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Each generation must, out of relative obscurity,
discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.
—Frantz Fanon

The predominantly college-aged crowd is growing more starstruck each time Hip-Hop Summit Action Network's Dr. Benjamin Chavis Muhammad introduces another rap icon. It's NBA 2004 All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles, and summit organizers have recruited some of Hip-Hop’s biggest names to USC's Bovard Auditorium. Even in Tinsel Town, the seemingly endless parade of Hip-Hop luminaries including Crooked I, Kayne West, Tamia and Snoop Dogg offers stargazers a chance of a lifetime.

Kevin Powell, Who's Gonna Take the Weight? Manhood, Race and Power in America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003)

Jeffrey St. Clair, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green To Me (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press 2004).

Hip-hop was born into death, mayhem, and violence.  Hip-hop was the movement that rose from the ashes of the Civil Rights/Black Power movement’s flameout.

I am very much like a lot of heads in the hip-hop generation: I am not going to smile, shuffle, or give a good goddamn what anyone thinks about me, and that most assuredly inludes White folks.

Every so often a few disgruntles with an agenda line up their cannons to take a shot at hip-hop. In large response to a hip-hop studies movement that is daily gaining momentum, the anti-hip-hop crusaders this time are Black scholars. The names have changed but not the game.

Regina Naasirah Blackburn: You are the founding director of the Hip-Hop Archive,* one of the first scholarly archives devoted solely to hip-hop music and culture, at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.  How has the archive changed since its launch? Are you more selective?

Many within the hip-hop industry have long feared a day when the origins and foundations of this culture would undergo a corporate-influenced change in order to make it palatable to mainstream America.  Well, in many ways it appears that day has indeed come.

"When you really understand what hip hop is, you know it's not a label at all," declared a participant at a women's-only conclave on a rainy Friday in Newark, New Jersey.  The depth of this wise assessment was plumbed during the first National Hip Hop Political Convention held in Newark from Wednesday June 16 through Saturday June 19, 2004, which is also "Juneteenth" (the day the last of enslaved Africans in Texas learned they had been freed two years before).  "Voices, Unity, Power," the convention theme, is another translation for today's hip hop, crystallized into an eight-point social j