We as hip hop artists – of a certain vintage – are at a cross-roads.
We have to decide what we want to do. Do we want to make music, or make money?
I’ll be the first to admit – I probably couldn’t produce or write a pop-hop, super-mega, radio hit (maybe Booz and Ak could, but not me). I don’t know what to draw from inside to inspire that.
I feel different things – and I try to convey those feelings in the tones and moods of the samples I chop, and synth sounds I use.
The sound I create does not seem destined to have a high earning potential, but it does reward me in other ways. When someone feels the songs the way I feel them, that is the reward.
Hip hop has made so many people very rich, but it has traded it’s soul and direction for this fortune.
Nowadays, the ‘best’ hip hop sounds like old hip hop. The new hip hop is pop, and the hip hop that is ‘pushing the boundaries’ is really just hip hop being done by a segment of people who never did it before (ie. middle class, educated people) – so the only the ‘progressive’ about it is a relatively milder, somewhat more Prep-school type of subject matter.
Musically – it’s still the same.
Ask yourself people – don’t you want more?
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