Dear Black Thought writing my essay , ?uestlove, Kamal Gray, and all members of the Roots, My global contempt for the hip-hop music community has always been deeply ingrained within my taste in music. It’s always been a driving element in my rip-tide repulsion to popular culture. Even during the foundations of the genre, groups like Run D.M.C. and N.W.A set an expectation deep within me that shouting poetry to the beat of music probably wasn’t going to be my thing. I’ve long condensed hip-hop as simply a sub-culture that represented little more than the glorification the performer, not the performance; acts that were focused on image and dominance in lieu of creativity or musicianship. It felt like every song I heard was banality of synthesized looping beats as the foundation for poorly executed shouting... Read More