Hip Hop Genius

Brooklyn-born Jay-Z returned to the mic in 2005, a year after becoming president and CEO of Def Jam Recordings, to spell it out for anyone who didn’t understand: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, maaan!”13

Does the edge exist because you’re poor, or does the edge exist because you’re willing to challenge your reality in ways others may not?” asks hip-hop artist and activist Rha Goddess.12 She cautions against falling into a paradigm in which struggling and starving are romanticized as prerequisites for creativity. The racism, classism, and ageism that inspired the birth of hip-hop still exist and continue to instigate innovations, but hip-hop cannot and should not be defined by desperation.

Musicians from other genres have used their creativity to go from situations of extremely limited resources to tremendous wealth, but generally their creativity has been their product.

“Can you teach people to be more creative?” someone once asked the philosopher Nelson Goodman. “Yes,” he answered. When asked how, he replied, “Give them harder problems.” Faced with racism, classism, ageism, and other forms of structural subjugation, many young people have developed the courage to break rules, the audacity to believe they can do things that have never been done, and the creativity to imagine how. This is hip-hop.