After hip-hop becomes this new voice of civil rights--a voice born of blacks and Latinos, African diasporas, as well as young people around the world--it is used to speak of the joy, hurt, pains, frustrations and fears of a generation, which before then, had no voice to the world at all.Then suddenly, corporate America, realizing the financial potential of the music, intervened. So, hip-hop became like the movie, The Matrix… There is a clear controlling body in the hip-hop industry and it’s the corporations that control and run the music industry—the Viacoms, Clear Channels, Universals, Sonys, and all the rest. These faceless multi-national corporations determine who gets a voice, who gets released, who gets promoted, and who gets played on the radio. Now, consider a generation of young people who are directly affected by these corporations; it’s like the mainframe plugged into the Matrix. Some have been able to take the red pill and be freed of that system, unplugged from the Matrix. They are critical enough to take a look at what is hip-hop culture, what do they want it to be, and what do they want it to evolve into. They understand that there is a cycle of themselves affecting what hip-hop culture becomes and allowing them to be affected by what hip-hop culture really is. And some are truly connected—they don’t separate the institution from the mainframe itself. It’s like Neo and Morpheus in the movie; they went back into the Matrix in order to free people from the Matrix. There are those who understand that they must be free thinking enough to create their art, without being told by the institution what that art should look (or sound) like. But are they able to use the institution to spread their art to those who wouldn’t hear it otherwise? I’m talking about the likes of Mos Def, Talib Kweli and even to some extent **** Prez. They’re not so independent that they don’t use the airwaves to spread their stuff, or at least not to the extent of other artists. Those are the people that get it. They know they’ve got to go back into the Matrix in order to free people from it, convince the people that they need to take the red pill if they want to be free and do their own thing.
