For a long time because of it, I hated ALL hip hop and it wasn't until I was introduced to Mos Def and Talib Kwelil in college where my hatred began to curb and I had perspective on hip hop in general. Over the past 10 years, they (and to a slightly lesser extent, Common) have established themselves leaders in an intellectual hip hop vanguard; sophisticated, complex, conscious yet in a human way to connect with a listener and understanding of hip hop relationship as both a continuum and a break from the African American musical tradition. Both's greatest contribution has been the way they have linked spoken word and the muti-faceted narratives of the oral tradition to American music. Both's style have a connection to their individual selves, adding layers of depth to their artistic work: Kweli, gifted in metaphor and word play, runs a bookstore in Harlem, Def, adept in the dramatis personae of the MC, has become a quite accomplished actor, earning a well deserved Emmy nomination in HBO's something the lord made.

More than seeing Mos and Kweil it was seeing the multi-racial chorus of people who loved hip-hop and what it meant to their lives that softened my anger. Going to various shows with friends in Bellingham, Vancouver and Seattle showed me that there was a dynamic other than the abusive one I saw at both ends of the economic spectrum in Tacoma. These kids were younger than I was (I was a 24 year old freshman) but they had a humanity, sense of culture and worldview that was broad, and hip-hop meant something to them other than the racial nightmare it was to me.

I thought of that day last fall, when both men released their latest solo records. Mos and Talib have made some of the best records of the past decade regardless of genre, but any of the cash money millionaire clique will move more units in 6 weeks than each can do in an album. So the push has been made to make them accessible to the mainstream, to sell America's most unsellable commodity, black male sophistication and intellect, to the TRL and 106th and park generation, who have never shown any interest for black culture or history but cant get enough of their Gangsta thugs. In a sense, it is understandable and admirable that both men want to get their message to the masses. There is a utopian essence to it: bring the good musical food to the people and they will want more. But what both men, especially Kweil, do is mess the recipe up in the process.

To understand why both men will never have a wide consumer base one has to be honest about both hip hop's fan base and the racial nightmare I just described. The primary audience for their work until now has been the socially conscious, sophisticated hip progressive students of all colors who have made a concentrated effort to understand the history of black culture and Mos and Talib's interrelation to it. And god bless them for it. But they are a minority in comparison to the white teen suburban consumer, who statistically comprise 75 percent of hip hop's consumer base, who continually buys degrading, destructive, disgusting images of black people and hasn't really shown interest in buying much else. The brutal untold racial reality in the 21st century is that white conservatives get crushed, reared and rattled for even an inkling of racial impropriety, yet millions of white hip hop "liberals" gobble up images like 50 cent putting black women in chains, the most disgusting of auction block imagery, and get a free pass in the media. Mos and Talib might mean a tremendous amount to the third year student from a liberal arts college, but to average main stream hip hop fan he is invisible, or yet worse, a monster. Because to buy into the image of 50, Lil Jon, Lil Flip, Cash Money, The G Unit and other thug rappers is to buy into the fact that you think black men are beasts. And it's easy to Idolize that beast on MTV and BET, because on television that beast is only an idea, a ruse to stir anger in ones parents and live vicariously through as a 21st century version of Norman Mailer's white Negro. But when you see that monster in person, without that controlled variable of the television, in an environment where you have to interact human_being-to-human_being, he becomes something frightening.