The Gift and the Curse, The Venom and the Serum*

I don't know what's in the water, but so many people are writing so much I like so much about the emotions behind hip-hop that it's making my head spin.  Ta-Nehisi writes:

In my memoir, I talk about a buddy who, whenever he was about to get jumped, use to recite the last half of Rakim's Microphone Fiend. It was like armor for his nerves. I think about that whenever I hear society mocking the mask which young black boys don in urban America. We manufacture the conditions, and then rail at kids for creating a code of survival in response.

In my time, hip-hop was an art-form based on that code. If you were a kid living in a city, and thus acclimated to the rules of that city, if you spent time trying to understand which blocks were off-limits, if you ever assembled friends, in the manner of land-lords assembling vassals, if you never went to see your girlfriend solo, if, in other words, you lived with the threat of random violence, then hip-hop was the language of your life.  

And DJ Stylus expounds on his arguments about hip-hop culture in a long comment on my post about communality, humility, and hip-hop.  I'm sorry if I'm belaboring this stuff, I am.  It's just that it gets at so much of why I blog about culture, and not policy, or sports, or cooking, or any of the other things I care about quite a bit.  To me, culture is where we figure out and express who we are.  Whether it's in selfishness or in search of courage, in communing with the whole or in full expression of your very unique self, how we react to art says a huge amount about the sum of ourselves.  Something like Twilight matters a lot not because it's some silly little trend, but because no matter how poorly written it may be, or no matter how unserious a lot of the conversation around it may be, anything that gets that many people to buy movie tickets in a single weekend is a serious business, that says serious things about our desires.

It's incredibly dorky, but I have OutKast's "The Whole World" as my ringtone.  Every time that jangle songs that "The whole world loves it when you don't get down / And the whole world loves it when you make that sound" it's a reminder of how all-encompassing our obsession with our popular cultures are.  I try to keep that before me in all this writing.

*Lyrics from Lupe Fiasco's "Conflict Diamonds," a remix of "Diamonds from Sierra Leone," so good it makes me weep: