But that begins to fall away, and the simultaneous rise of their success as a genre speaks to not just people’s willingness to celebrate these icons, but white desire for this kind of unproblematic consumption. You have to really ask some fundamental questions about white fan consumption of hip-hop. It just rarely gets asked! What is it about this that’s so exciting? You can sort of make some excuses for black young people liking it, but what is it about this that makes it so exciting and interesting?

— Tricia Rose on The Hip-Hop Wars, Race, and Culture - Part 1 [via]

When the next outburst of American anger and determination comes, it’s going to unleash such a creative force that it will make Ice Cube and Public Enemy look like child’s play (let alone Talib Kweli and his “revolutionary entrepreneurialism”). The next surge of violent creative potential will be from all those hip-hop heads that the “conscious” crowd dismiss in their veiled middle class racism. It will be those cats Black, Brown, and White, with gold fronts, gold chains, saggy pants, and cocked hats who throw off the old society and give us something worth living for. Why? Because they know there is no alternative WITHIN the present arrangement. They know that those who rule are unfit to do so and no amount of diversification of the rich and powerful can prove otherwise.

— All hip-hop is concious except for ‘concious’ hip-hop [via]

And that’s what this album is about. It’s filling in the bridge and the gap so that somebody in Liberia can articulate exactly what they want to say without having this middle-man person who has to be from the first world. And that’s what this album is about, it’s like “guess what: I came from the fucking mud hut and I got here and I’m here and I did it in 15 fucking years flat.” It’s not a three-generation experience like people in America.
You know, hip-hop came out of having the right stuff, and you had to have a slavery and you had to have a war and you had to have all these things in order for Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs to be singing about fucking Bentleys. You had to have that journey. That takes a long time, and in America it took three generations for that to happen. And for me to come from a mud hut and to be here and shouting in front of a disco, it took me 15 years. And that’s all I represent. Everything boiled down is that, that’s all it is. If I get it back to Africa, this is what I’ve accomplished.

— M.I.A. Confronts the Haters