We beta launched ChicagoMusic.org over the summer and the Hip-Hop / Spoken section in mid-October. Since the Hip-Hop / Spoken section is still new, I wanted to take a moment to lay out how we’d like to run this page going forward.
As everyone knows, or should know, Chicago “Hip-Hop” has been in the national and local news quite a bit lately. With the emergence of the Drill scene and the ongoing socio-economic issues we’ve been dealing with in Chicago, there’s been a lot to say, ponder, and call for action on. I was relieved, in all honesty, that since we launched this page a bit after a lot of the major events around Chief Keef, the untimely death of Jo Jo, and the various twitter beefs and disgraceful videos that followed, that we didn’t have to start this page feeling compelled to address those issues right away! There were at the time, and still are, plenty of outlets more than willing to do so! Read more...
The telephone was a great invention. For the first time people could talk to each other from far away, in real time, and have a conversation. Gone were days of waiting for telegraphs, and decoding smoke signals. Until Alexander Graham Bell received the first telephone patent in 1876, I’m sure most people were quite content with whatever method of communication they were accustomed to. Then here came this ‘thing’! This telephone! An ingenious piece of equipment where you spoke to a person through a cone connected to a box. The person on the other end would listen and respond the same way! Amazing!!! The early phones were expensive devices of luxury reserved for those lucky enough to have one. My earliest memory of a telephone was a rotary one, where waiting for the dial to spin back took an eternity. I remember our first touch-tone phone, with it’s cool buttons and tones! I remember dragging the phone across the house on a 100ft cord I bought on the Lake-Dan Ryan train. I remember the first car phone, cordless phone, and cell phone I ever saw. I remember joking with friends about how cool it would be to see each other while we talked on the phone…. And now I Skype from my Android, and just realized my grandchildren wont even know what a dial tone is.
That’s my analogy of the life of hip-hop, so far, kinda sorta. At one time it didn’t even exist, now everyone knows what it is. And those of us on the inside have witnessed tremendous growth, evolution, and a change with the times. But we are now at another crossroad. Especially right here in Chicago, where it feels we are under siege by violence. We are at a place where reputation precedes us, and the ‘boom-bap’ gets less love than ‘trap’. Our generational gaps are widening within the culture and we are starting to sound like our parents... “I don’t even know what they are saying in this NEW music. It makes no sense.....”
Here’s what breaks my heart today… Read More
