"They Not Like Us"

It was the Kendrick/Drake Beef that brought me back to Hip-Hop. I remembered the feuds from back in the day: Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool J, Jay-Z and Nas, and the recent ones, Nicki Minaj and Meg Thee Stallion. I started thinking about what drew me to Hip Hop in the first place. It was the lyrics and the flow. Creatively crafted cadences that spit truth and flames and sometimes truth on fire! Hip-hop was about having fun and hyping up the crowd. It gained popularity, and then it became conscious. It grew up. Then it woke up.

From the time I heard Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five say, “Don’t push me 'cause I’m close to the edge…” I knew that Hip Hop had a destiny beyond just booty-shaking and bravado. There was a truth that needed to be told. A light needed to illuminate what hovered in the darkness around us.

Hip-Hop was that in-your-face, profanity-laced, unapologetic truth-telling vehicle that was starting to bring us together, and we were making millionaires because of the potency of the truth that Hip-Hop was. And with money comes power; we were building empires and bringing others along with us, and we were once again shifting the culture.

But there is a rumor that there was meeting between deep pockets and hip-hop. It is rumored that deep pockets offered Hip-Hop unlimited access to the things they rapped “money, clothes, cars, and (if you know, you know).” The agenda was clear: pander to a specific audience, glorify the use of weapons and sidewalk pharmaceuticals, change the names of queens to that of dogs, and the world will be yours. The darkness of deep pockets engulfed Hip-Hop.
All of Hip- Hop did not follow suit. There has always been a remnant, the resistance, if you will. Those who still entertained and spoke the language of hip-hop but used it like a decoder ring to stay woke and alert the rest of us to do the same. In that remnant, you find one Kendrick Lamar Duckworth or KDot.

This Beef between Drake and Kendrick is a battle for the soul of Hip-Hop. Drake is Canadian-born and has parlayed his acting career into that of a successful rapper. He is one of, if not the highest-selling artist on the Billboard charts. His music is popular among the mainstream. I have found some of his lyrics quite cringeworthy, and I’ll leave it at that. I believe his flow is mediocre. There are no dynamics whatsoever, just a nasally sing-song thing.

KDot, on the other hand, got BARS. They don’t give a Pulitzer Prize to just any old album. His lyrical content in the tracks he dropped during the beef made me believe the hype! With lyrics like “I calculate you’re not as calculated I can even predict your angle (Euphoria), and “But I live in circadian rhythms of a shooting star, the mannerisms of Raphael, I can heal and give you art (6:16 in LA), he is calling out the darkness that hovers around us.

So, I stumbled into the BET Awards, looking for something beyond the beef that would rekindle my love of Hip-Hop, the music, and the culture. I have to admit that I was a little thrown off by the level of skin and wiggling, and I almost let it run me away. Then Killer Mike accepted his award. I don’t know much about Killer Mike, who he is, and what he does, but his speech was a call to action. When I could get past all those things I didn’t want to see, I realized that artist after artist came up and spoke from their hearts on various subjects. Taraji (host) drove home the importance of informing ourselves of issues affecting our lives. The reason Project 2025 was trending is because of Taraji P. Henson.

Why does any of this even matter? Because, my dear brothers and sisters, we are in danger. We are in danger of losing all the progress that we have made over the years. We need to be a people united. A people united can never be defeated. We can pretend that there is no deficit of under-40-year-olds in our churches, or we can try to figure out how to fix the communication between us and them so that we can save our collective future. We must realize that just because we use the same words doesn’t mean we speak the same language.

The generational divide among our people will not be fixed until we learn to communicate. I thought that meant we must all speak the same language. Now, it means we need good interpreters to help us understand each other. I found that in the lyrics of KDot. Hip-hop is again becoming a way for me to understand what young folk are trying to say instead of focusing on how they are saying it.

If you listen, really listen, you will realize that they are more like us than we think.

Rev. Dierdre R. Parker
Entertainment_arts@StarofZion.org