Underground hip Hop is Dead
Yea, I said it.
It’s an empty genre and an even emptier phrase. For those of you who know me, you probably think I’m crazy at this point. I swear by this “genre”, bump it constantly, and have even DJ’ed it on the radio. Yet, I have my reasons.
The internet has changed the world in infinite ways. You can literally search anything in Google or Wikipedia and find 
out everything you wanted to know about it and more in seconds. Thats basically where my argument begins and ends.
With the internet, it is absurdly easy to be in touch with what is happening in the music world at all levels and genres. Seriously. When I go through my daily rotation of blogs and websites I use to find new music, it is just as easy to find a leaked track from Brother Ali as Fabolous. The internet, especially in the music world, is the great equalizer.
For the past 2 months, I have been living in Cuba, which has given me perspective on a lot of the things I love in my life. My family (I miss them), friends (are family), school (greatest opportunity ever), country (God Bless America), and basic day to day habits (like shitting). But more specifically it has made me think about how underground hip hop functions in a country that is more or less isolated from the rest of the world. I met this guy the other day at a party some American students threw named Francis. My boy Andy started a conversation with him about hip hop and got me in on the cypher. The guy is OBSESSED with MF DOOM (all caps baby). Hip hop runs so deeply in his veins that ever since he was 12 he couldn’t listen to anything else. The guy doesn’t even dance salsa, which is truly an identity crisis in this country. He is studying English right now and lives off a 2 dollar a month stipend from the government. I gave him 3 bucks one night to buy four DVD’s so I could give him some music. His face lit up like a little kid with Santa’s credit card as I browsed through my I-tunes and dragged and dropped 18 GB’s of music. And still, he was able to give me three MF DOOM and two Jurassic 5 albums off his memory stick I didn’t have.
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