Nearly all of my earliest memories of hip hop go through my older brother O. When he

was 16, O formed a rap group called 360 degrees and he started going by O. Love.

Sometimes I sneak into his room and go through his rhyme books and the lyrics he'd write

down on scraps of loose leaf folded in with letters, lots and lots of letters from girls.

I'd read both with deep anticipation and appreciation and when his group dropped their

one and only single in 1989, a record called Definition of a Hip-Dup Black Man, I carried

that vinyl into my sixth grade dance, proudly shoving it into the DJ's face and he actually

played it. My friends went wild.

But the very first time I remember hearing rap music, I must have been like six or seven

years old and my brother was playing UTFOs Roxanne Roxanne back in 1984. After that, I was

hearing rap in passing cars and at my cousin's house and even on the radio. It was everywhere.

LL Cool J was rocking the bells and couldn't live without his radio. Schooly D dropped

what does it mean and Rundy M. C were the rising kings of rap. In those early years, my

teenage brother and his boys had big boom boxes and would go on these wild missions to

find huge pieces of cardboard that they could lay out in the cement to break dance on.

Once him and couple friends even walked seven miles each way to a flooring place to buy

a gigantic 12 by 12 roll of linoleum to dance on. By the time I was 10, I was starting to

understand what rap was or at least what it sounded like with that signature boom-bap.

But it wasn't until I heard Slick Ricks, a children's story, a cautionary tale about young

life in the streets that rap really made sense as an art, as a device, as something powerful

and uniquely ours. And when public enemy released fight the power, we raised our fist and

our voices up high. I felt strong and black and more than anything. I felt this feeling

...