Doorknockers: To love hip hop: Remember when we were little and the boys used to think they could love hip hop better than us? It was their game, their thing, their fun, their philosophy.
Ah hip hop may have dominant male identity, it may be sexist and violent towards us more often than not, even violent to the men themselves, but hip hop is our soul. That soul has no gender. That soul is just love, and the stories of ancestors, translated and mediated over time.
Hip hop is the best boyfriend any of us ever gonna have and don't you forget it. This is because we can cut and paste our hip hop, we can censor our hip hop to some degree. We can tell our daughters, "You can't play that crap in here even if I can't stop you from listening it with your friends." Or we can even say, "When you bring oppressive music like that into this house, that means you're willing and ready to dissect it."
It's not this way with actual men, brothers, lovers, boyfriends, and the like. They gonna say what they want. They gonna believe what they want. Lastly they will do exactly as they want. That's the price of relating to a human. He's his own person, he's not what you wish.
But with hip hop you can choose the voices you like. You can choose voices that soothe you and voices that love you. Most deceiving of all, we can spotlight on poetry that honors us even if in real life we understand that the poets who have written these words are each complex human beings. Undoubtedly if I look at certain aspects of my life work so far, I see myself as a stable, strong, honorable woman. That doesn't mean that every moment of life I feel stable and strong, or that I've always said and done the most honorable things.
I love hip hop, by which I mean I love what I've selected and chosen and glued together for my own mixtapes. Outside my window though, it's a whole other story, isn't it?
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