Everyone loves a story. The problem is that every person’s story is its own truth, omitting and observing the facts as they see fit. Oftentimes hip-hop is forced into this literary structure, a dramatic arc from rise to fall to eventual death—and a shot at redemption. This classicist story is linear, a dialectic approach of dominant ideologies reacting to outdated modes of thought. Old school begot hip-pop begot gangsta begot native tongues begot bling-bling. It is a story of the rise, fall, and eventual death of rap music. (The story often concludes with redemption (i.e. the “underground,” where the old spirit is kept alive.) In actuality, hip-hop is a large and contradictory animal these days, and it defies such generalizations...
