 December 24th 1999 Christmas Eve. Was it me or was there something missing in this last Christmas of the millennium? I have to be honest it seemed a bit sterile. I couldn't feel the magic in the air and everything seemed to contrived, orchestrated and devoid of spirit. Did anyone else notice this? I saw all the Christmas Trees and decorations and all the Santa displays, but they all came across hollow. It was like the decorations were there because they had to be there, not because anyone really wanted to put them up. I never tried to rush home and catch any of the holiday specials on TV.. and to be honest the few that I did see didn't seem genuine. It was like everything this holiday was put together to be one big endless commercial.I didn't seem like the spirit of wanting to bring joy to the world was first and foremost on everyone's mind. It was like everything was designed to get me to buy and buy some more..Heck, even all the little kids seemed different. They didn't seem to really care about Santa and his elves. Parents seemed all stressed out as if they were afraid of the consequences of not satisfying their kid's Christmas's wishes. It was like they knew that there would be hell to pay if Pokeman wasn't under the tree come Christmas morning. Remember when it didn't matter about the gift? Remember when it was just the thought of Santa coming to town and everything was all magical? So here we are Christmas Eve 1999 and I'm seeing people in the malls and despite this supposed booming economy, I'm seeing folks acting mean and pissed off. I'm stepping into department stores and if there isn't some undercover security guard making it obvious he's following me, then it's some retail clerk who acts like she's doing me a big favor helping me find a sweater. I'm all stressed out because if I don't get this sweater for Christmas then I'm gonna have a pissed off Uncle who will throw the same type of fit as the little kid who wants that damn Pokeman. The season of giving has turned into the season of 'What Have You Done For Me Lately!. If that's not enough pressure, Macys department store where I'm getting the sweater wants to charge me 10 extra bucks to wrap the gift. I'm strolling around the mall and I'm seeing thugged out kids walking around mean mugging folks or grabbing at girls demanding and phone numbers. On a couple of occasions there were actual fights. How disturbing. Here T'is to be jolly and we got folks throwing blows and knocking over Christmas displays inside a mall. The spirit is definitely gone.. I guess it was hard to get into the holiday season when you consider that people started peddling Christmas way back in September. That's when I saw my first Christmas Tree go up. That's when the local malls opened up their Christmas stores That's when retailers started putting out Holiday displays. That's when everyone started gearing up to make their loot off of the slick marketing campaigns that all of us brought into..As early as October I started getting cards from businesses who had forgone the holiday spirit by turning their Christmas cards into fancy flyers. For example, I got a card from one retailer who wished me Happy Holidays in one sentence and then invited me down for a 10% off sale in the next. There was no hand written note from the manager thanking me for spending three grand of my hard earned money in his store this year. In fact the card wasn't even signed. The holiday spirit is gone. All year long I get record label cats who call me every week asking me to write about this artist or that artist. Or they call up asking me to add a record to my trade reports or increase my spins of a certain artist on my radio shows. I get cats who I've had conversations with all year long who send Christmas cards that don't have a personal note of thanks . It's not signed or at best the signature is stamped. There's no indication of our unique conversations and relationship. It's not like I take money under the table or ask for crazy favors like free trips to Miami or a pair of 200 hundred dollar sneakers in exchange for looking out for some promoter's record. After all, such things are pretty common in this industry and if I was one of those type of deejays then of course I shouldn't complain about some Christmas card.. However, I find that I'm usually looking out for these label folks on the strength and here I am on Christmas Eve looking at three and four of the same card with the same cheesy message and fake signature from some cat who never took the time out to really say thanks and Happy Holidays from the heart. So what in the world does all this have to do with Hip Hop? What am I getting at with this whole tirade about Christmas cards? Well, I got to thinking, if we've lost our spirit when it comes to the most joyous of Holidays like Christmas, have we lost our spirit when it comes to Hip Hop? Those of us who are down for Hip Hop have to constantly re-evaluate and ask what is our motivation and what sort of principals are they grounded in? Are we as Hip Hoppers in a proverbial sense sending out unsigned mass produced Christmas cards? Do we really have a care or concern for the people we reach? What are we trying to instill into the people we do touch? Are we coming from a point of giving and sharing? Or are we all about the taking? It's real easy to get caught up. It's really easy to become the very things that we say we despise. Hip Hop in the ideal sense, is a personal expression that has lost some of its appeal because it's constantly being mass produced. We've allowed ourselves to get caught up in a business that specializes in making a profit off of people's souls and emotions. This music business will take a snap shot of someone's most personal and inner most feelings and then try to create a carbon copy, repackage it and sell it to the masses. Many of us who are within Hip Hop will allow ourselves to become enticed and go along with the game plan without realizing that we have diminished and compromised who were are as expressive and innovative people. For example, when I first started out deejaying.. I would spend hours searching for records. I would get up early on Saturday morning and spend damn near all all day and all my money canvassing various stores in search of the perfect beat. My goal was to the man with all the dopest beats and the hypest records and once I found a blazing track..I would become excited and literally jumping out of skin in anticipation for my first opportunity to drop these new gems on the airwaves or play it at a club over a booming system. I couldn't wait to get feedback or see the crowds reaction to a record I found after searching for hours. And if I could get other deejays on my jock trying to get the same record then I really felt good. I wanted to be the man who could find and break new records. This was my motivation. As my reputation grew record labels began to see a value in my visibility and started hitting me off with records in the mail. Soon I was on everyone's mailing list and getting flooded with product to the point that it became hard to keep up. Over time my trips to the record stores ceased. It wasn't long before I moved from a point of being a person who enthusiastically sought out the ultimate record to being a person who sat back and expected the ultimate record to come to me in the mail. In fact I soon developed an attitude that said if you can't bother sending me the record then I ain't checking for it. To not send me a record meant that weren't doing a good job promoting your material as far as I was concerned.. In many respects I had a right to take on that mindset. After all, I was helping make money for these labels by exposing their music. Plus, there was a serious imbalance to what the labels were making versus the artists and the deejays who were exposing the material. More often than not many of us deejays were volunteering our time even when on commercial radio. With this in mind, the least these labels could do is put me on their mailing list. It wasn't long before I moved to a point of wanting and expecting all the industry perks. This meant getting gold and platinum plaques, free dinners and some sponsorship to these overpriced music conventions. I expected to be on the 'A' list where I would get everything a head of time as well as free admission to the all the concerts.. Now, while all that I described is good in the business sense, I have to seriously ask myself was it good for Hip Hop? While I was sitting at home getting 15 copies of the new Puffy album in the mail, did I inadvertently overlook some cat who just released some slamming material at my local record store? Was I bypassing some next level stuff because it wasn't served to me to me on platter? By not going out and seeking new things, I've allowed myself to stagnate and stop being hungry. In many respects I compromised that adventurous and resourceful spirit that has long characterized Hip Hop. More importantly I came to realize that part of the thrill of deejaying was going out and hunting down new records. Nowadays you got kids who make records and never bother to learn how do good shows, just like you have deejays who no longer look for break beats or even go to record stores. Even worse they only play what they heard on the radio and don't try to figure out new ways to introduce their audience to new material. . Within record labels, you have Hip Hop A&R guys who no longer go to clubs but instead will wait to see who is moving units in a particular region. Instead of peeping out and experiencing the scene for themselves They'll get on the phone and call a deejay like me and pick our brains trying to find out the next 'Big Thing' for them to sign. In many respects Hip Hop has lost it's edge because many of us no longer lead. We haven't been about the business of laying out the agenda and setting the pace.. Many of us are either were reacting to someone else's agenda or we're in there trying to play the industry game and falling prey to all its enticements. As Hip Hop deejays we're trying to get free meals and free plane trips. As rappers we're trying to get movie deals and commercials and other perks. As Hip Hoppers we're trying to get paid while abandoning the key aspects that made us popular in the first place. We all of sudden start cultivating our business aspirations at the expense of cultivating our talent, spirit and soul. It's like this..When Hip Hop first came on the scene it caught everyone off guard. At first there was a lot of resistance but cats stuck with it and eventually it went on to revolutionized everything from the way we danced to the way we talk to the way we approached doing music. Our spirit was infectious as we succeeded in 'moving the crowd' and the world around us. Nowadays instead of continuing on the path of creating new rules, flipping the script and changing the landscape, we've allowed ourselves to get caught up to the point that we are no longer guided by our creative spirits. In the beginning folks outside of Hip Hop were forced to crossover to us. Now many of us are crossing over to repackaged industry driven images of ourselves. A lot of times we do all this crossing over under the guise of trying to 'get to the next level' in the game. Unfortunately, we keep forgetting that there would be no game without us. The record industry has done a great job in convincing the Hip Hop community that we need them more then they need us. And like dummies we've fallen for it, hook line and sinker. Many within Hip Hop have come to believe that we need the radio stations, video shows, record labels and magazines to blow up. We've been convinced that we need a Grammy, American Music or MTV Award to be authenticated. We've even brought into the unfounded notion that convinced us that we need to take on some destructive habits like gangsterism, materialism jiggyism, ignorance and thuggism to be viable in the marketplace. Ironically some of us who avoided that pitfall have adapted the equally destructive mindset that says we must be perpetually broke and [exploited] in order to keep it real and true for Hip Hop. So you have cats feeling guilty because they made a few books off of something they created for themselves. I can't even began to tell you how many times I've been in rooms and meetings where industry cats have turned down an artist with the criticism that he wasn't 'street enough'. 'The real Hip Hop comes from the streets' was what was being harked by more then a few industry folks not so long ago. The next thing you know kids are being encouraged to peddle the pathological behavior of our community within Hip Hop A couple of years later that same industry cat is telling artist that their music is way 'too ghetto' and they need to sound more 'underground'. They even came up with with some ridiculous divide and conquer theory about how gangsta is 'rap' and being underground is 'Hip Hop'. 'He's making the underground artist feel like its a cardinal sin to make some money and that he's somehow violating a Hip Hop code of ethics to get paid for his craft. The irony here is while this 'keep it real and stay broke' nonsense is being preached the industry cat is steadfastly getting paid by taking money for adds from artist who are 'gangsta'. He's signing or distributing artists via his label who are gangsta. A man without a grounded spirit is a man who will easily compromise his principals. The real Hip Hop comes from the underground' is the song they sing today. Tomorrow it will be something else. The trick is to get the Hip Hop artist to buy into these ever changing rules. What that industry cat never reveals is that he's walking on a thin line and should the Hip Hop artist ever open his eyes he would quickly realize is that the industry cat is nothing more then a middle man. It is not necessary for him to be on the scene for Hip Hop to function. In fact it may actually progress a lot further if he wasn't in the mix stirring up conflict. East vs West, Commercial vs Underground, Rap vs Hip Hop etc are a few of the many things the industry has tossed in our paths and we unfortunately allowed them to be major distractions. Too many of us have cast aside our spirits and allowed ourselves to be manipulated by this an industry that never had our best interest in the first place. We stride to be accepted by someone who is souless. It's difficult to discern who is faking the funk and who is coming from the heart. What is real and what is fake will bear itself out over time. After all, there really are some thugged out gangstas types who are honestly being themselves when they step into the Hip Hop arena and scowl at the world. There really are kids who wear backpacks and chew on sticks and bring to the table that whole bohemian type vibe. Where things go wrong is when that artists finds his style and unique approach toward Hip Hop being carbon copied and resold over and over again with every Tom, Dick and Harry trying to mimic him. Things go wrong when the artist gets caught up in the music business machinery and doesn't allow himself to continuously connect and share his personal growth and out look with audience. Artist from the past like James Brown and others grew with their fans because they availed themselves. They involved themselves in the politics and social happenings of the day. They never allowed themselves to stay too disconnected. Are we as Hip Hoppers doing that today? Are we allowing ourselves to connected with our audience.. Is our spirit being felt? All of us have our opinions as to what is contrived and what isn't within Hip Hop. It's up to each of us as individuals to seriously question ourselves and ask 'What's my motivation?'. Why am I taking this approach? What do I hope to accomplish? You'll literally feel it in the air and be inspired when things are right and you'll feel drained and frustrated it when our approach is wrong. This all comes back to the points I raised surrounding the spirit of Christmas. if you think about, you can really feel someone's spirit and good energy when they come up and genuinely wish you a Happy Holiday. I can get a card from someone who I can really feel because they took time to write something personal. They reflected on our friendship/relationship over the past year and they brought forth those good thoughts and their genuine concern for me in the card. On the other hand , I can get a phat present from some one and not feel a thing if their heart and intentions ain't in the right place..Hip Hop in many respects is the same way... All in all what I'm trying to say is for us to be careful not to get too caught up. As we head on into the new millennium, let's really try and align ourselves with the positive spirit of God. There really is something to be said to that old saying echoed by the old church ladies when they shake their finger and say 'You need Jesus in your life'. The bottom line if we ain't God centered in what we do, our creations will only take us so far. maybe Hip Hop isn't where it needs to be because we aren't coming correct in our spirits. Are we trying to give or are we trying to take. I honestly believe how we feel about our participation will ultimate determine our overall success in this arena of Hip Hop. As we may sit here and reflect on the true meaning behind Christmas, and Kwaanza and all the other Holidays.. Lets think about why we are doing what we do within Hip Hop. Are trying to get paid and get rich? Are we trying to share ourselves? Are we trying to obtain power or are we trying to attract women? Are we trying to make a difference? Do we earnestly believe in ourselves and the things that we're doing? It's not really something you have to share with the world but with ourselves. Our respective actions will reflect our true intentions. I guess in closing, the gift I will give myself this holiday season is a long hard, honest look at myself. That's not always an easy thing to do.. And it doesn't always come naturally. But going into the new year I want to really be clear about my motivations.. I want to be crystal clear as to what I hope to accomplish within Hip Hop. More importantly I want my goals to be uplifting, inclusive and empowering and not destructive.. Peace to everyone and may this Holiday be one that is full of blessings.. Davey D
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