Hip hop is a way of life that's evolved into many things over its lifespan. It's grown out of the inner cities whence is sprang, and up to the very height of popular culture. Its financial contribution to the music industry has ascended from a hill of beans into one of the largest movers of money in the world. Its reach is heard and felt across boudaries both cultural and national.

The question is, what has it really become? Does it now exist in contradiction with its intended message? Does it now tower over our world in spite of its roots? Is it still art, or is it now merely a cog in the money machine?

Listening to the radio one night, I tuned in to Chocolate City, one of the many outstanding shows on KCRW. Chocolate City has long been my favorite program on the station, thanks in no small part to deejay Garth Trinidad. That night I tuned in to hear Garth reading an essay that someone had forwarded to him. It was called Fuck Hip Hop, and it was about how the last black arts movement had died. As Garth read it, I was hit by how powerful and brilliantly written it was, and I couldn't stop shaking my head as the essay touched on points that I had been thinking about for years, but no one had been saying.

Garth was reading an article from a site called ExitTheApple.com, and this amazing essay had been sent to him, and he had been as compelled to read it, as I had been to listen. The author is Pierre Bennu, and I knew immediately that I had to talk to him. (Please make sure you find time to read the article, it will be well spent.)

I got in touch with both Pierre and Garth, and we sat down to talk about some of the issues that Pierre's article got so eloquently into. What follows is a discussion between the three of us about the state of hip hop as an art and culture, and its future or lack of future, in light of the current state of music and societal attitudes toward all the images that are associated with hip hop.

Pierre Bennu is a jack of all trades: artist, musician, writer, filmmaker, deejay... He and his wife Jamyla produce the site Exit The Apple. You can find out much, much more about him on the site.

Garth Trinidad is a veteran deejay at KCRW, one of the most popular and acclaimed public radio stations in America. Aside from his show, he deejays a live club on weekends, and spends time spreading knowledge and education around the inner city and anywhere else he is able. You can read more about Garth on the station's site.

JESSE: Pierre, I've read 10 other articles like yours that were all trying to say what yours said. They all failed miserably. It's a tough thing to get across - artistic criticism is tough, because who are you to criticize someone's art? And that's why we're here: because we do have that right. Because someone's got to say something. For too long, the record industries have really been controlling the art -- not just in hip hop -- and it can really get lost in the machine.

Someone wrote, about 30 years ago, that "rock is dead." And now here were are today, and someone's writing that hip hop is dead. What's the time correlation? Where's the arc on this?

GARTH: It's the corporate cycles. It's like a washer and drier. It's war in the economy -- every 20 years or so, something has to go down to stimulate the dollars, and that's controlled by a few people. Any industry that's responsible for making people really rich, it's got to go down like that.

So, you know that 30 years ago rock was dead, and next thing you know, hip hop is dead. It's because of the corporate pollution. A trend is discovered, numbers are sold, and the cookie-cutter system comes along… and it always has to be a cycle, if there's to be more people who are concerned with the cash than the creativity.

PIERRE: Hip hop right now is where disco was when hip hop came along.

GARTH: Word. Word!

PIERRE: There is a lack of balance. I got a lot of emails: "why do you think that hip hop is dead?" Death is definitely relative -- Miles Davis once said that jazz was dead, but that doesn't mean that he stopped playing jazz, or that they stopped being creative people. It just means that it stopped being the force of change that it was. It's been corporatized; changed into Kenny G, what have you. It's been baited into the pop culture that you have now.

And that's where hip hop is. That's not to say that there aren't great emcee's out there -- that people won't be rhyming and break dancing on another level… but I don't think hip hop culture transforms people the way it once did. Hip hop was, after all, the first music of the children of apartheid.

The generation that created hip hop supposedly had all their freedoms. This was post-King, post-Malcolm X, post-60's revolution, post-Black Panthers, if you will. This was the first music coming from those kids.

JESSE: I don't think it even has to be as extreme as Kenny G -- I think you're right, jazz was dead at that point, and even though Miles and a few other giants were still around, you can't say that there's nobody playing jazz today that's good. Take the Marsalis Brothers...

PIERRE: Yeah, Antonio Hart… there's people out there doing it.

JESSE: Right, but the key phrase is "force of change." It does hit that plateau, and starts to fall.

And you mentioned MLK -- he once said that it was radio, above all other media, that was keeping Civil Rights alive. That's one of the first things that I thought of when Garth read your piece on the radio.

PIERRE: Wow, I definitely feel that. Not so much FM, but NPR and the Internet. I sent that article out to like 30 people… and people all over the world are responding to it. I don't think the internet has been freaked yet, as the force of change that it could be.

JESSE: Where's the next force of change? If rock was dead 30 years ago… if jazz was dead… if hip hop is now dead… was there any force of change after those death knells? And for hip hop, is there any chance for it to turn into a force of change again?

GARTH: Because -- piggybacking on what I said earlier -- it all works hand-in-hand with the socio-political climate of the time. My play older brother always said, "music makes a statement for the time in which you live," so I think all the energy surrounding everything is related. There was a time when rock was a force of change because people were living a certain way, and were feeling what was coming out from the artists, because the artists were among the people. And it was the same thing with the jazz movement, it was the same thing with the origins of what hip hop is about. It wasn't about nothing but feeling a certain way and living a certain way, and expressing yourself in a certain way, before everything was packaged, marketed, and sold back to the culture that started it in the first place. And then, of course, to the world.

It's about goods and services, it's about products versus the kind of markets and demographics… so once that catches on, once there's cash involved, there has to be something else that comes about, when the cow is milked dry. Something else is gonna happen. It's all related to what's happened at the time -- right now we're living in a capitalistic, consumer-driven world, and the images that are projected to us that we see, hear, and feel, are beamed to us like weapons for a quiet war. You're not looking at too much that can happen in that kind of climate, until people feel so stressed out and burnt out, that they pop -- like The Matrix. It's like a real life Matrix when you meditate on the way that we're living right now. Everything is about 'be rebellious' and in between, you've got the commercials to buy the car, the acne cream, get your titties bigger, grow your penis size. You gotta really take a look at: what are these artists that are living among us gonna come out with right now, that's gonna stimulate that change?

PIERRE: Hip hop is exactly where disco and funk were in the early 80's/late 70's -- hip hop, when it first came out, was a cult. It didn't have a name. It was just a bunch of young people doing what they do. There's breakdancing happening in this corner, and then there was graffiti art, and then someone put it all under one umbrella.

If you remember, when disco was fading out, hip hop was coming out, sounding almost like disco. Even groups like the Fat Boys were called the "Disco Three". It wasn't until Run DMC came along and changed the aesthetic, and gave rap a look. Prior to that, hip hop was Grand Master Flash, it was Afrika Bambaataa, so it had a whole different look and aesthetic until Run DMC came along.

The new music, the new sound is already here. That force of change is already amongst us, but it doesn't have a look yet -- it doesn't have a title yet. It hasn't been around long enough to really be called anything yet, but it's here.

JESSE: I saw an intereview with Grand Master Flash years ago, and he said that when hip hop was starting out, the great thing about it was that it didn't really have a template. And when he talked about how he was incorporating the deejaying into the rap, he was saying that you brought your style into it -- you used the raw tools that you had, and it was just you down there.

Nowadays, it seems like there is a real template, and most of that is due to the success of certain artists, who are really pointing the way toward how to be successful. Is there a way out of that? Do new artists coming up feel trapped by that? Or do they even aspire to it?

GARTH: there are those people that want the major label deals because they're after something, and then there are those people that love their craft, and they're gonna put it out any way they can. There's folks that are after the dream, and there's folks that don't give a shit about the dream, and love their music.

PIERRE: Right. And people have different ideas of what success is. For some people, success isn't the million dollar contracts. Most of the nice emcee's that I know -- most of the illest breakdancers, emcee's deejays I know -- don't have a record deal. They are working at Costco or UPS, you know? There has to be a fearlessness to put your art out there, and another fearlessness to say 'this is what I'm gonna define hip hop as.'

GARTH: Unfortunately, labels operate in a way that's not beneficial to the artists, unless that artist is multi-platinum, and even then the labels are making so much, that they make that little room for the artist to be able to generate dollars for themselves. Most mid-level artists are broke! They're living like any other middle-class or lower-middle class people -- sometimes impoverished people.

I saw that Behind the Music with TLC, and they were talking about the dollars that they brought in, and how after everything was said and done, they each took home $50,000. They talked about $5million of revenue that they brought in, and how they busted they ass, and they each gonna get $50,000? How in the hell did that work out? That's Uncle Sam's taxes, that's lawyers, managers, agency, and that's the label taking out their share. $150,000 to share? That's crazy.

JESSE: Is there cross-over between these two groups? Are there artists that start out just doing their art, end up making it, and not sell out? And seemingly more rare, are there artists that come up in the mainstream, but decide to go with the art instead?

GARTH: All the time. Being in my position, and doing what I do, I feel it's my job to push artists who are starting out who are just doing their thing, who I feel are just really solid, really good artists that I can get into, dig into, listen to, and share with other people. I feel it's my job to push them into the mainstream.

I remember Saul Williams wrote an article for Fader Magazine last year, and he talked about taking over the mainstream, because that's the lifeline. That's the bloodline, the ocean, the river -- you know, that's where we need to be, forget all this underground stuff.

Because what's the point? Why are we gonna complain about somebody who crossed over to the mainstream? The mainstream is nothing but the network of radio, television, distribution, etc. All those things that are all locked down by the labels, they're taking these trends, and pimping them to the max, until they need to come up with another trend or another style.

PIERRE: It's a powerful machine, but I think that if we got together and worked at it, we could put together a stable alternative to the mediocrity. The bullshit that's out there only has power because we give it power.

GARTH: With all these millions of dollars, we tend not to realize that, because we're chasing these 'things'. But if we were to take a hundred dollars or less every week, and spend it differently -- there's a revolution!

PIERRE: Exactly. There's no hip hop union; there's no organization getting together to consolidate resources, and say "Yo, let's us twelve artists, instead of everybody reinventing the wheel (I'm gonna have a hip hop company…I'm gonna have this… I'm gonna have that…), get together and move together." There's no vision. So even if it's us in control, there's no benefit. What's the point in having a clothing line, if your clothes are being made in sweatshops?

JESSE: It's about coming together with some truth. If you haven't heard about it, Steven Soderbergh's production company has brought together the brightest young directors, in an attempt to turn Hollywood on its ear. Instead of a bunch of execs, he's got the artists commanding the art. If it can happen in film, then it can happen in music -- in places like ArtistDirect, and even KCRW.

GARTH: I think the last black person that really stirred things up at that level -- as far as the network of the industry is concerned -- was when Bill Cosby stepped up and tried to buy a chunk of NBC. That's an example of the kinds of things that need to happen.

People like Bob Johnson, who owns BET and a new airline -- stepping up and saying 'I'm not gonna sell my company to Viacom, and I'm actually going to give a shit about quality programming, and do something about it.' That's where change is. But people are too busy living the kind of lifestyle that dictates those things that don't promote change, those things that don't make a difference.

We can all make a difference -- you have us here because you feel like we're agents of change. Here my man is writing his thoughts down, and I'm inspired enough to read them on a radio show that's gonna reach a lot of people. That's where change is. It's Bill Cosby stepping in and saying 'I want a piece!'

There's all kinds of conspiracy theories, but we'll never know… That's how I feel: this black man stepped up to the plate, and the Good Ol' Boy network said 'Oh HELL no!'

PIERRE: In that same vein, it's also time for us -- it's up to us to consolidate the dollars that we do have. The dollars that move through our communities on a daily basis; we spend so much money and energy focusing on the "I".

I was very disturbed… I got a lot of emails that said 'I am hip hop,' and I agree, to some extent… but not one person said 'We are hip hop.' To me, that's the problem. Everyone is about "I, I, I," and self-definition. There's no definition of community.

JESSE: To bastardize a saying, "There's no 'I' in 'dream.'"

PIERRE: That's real! Me and my wife, we started putting together this free art movement, and basically, artists come and bring their art, and that's how you get in. You trade with somebody that you don't know…

It's starting at grassroots levels like that. Where people who feel they have nothing get together and share what they have, and start to move forward.

JESSE: If we talk about bringing hip hop onto the bigger stage, as it's expanded from its early days, all the way to the top, how has the influence in and out of the genre worked? Bands that are doing crossover stuff: Anthrax, doing a song with Public Enemy; Faith No More, 311… Does this do anything positive for the art form?

PIERRE: That's tough. The first thing that comes to mind is the Grammies. The hip hop Grammy is only six or seven years old, so I think that it really legitimized RAP as an art to people who otherwise didn't perceive it as such. And once it was recognized, money became a factor.

GARTH: Yeah, it's the same thing going back to the cycles. Same thing with jazz, same thing with rock. There was a time when everybody was like 'Aw hell no, this isn't serious! This isn't nothing! Get that blues out of here, that's race music, we don't wanna hear that.'

Every genre has had its growth period, and its popularization crossover period, where it's recognized as something legitimate by the industry, which then in turn makes it legitimate for the masses. Hip hop's turn is just in a long line of what came before it.

There was a time when people hated jazz! 'What is this noise?' Same thing with rock. There was a time when jazz and rock musicians used to clash, because they didn't understand each other, although they were coming from the same source.

As far as whether it was positive or negative -- you can always get good out of whatever people deem to be bad. I feel the same as Pierre, it didn't do nothing to me, so I don't care. Rap music has become a popular form of music. When something sells enough records, it leaves the black marketing department, and goes into the pop department of the label: Michael Jackson, Prince. When you cross over, you're no longer a popular artist or a genre artist -- you're a pop artist.

JESSE: You're a dollar sign.

PIERRE: If the focus is economics, we have to think about who we're crossing over for. Are the communities that these artists are coming out of benefiting from them crossing over?

GARTH: That's a really good point.

JESSE: I read a long rant recently about how strange it was to go outside the inner city and see these suburban kids rolling in their dropped Mercedes, and pumping the bass on the latest hip hop, and looking like they play the part.

GARTH: That's tribal. That's the human instinct to be part of something. So what? You're listening to it, you're living whatever period of your life you're living. A lot of these cats are young, in high school or college… this is the time where they express themselves, or follow along, but it doesn't mean they're gonna stay that way. Whereas kids in the ghetto, or these particular artists, that's who they are. The people that are influenced or follow along, they're really not necessarily going to stay that way. They're not going to be quote 'wiggers' forever.

PIERRE: At the end of the day, it's music. Music speaks regardless. Something like Alice Coltrane, there's no lyrics, and there doesn't need to be… for them to be moved enough by the music to attach themselves to the aesthetic, that's ther power of art. That's music.

GARTH: Look at the Beatnik generation. Look at all the white blues artists that came out. The European rock thing that happened with the Beatles and Stones, 'cause these cats were picking up Muddy Waters, and going 'Damn! What is this music? I have to feel this, be this, and do this thing!'

I read an article from 1972 in Jet Magazine, they were talking to a couple of the Beatles. They were telling a story about how they first heard blues, and said 'From that moment on, I dropped whatever I was doing, whatever my parents were telling me to do an be. I picked up a guitar, pissed everybody off, and black music became my life.' You're not going read that in the major press, but you'll read it here and there, because the artists never deny anything, they'll tell you where their influences come from.

PIERRE: Emin

GARTH: The music is serving the purpose of the corporations. The fact is, the poor, young black youth who are working their minimum wage jobs are the number one consumers of high-fashion clothes in the world. There are jewelry stores over here in the Crenshaw District that allow you to put jewelry on lay-away. Put rims on lay-away, et cetera.

I've heard rappers and different people say that the black community, through this medium now, is looking more than ever to fill this void -- this really big hole that's in our spirits, in our souls, in our hearts -- to fill it up with all these material things, so that we can feel like we are something. Rather than continue to feel that we're nothing. Because we come from nothing, we come from broken homes. We're looking to put some platinum on, some diamonds, get the car, the clothes, the girl -- and say 'look at me, I AM somebody.' Rather than Jesse Jackson at the Watts concert, saying to the whole crowd say, "Put your fist up in the air and repeat after me: I am somebody," rather, now it's 'I am somebody because I have these things.'

The dream is a lie. Our music is leading countless numbers of youth to contract the HIV virus through sex and drugs. Sending countless cats to live a criminal lifestyle in pursuit of the cash, that's gonna land them in the graveyard, or a privatized jail, like my man said. It serves the corporate purpose -- it's all related to the cashflow economy in this country.

And in other countries, for that matter. You can go to any country, and you see the influence of black music. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Central America, and the whole gangsta thing out there is undeniable, and non-stop. It's ridiculous. It's all because they got MTV!

PIERRE: And drugs!

GARTH: It's impoverished communities coming from really terrible places in history, of abuse, or oppression, of slavery, of poverty, and they're looking to have some shit! 'I can get this!' But we don't see the bigger picture, because it's not taught to us in schools, and in not in our homes.

PIERRE: We also have to take into consideration what they're feeding us they're telling us what our dream should be. If you talk to the people in the community where I grew up, it would be to get the hell out of the ghetto, or whatever situation. To get a better education. It wouldn't be about getting rims.

In history, the artists are paid by whoever's in power. Right now the corporations are in power.

JESSE: Now that's a dream. When you talk about a dream, it's literally something that's ethereal. You can get your hands on the diamond. You work at it, and you can see something in your hand… but what you're talking about, that is the dream. You really have to 'see' it. You really have to believe to make that. It doesn't take a lot to believe in a Lexus.

PIERRE: Diamonds at what cost? Do you take the Lexus that you see someone else driving? Lexus at what cost? Who suffers, who benefits?

JESSE: Is there still a way to realize this dream? Realize that through hip hop? As Garth said, it's all part of the machine, but you guys are both part of the machine, but you're not propogating that lie.

PIERRE: It's on us, not only to do what we're doing, but to expand and be serious about it. As serious as these companies have resources, we need to pull together and use what it is that we have. We're not coming from nothing, we have each other.

GARTH: It's like anything within the industry, within the machine: you have options and choices. The artists that we're talking about comparatively, there're artists that are looking at selling those platinum records, because they want that recognition and that money, they want to be that star. And there are people that just want to do their art, and if they blow up, cool, but let's try and stay sincere with their art, if people like it.

It's all branding. I totally agree, you're not gonna get nothing done without organizing, without unions, without people networking together, without creating something and bringing it to the front. Unfortunately, the black community comes from such an environment, that we have yet to be able to get it together. You look across the country at different cities and see the gentrification of the black communities happening…

JESSE: Let's talk about this choice. Who's making the right choices, out there? Or, in simpler terms, what was the last great album that you heard?

GARTH: The artists are always around, whether they're grass roots, or they're popular.

I'm a fan of Me'Shell NdegéOcello --

PIERRE: Oh my god! That's the first album I thought of!

GARTH: Oh, hell yes.

Now, the last great album… there's a few, and it's hard for me to say "great", but I think Ice Cube's "Death Certificate" was a great album. That spoke to me almost more than Public Enemy. For some particular reason, the way he put the album together, spoken word and theatrical skits that he had on there in between songs, the stories he told, the production behind it with Chuck D. and the rest of the Bombsquad, it was -- it's still -- one of my favorite albums.

For me it was like revolution, and the potential for where we could go as a community right here. It was just right before Cube started to, uh, get into his stirrups and make that money, and move to the Valley, and do his own little thing, and kinda switch around. P.E., Boogie Down Productions, KRS-One, everything that they did for me was like what great leaders like MLK and Malcolm X did for their generations.

PIERRE: I agree. And I was thinking about that recently, and Me'Shell came up. Man. She physically gave me that album! Before it came out! I don't even know her, we don't hang out… we met on the street one day, started talking, and she gave it to me. I'm not impressed by… anybody, but I've seen her live, and she's incredible.

To me, she's a hip hop artist. She's a lyricist. And to me, that's the last great album I can think of. There's a couple more recent albums though, that I'd like to mention. I have great love and respect for everything that P.E. has done for me in the past, De La (Soul) too J-Live just dropped an album called "All of the Above". That album is amazing.

Lauryn Hill's album, the Unplugged album -- not so much because of the music, but because of what it is. She's just raw on that album. That's hip hop! It was just her, a mic and a guitar, and that's it! And the moments where she was rhyming, she's still one of the best lyricists out.

GARTH: Oh, man! No doubt!

PIERRE: Hands down! She would burn anybody! Lauryn Hill's lyricism and her style alone are so amazing.

GARTH: I love Lauryn Hill. To me, she can't do no wrong. I totally agree with you on that one.

JESSE: And the way she walked away from her career, to do her own thing, to have her kid -- knowing that you're only as good as your last sale -- that's living the dream, to me.

PIERRE: And her whole thing is, she said 'I'm gonna come out looking the way I look, this is me.' And that's the original voice of hip hop. Take it or leave it! Hip hop was a cult, no one wanted to be a part of hip hop.

GARTH: I remember when hip hop came to the West Coast, gangsters for the longest time, weren't having it. They made fun of it. They weren't trying to hear this silly-ass hip hop. It wasn't until Easy E and Ice-T was getting their hustle on, that the whole, what Ice-T calls "the crime rhyme", came into proliferation. It was so simple, too. On his first solo record, I think the track is "Phony MC's", he said "too many rappers in the East wanna be gangsters. Too many gangsters in the West wanna be rappers." The thugs and gangsters were like 'hip hop, what is that silly shit?' And now it's the celebrated thug bread and butter. Everybody's a thug now. It's so funny that it came from that place where they were against it.

PIERRE: It was a cult. There were different styles of rhyming and graffiti and dancing for each borough. Queens used to battle Brooklyn, the Bronx versus HArlem… it homogenized later on, as it grew, but those were completely different styles.

GARTH: It was very specific to what was cracking on the streets of New York in the different boroughs. I'd love somebody to get deep off into that. I love what you just said, because that difference was so important. It was beautiful, just beautiful.

PIERRE: It was. And it grew, it advanced the craft! Everybody had to be better the next time out.

GARTH: Crazy Legs was on the radio, for the 25th anniversary parties out here in LA for the Rock Steady crew, and we were talking about the positives, the anti-criminal aspect of hip hop. It's taking the impoverished youth away from meditating on what crimes they were gonna commit to get that cash or that girl, to practicing their craft, so that they could beat homeboys down in the next borough. It wasn't about not wanting to be thugs and gangsters - it was mostly thugs and little criminals who were just like 'Yo, I wanna be better than you!' He's like, "Don't get it twisted. We was the street urchins. But we got so into the art, that we forgot about the crime!"

PIERRE: Zulu started out as a gang. New York was gang-riddled! Back then it was something completely different. It changed itself, and that's the power I'm talking about. What frustrates me the most, is that this is the first art form that we had the opportunity to take complete control of. We had the ability to take control of where it went, and where it goes.

We still do, but it's going to take a certain level of organization that I haven't seen yet, among the people that have the influence and the capital.

JESSE: So then, who's on the horizon? Who are some people that are coming up?

PIERRE: J-Live, I mentioned… Bahamdia … Cardinal Official… Dead Prez has a record that's amazing… It's called "Turn Off The Radio" and each song will have you running around the room, trust me! They take samples of "hot" songs that are out now.

There's a sister out here named Bless… I still listen to Pete Rock, DJ Shadow, 3Bean Stew is a crew out here, K-os, always De La Soul, that's my favorite group.

GARTH: Isn't it beautiful that De La is just about the only group to stay a group? What a statement they made by staying De La soul!

PIERRE: Tribe Called Quest is supposed to be getting back together --

GARTH: That's because their solo shit wasn't cracking!

PIERRE: How you make an album called "The Love Movement" and then break up?

JESSE: The key word there is "movement".

GARTH: As far as I'm concerned, nobody's fucking with Jean Grae. She's one of the illest emcee's, let alone female emcee's, who's been trying to come out for awhile. She used to go by What? What?, she hooked up with The Herbaliser years and years back, and she's been doing cameos, too. She's got a record that she just put out called "Attack of the Attacking Things". She is soooo dope. She's just ridiculous.

Who else? Little Brothers, Saul Williams. I'm hoping to see Saul Williams do some amazing things in the future.

PIERRE: His next album is gonna be incredible!

GARTH: Let's see: Mad Lib is one of the most prolific producers to come out. He exhausted what he could as far as samples went, and he collected these instruments from wherever he traveled, and now he's learning how to play and produce that's on a different level, and just reminds you where this all came from. What he's doing now is totally related to what cats was doing back in the late 60's and early 70's. I think he's about to take shit to people who haven't seen it yet, and he's got all kinds of different incarnations. Him as Quasimodo, I'm waiting for the next record to drop.

You know, Mad Lib and J.D. just finished a project called "J Lib" and I'm about to go pick that up from the label, and my mouth is watering, because that's supposed to be amazing.

PIERRE:But there's a lot of people coming out. I'm sure that there's a hundred million people that we don't know about. There's probably somebody in Bucharest that's got incredible beats, you know? There's people in Brazil -- I don't know what they were talking about, but it sounds amazing! There's people I've heard from Germany and France that I don't know what they're saying, but it's hot!

JESSE: Well, France -- the last great hip hop album I heard was from there. MC Solaar. "Prose Combat". That song-writing… well, I don't think it gets better than that, in any genre. You can't speak enough French to get into it all the way.

GARTH: Yeah. That album was mind-opening. That was when I was first learning the ropes. Unfortunately, I heard that he kinda got too high up on the horse, and came down. That whole crew fell off, kinda scattered.

PIERRE: Yeah, La Funk Mob. What happened to them?

JESSE: I think the corporate machine hit over there. They got Americanized; shown what the American dream is all about. I think it's easy to miss the real message of the music, under the blinding glare of the image. Beneath all the glitter and bling, the real message is about community, it's about representing who you are and who you're with, and showing the kind of unity that can only come about when cultural gaps are bridged by music.

Music is the most important language in the world, but we've been forgetting how to share it with one another. Guys, thanks so much for sharing your hearts and minds with us, it's a beacon of hope for everyone to know that there are still people that care about music, and are ready to step up and make a change in this world.

em is the same.

GARTH: It's all the same. There ain't nothing new under the sun.

JESSE: Let's talk about the dream. Hip hop didn't start as a way to realize the dream, but it became that. It ended up symbolizing, for a lot of people, what one kind of American dream was. That, more than any other part of hip hop is dead, at this point. Like Pierre says in his article, it's "draped in platinum."

I was watching MTV years ago, and I couldn't get over the images of black America wanting to look like white America. You have Biggie Smalls, or even before that, in these videos he's living in Beverly Hills, he's got the white bikini chicks, he's driving the Rolls Royce. Is that good enough? For anyone?

PIERRE: What that deals with is something that goes a lot deeper than just hip hop. The American dream is a capitalist fairy tale, a fairy tale whose reality has been genocide, slavery, oppression, and getting paid at any cost. In all communities, there's too much focus on dreaming, and not enough focus on what's really happening, what's really going on. Illiteracy, depression, privatized jails. There's a hole int the ozone, and people are still rapping about "whips" and "chains."