Nowadays people use “Hip Hop Generation” and “Black youth culture” interchangeably. Is that at all dangerous to you?

I think Black youth culture is Black youth culture. The Hip Hop generation encompasses a lot of other cultural backgrounds to me. It sorta encompasses a huge amount of youth that exist in other countries so to me the Hip Hop generation is the youth period and at this point it’s a couple of generation. So I think Black youth culture is one thing in itself and it should be dealt with separately because we go through different issues and the younger Black generation has a whole set of different barriers and hurdles to overcome.

You’re one of the dopest females ever to touch a mic, lyrically. How does it feel to see women in Hip Hop now achieving a certain level of fame even though they don’t write their own lyrics?

Oh, well…boy. It’s to each it’s own. I happen to think that writing your own lyrics for your rhymes is necessary. For me that’s what Hip Hop is all about because with singing someone can write for somebody else, with an orchestra or a band, you can write the music for someone else to play but hip hop is the kind of music that should come from you, from your soul and your spirit and that’s how people will feel it. And that’s why Hip Hop is that type of music that speaks to your soul and spirit. When you begin to have people writing for you and writing about things that aren’t true to who you are, it has a certain fakeness that doesn’t resonate well with the people.

I mean, you say it doesn’t resonate well, but you have these popular artists who have sold a lot of records…

Yeah, but popular doesn’t mean that you’re good. And you know, you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. I think that the way that this system is set up today, yes there may be a large amount of artists that are popular who don’t write their own lyrics but they have made fans of their music, not fans of who they are. So if someone who’s been their top writer decides that they’re not gonna write for them anymore, then so goes the popularity of that person. I’m just thankful that I came in at a time when record labels were into artist development and making fans of artists and not fans of a hit song.

You spoke at one of the panels about the infiltration of Hip Hop right as it was reaching its peak in terms of its ability to move the masses in a positive direction. Can you elaborate on that?
Well, I tend to feel like there was an era when so many things were being taught. Take for instance KRS1, “You Must Learn.” I mean at the time when we were in the midst of it, it just felt like good music, you know. And what he was sayin was so on point. Now when I look back and I listen to it, it was really tutorial, it was really, like teaching. Just imagine, everyone from that era had their own voice. There was no doubt about it, when you heard a song, you knew exactly who it was when you bought a record your pretty much knew what you were gonna get. There weren’t any surprises in a way that would make you feel as if you’d been tricked into buying or purchasing that record. They say it’s no mistake that Hip Hop came at a time when the whole Black power movement of the 70s had been diminished little by little, infiltrated and I believe Hip Hop was started as a way to let these young folks from the ghetto get a message out, or tell a story, or have fun—it was never degrading. It was never the type of music that would put someone else in a predicament that was unsafe or unhealthy. But in any case, yeah, I think it was building up the capability of moving people in huge numbers and you can tell that by the number of records that was sold and the number of people that would show up to concerts. And the perfect example is Public Enemy. The scary thing about PE was although they were attacking white supremacy they had white fans. So, I mean, that’s a reason for someone to get scared because not only are you talking about uplifting Black people but now you have not just Black people as your followers. So I think it came to a point where they were like, okay we gotta get in here and infiltrate this, too much can happen and it’s giving power to groups that may use that power for something that can be tremendously good. Continued on page 3 »