If you know me, you know my taste in music. I listen to almost every type of genre there is. But if you know me, you know what music I absolutely cannot stand. Hip Hop

For the longest time, my friend Carmen and I have debated the worth of hip hop. She loves the music, I hate it. She says it is the voice of our generation, I say it is the voice of bullshit. I mean, listen to what you hear on the radio. How many times can one stand hearing about cars, clothes, bitches, and hoes (I can rhyme too, give me a record deal)? But Carmen feeds on the music. She loves it. And until recently, I could not see why.

You see, Carmen loves hip hop but I could never understand what she saw in it. She would name some of her favorite groups but in my stubbornness, I never asked her who or what those groups were about. I just let them flow into the pile of what I thought was meaningless garbage. But I was wrong for that. I should have looked deeper into the subject instead of being ignorant and willing to stay that way.

My first love for a hip hop artist fell on a man named Talib Kweli. One of his songs were played for me when I was at work, a song by the name of, "Get By." I don't know what it was but something about this song...the beat, the lyrics, the arrangement, it all drew me in to him so much that I HAD to know his name. Talib Kweli. I went home and downloaded the song and listened to it over and over until my mother told me to turn it off.

Very appropriately, Carmen bought me his CD, Quality. When I got home, I listened from start to finish, savoring every word this man said. When I was finished, I said, "This isn't hip hop. This is something else." I was wrong.

See, I learned something when I went to the Sprite Liquid Mix Tour Concert. Kweli is REAL hip hop. The Roots is REAL hip hop. Jill Scott, Mos Def, D'Angelo, Maxwell, Common, Erykah Badu are all REAL hip hop. It's not the folks out there who make every song suitable for radio play or the people who follow other people's lead by downing women or talking about what they have. It's the artists who are not afraid to say what they have to say, even if it means the little teenie boppers, who are all of a sudden into hip hop because they want to be "down", doesn't hear it.

Everybody says they want to hear better music than what's out now but at the same time, we never support these artists. We allow Nelly, Chingy, and company to thrive. Now, I'm not saying I hate their music. Like anyone else, I like to listen to something fun every once in a while. But this isn't what hip hop is...wait, this is hip hop. This is commercial hip hop, something that can appeal to all and offend the fewest of people without being too bubble gum. But that's not what hip hop was about.

Carmen told me something that Mos Def said a while ago. He said something along the lines of, Hip Hop was never about conforming. Nowadays everyone want to say in order to be hip hop, you have to wear this and drive that. But when hip hop first came out, it was about being different, and not following the norm.

For the longest time, I hated hip hop because I wanted something real to me. I didn't want to be like all of those rappers out there who said I had to dress a certain way. I wanted music that would speak to me. Strange that I found all of that in Hip Hop.