Ain't Hard To Tell

The beat dropped, and my head started nodding. Immediately, because the beat was like that. And the rapper flowed like water with lyrics that teased my brain with verbal riddles I dissected later. This was love at first sight.
I was in high school, and though hip-hop poured from radio stations, I hadn't paid much attention until I heard A Tribe Called Quest's "The Low End Theory." Music CDs weren't around, so that group's second album was condensed into a small cassette that I wore out over the dozens of times I played it, as I tried memorizing every line Q-Tip and Phife Dawg spit.
No swagger contest. Just two guys rapping about their lives over jazzy horns, funky basslines and boom-bap drums.
There's nothing like that first love, and there's nothing like that first heart break, leaving you bruised like someone beat the crap out of you. Feels like betrayal, like your first love slept with your best friend. But it doesn't matter. You go back because you're hooked to that feeling you had when you popped in the cassette.
You remember where you were when you heard Nas' "Illmatic." The haunting beat on "One Love," Nas' poetic letter to his friend locked up, Q-Tip's monotone the chorus. The bleak chorus of "Life's A Bitch" contrasted with the remnants of hope found in Nas' gratefulness for another year of life and the possibility that better days might exist for his future offspring. You remember you were in college with a group of your friends, the beat bursting out of the tape deck and rumbling through every inch of the car.
You recall every lyric of Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's classic "They Reminisce Over You." Even now, nearly 20 years after you heard it, and your body instinctively moves to the beat. It feels good, feels just like love. It feels like you're home.
So everytime you turn on the hip-hop station, you search for that feeling and you end up wanting to curse because the music has changed, because the lyrics aren't there, because it's all about hot beats and hotter hooks. A Tribe Called Quest is long gone and the group isn't coming back.
You feel old. You're like your parents saying remember back in the old days when music was good, when hip-hop was like that instead of like this. Remember? You find yourselves giving people younger than you history lessons, telling them the first time you heard A Tribe Called Quest, and you get sad when they look in your face as if saying what are you talking about. This is ancient history to them but very much now to you. Because the moments are here, not 20 years ago, but here, still pumping through your veins, your heart bearing the bruises of being hurt all those times you turned on the radio and the hip-hop you listened to is nowhere to be found.
But Mos Def said hip-hop is us, didn't he? He said it lives in each one of us, didn't he? So why am I heart-broken? Why am I defining hip-hop by what I hear on the radio? When I hear Elzhi bringing a freshness to an old classic, I realize that hip-hop is both past, present and future intertwined. Hip-hop is ever expansive, evolving but also reaching back into the past to pull something new.
And I realize that this is me also. I'm hip-hop in the sense that I'm evolving just as much as hip-hop. I pull from my past, take what's useful and throw the rest away, and make something new. Making something better. Make a better me.
And just like that I'm in love again.