Ceding this space to Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, this is his introduction (“Fear Not of Man”) to the album, Black on Both Sides: “A lot of things have changed / A lot of things have not, mainly us / We gon’ get it together right? I believe that / Listen—people be askin’ me all the time / ‘Yo Mos, what’s gettin’ ready to happen with hip-hop?’ / (Where do you think hip-hop is goin’?) / I tell em, ‘You know what’s gonna happen with hip-hop? / Whatever’s happening with us’ / If we smoked out, hip-hop is gonna be smoked out / If we doin’ alright, hip-hop is gonna be doin’ alright / People talk about hip-hop like it’s some giant livin’ in the hillside / Comin’ down to visit the townspeople / We are hip-hop / Me, you, everybody, we are hip-hop / So hip-hop is going where we going / So the next time you ask yourself where hip-hop is going / Ask yourself: where am I going? How am I doing? / Till you get a clear idea / So if hip-hop is about the people / And the hip-hop won’t get better until the people get better / Then how do people get better? (Hmm) / Well, from my understanding people get better / When they start to understand that they are valuable.”

Hip-hop, like literature, like politics, synecdoches all for humanity. The question then reiterated: what is valued, and how is that value expressed? So our work continues: to contextualize and to illuminate the exuberant expression of life through the structures and forms that yield to and give it shape.

—Nicholas Grosso

New York
August 2020