All the way back in 2011 (not that long ago, I know, but work with me here), right before my drug withdrawal episode, Blood Is One debuted as a website. We were serious about it - the above image is a promo shot a friend and I produced for Carl Roe. I had the support and association with two rap acts - Kenan Bell and Carl Roe. They put together one song to help with the website called "Killers," which I still honestly think is pretty dope:
My drug withdrawal was a bit brutal and I fell off of hip-hop world. Nothing was inspiring. I got Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP 2 and liked it plenty but besides that, I felt like an old man who had been there during Woodstock wondering what all this 1980s hair metal was about. Kenan's music never really took off and he seems to have dropped out of the world while I actually found myself unfriending Carl Roe - his music got weird and he seemed to be on the Trump train, which is a bit weird when you make hip-hop but whatever. I honestly stopped listening to hip-hop for the first time since I was a little kid for well on several years.
I got two albums, Yelawolf's Love Story and the Southpaw soundtrack, and it made me enthused again. I remember getting really excited about Yelawolf when I started this website. However, his major label debut Radioactive was bad even by his own estimates. Love Story was a genuine classic, however, and everything he has put out since has only built on it.
Hip-hop, like rock or jazz, isn't going to be exactly what it started out as. The crack epidemic, 1990s political environment and everything that produced hip-hop to begin with isn't just going to repeat itself. The genre isn't what it was and moves a whole lot slower than it once did but that doesn't mean the inspiration is gone. It's necessary that the art is different. I'm really glad to artists like Often Spaced or Ras Dude who are making this a productive project and one that is still here despite all sorts of forces against it.
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