Hello Hip Hop enthusiasts, neophytes, and everything in between! HP here with more of a question than a theme/topic/category today. I’m sure that for most of us, music occupies an important space in our lives. A lot of us have our favorite albums, songs, musical artists, record labels, concert experiences, festival memories, physical media, posters, etc that are proof of this. And if you’re here, and you’ve been reading these every day (and maybe even posting songs and talking to other folks on these threads), you hopefully are getting a sense of what music can mean to people.

And specifically, what hip hop is to each of us. That story is being told in the songs we’re posting, in the enthusiasm we have for not only the tunes we’re introducing to others but for the things we see other people talking about and posting. Hip hop culture has always centered community, and it’s been a real pleasure to see that start to grow a bit here every day, it affirms the importance and the extraordinary contribution the genre has made to the world.

But at one point, either many years ago, or somewhere along our musical journeys in life, we probably fell in love with hip hop and its culture. Or maybe not love, but fascination, or maybe not fascination, but respect. Or maybe not respect, but curiosity. But in all likelihood, it’s some wonderful, subjective combination of these things- and so our challenge today is to post a song that conveys some of these things toward hip hop as a genre, as a culture, as a kind of music that has had significance in your life. I originally titled this the ‘introduce someone to your love of the game in one song’ challenge, and that’s still what I’m going for, but I want to leave space to account for the many ways we might relate to this music. As a student of language and prose and poetry and the politics of identity I find hip hop to be a pure example of a kind of political and cultural force that is stunning in its diversity, in its reach, and its purpose.

So much on my mind that I can’t recline
Blastin’ holes in the night ’til she bled sunshine
Breathe in — inhale vapors from bright stars that shine
Breathe out — weed smoke retrace the skyline
Heard the bass ride out like an ancient mating call
I can’t take it, y’all! I can feel the city breathin’
Chest heavin’, against the flesh of the evenin’
The sigh before we die like the last train leavin’

This was it, the song that convinced me that even if this wasn’t a genre I listened to often, it was worth paying attention to because I loved language and I loved cities, and I love Blackness and our culture-this song was a connection to all of these things, and I realized, listening over and over, that what it was telling me was that hip hop could encompass so many things that are so important to me. And I kept trying to listen-I didn’t know anyone who listened to hip hop back when I first heard this song but I tried my best to figure it out and I never looked back.

So bring em out-what song would you offer that tells us about how you think about rap and hip hop? You know the drill-

1.) The tricky/fun thing about this 30 day ‘challenge’ is that you get one choice (see, it’s a challenge!). Maybe there are a lot of songs you could use here, but there’s no wrong answer! 🙂

2.) In order to keep the thread from borking, please limit yourself to one YouTube/media link per post. If someone ‘beats you to it’ and posts a song you would’ve posted, reply under their post saying why you like this song/why it was your pick as well, etc. Let’s not give Disqus a reason to make the thread hard to navigate for those of us listening to the songs! If you want to mention some others, of course that’s fine!

3.) Let’s keep this as positive as we can. Don’t yuck anyone’s yum, don’t snark on someone who may not be as familiar as others, don’t ‘Um, actually’ people, etc. Ain’t nobody earning any Internet Points out here.