When Did You Fall in Love With Hip-Hop? Posted by Nathan S. on 10/02/13 | Filed under Opinion, RH Nation Answers

I'm no stranger to intense debate and controversy when it comes to "Questions of the Week", but this week I'm just feeling a little more positive. Is that strange feeling...happiness? Or is it scotch?* Either way, instead of battling over the best of anything, I thought we'd get a little more personal this week. In other words, when did you fall in love with hip-hop?

Now, this is real life, not a movie. Just like when you fell in love with a person, there's probably not going to be an exact moment you fell in love with hip-hop. It could have been a song, an album, a live show, when "Luchini" was playing during a summer ride and everything just felt right and you wanted that more of that feeling.

And we're talking about love here. You love hip-hop when you want to devote you care about the culture, when listening to hip-hop is as natural and unremarkable as eating. (Frankly I find it hard to believe anyone's reading RefinedHype who doesn't truly love hip-hop, so it's a bit of a moot point.)

And last but not least, I'd push RefinedHype Nation to be hones. Sure, we'd all like to say that we fell in love with hip-hop while listening to "Straight Outta Compton" when we were 5-years-old and cleaning our Adidas shell toes with a toothbrush, but come on now.

Speaking of which, I'll go first. While it'd obviously be good for my reputation as someone who works on the rap interwebs for a living to say I popped out the womb with "Raising Hell" in the tape deck, the truth is I don't think I truly, fully fell in love with hip-hop until high school. Until then I always listened to hip-hop, I'd liked certain albums (like Tribe's "Low End Theory" enough to memorize them, but on any given day I was just as likely to be listening to rock as hip-hop.

I think it was really the summer of '99, when Mos Def's "Black on Both Sides" dropped, that shit got heavy. Not only did I listen to it endlessly, I felt this need to understand it as part of a larger culture. When Mos says, "Propers to B-Boys getting busy" on "Hip-Hop", I suddenly had to know enough about b-boying (not breakdancing) to give them their propers too. And of course Mos lead me to track down BlackStar, which lead me to "Respiration", which made me have to figure out where that vocal sample in the beginning was from, which lead me to watching "Syle Wars", which lead me to reading everything I could get my hands on about Futura, and of course I saw Crazy Legs in "Style Wars", who I now knew because I was going through b-boy history, and I just saw the whole unbelievably dope, interconnected web that is hip-hop and HOLY FUCK THIS IS ALL I WANT TO DO.....

So as much as there's any one moment or album, for me it's "Black on Both Sides" in '99. How about you?

* Rhetorical question, they're the same thing.