The Language of Composition: "Hip Hop Planet" by James McBride

To many of my generation, despite all attempts to exploit it, belittle it, numb it, classify it, and analyze it, hip hop remains an enigma, a clarion call, a cry of "I am" from the youth of the world.

To many of my generation, despite all attempts to exploit it, belittle it, numb it, classify it, and analyze it, hip hop remains an enigma, a clarion call, a cry of "I am" from the youth of the world.

To many of my generation, despite all attempts to exploit it, belittle it, numb it, classify it, and analyze it, hip hop remains an enigma, a clarion call, a cry of "I am" from the youth of the world.

To many of my generation, despite all attempts to exploit it, belittle it, numb it, classify it, and analyze it, hip hop remains an enigma, a clarion call, a cry of "I am" from the youth of the world.

In the late 1950s and '60s, Baraka performed with shrieks, howls, cries, stomps, verse floating ahead of or behind the rhythm, sometimes in staccato syncopation.

In the late 1950s and '60s, Baraka performed with shrieks, howls, cries, stomps, verse floating ahead of or behind the rhythm, sometimes in staccato syncopation.

It was performance art, delivered in a dashiki and Afro, in step with the anger of a bold and sometimes frightening nationalistic black movement, and it inspired what might be considered the first rap group, the Last Poets.

Their records consisted of percussion and spoken-word rhyme.

The music that was once the purview of black America has gone white and gone commercial all at once.

...he can relate because he's paying alimony and child support.

Obviously, it's not just working-class whites, but also affluent, suburban kids who identify with this music with African-American roots.

What attracts white kids to this music is the same thing that prompted outraged congressmen to decry jazz during the 1920s and Tipper Gore to campaign decades later against violent and explicit lyrics: life on the other side of the tracks; its "cool" or illicit factor, which black Americans, like it or not, are always perceived to possess.

"People call hip hop the MTV music now," scoffs Chuck D, of Public Enemy, known for its overtly political rap.

"It's Big Brother controlling you. To slip something in there that's indigenous to the roots, that pays homage to the music that came before us, it's the Mount Everest of battles."

"It's Big Brother controlling you. To slip something in there that's indigenous to the roots, that pays homage to the music that came before us, it's the Mount Everest of battles."

Most rap songs unabashedly function as walking advertisements for luxury cars, designer clothes, and liquor.

Five hundred yards (460 meters) away, Africans eat off the sidewalk and sell peanuts for a pittance.

In Dakar, where every kid is a microphone and turntable away from squalor, and American rapper Tupac Shakur's picture hangs in market stalls of folks who don't understand English, rap is king.

They write about their lives as village fishermen, the scarcity of catch forcing them to fish in deeper and deeper waters, the hardship of fishing for 8, 10, 14 days at a time in an open pirogue in rainy season, the high fee they pay to rent the boat, and the paltry price their catches fetch on the market.

The Bronx is the hallowed holy ground of hip hop, the place where it all began.