But I'm excited to have found this new direction to explore musically with more of that awareness, grown past my schoolboy self rapping along to 50 cent without really understanding anything I was saying past "Gangsters are cool" etc.

Now post-superbowl, I am 3 albums into Kendrick Lamar's discography and hoping to find more along the same vein. I feel a ln unease in sharing in the aspects of black culture highlighted in his songs/performance eg. I didn't feel right sharing Serena Williams's Crip walk as my good morning GIF today

Fast forward to 2025 - I just finished reading "The Hip-hop Wars" by Tricia Rose which expertly breaks down and contextualizes the evolution of hip-hop lyrical content. It highlights the best potential of the genre for storytelling and calls out the bigger powers that misrepresent it.

I feel like ever since, and post political awakening, I've dismissed hip-hop as largely not-my-thing because any attempt at "Hey maybe I'll do Spotify hip-hop radio today" results in tracks that are 1. Musically not engaging 2. Lyrically/Morally alarming and disagreeable

It got me as far as a surface-level listen of the whole TPAB album. I found it very impressive, but didn't really make an attempt to read into it, which is really the only way to listen to hip-hop "well". The album is still so musically unique and interesting that some tracks stayed with me.

My friend showed me the track "Interlude" from "To Pimp a Butterfly" in college, and it blew my mind. It was so aggressive and layered and musically interesting and scratched all the itches that prog metal usually does for me, which was a revelation!