TI and Jeezy made it cool): Turn off the got damn radio sometimes. Hip hop didn’t start out being the commercial giant it is now (*if you believed otherwise, log off and go pick up a book on hip hop history… and anything with Eminem on the cover does not qualify.) and I’ll be damned if we’re remembered as being a one sided, self degrading, violent and niggerish as it is now. Pick up an independent CD and give it a listen. Don’t know where to start? Talk to the loner kid you see everyday who always has headphones on, he/she has probably got some fire coming from the iPod (do people still have portable CD players?)

Super militant, fuck the world fans: Continue to speak out against this one sided representation of OUR music. School the kids in your community and continue to write and call your local music outlets and demand that they do better. On second thought, HARASS THEIR ASSES (just stay out of jail, nobody will ever believe a hip hop journalist on the net put you up to this anyway). Most execs are scared of black folks anyway, might as well put that fear to good use. Continued on page 3 »