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You were the terrible twin of punk, Afrika Bambaataa in a 'Never Mind the Bollocks' T-shirt and afro-hawk, Ramalzee and Lee and the urge to get free, Dondi as a spray can splash Gandhi, Grand Master Flash and the Clash, both poles of Basquiat, painting primal anti-products on barrio billboards, ex-vandals drawing skelly courts on stolen streets.

We couldn't afford (to pay for) instruments or attention, so we scratched on vinyl; we had no canvases, so we painted on overpasses; we had no ballet classes on these crazy calles, so we made do with our own bold (b-boy) bodies and cardboard boxes. We stole back space and sound as reparations for the countless creations crafted by people of color then co-opted and commandeered by culture vultures with calculators, and the DJs and MCs of the APOCalypse didn't give a damn if their utterances got any farther than the little slum schoolyard where they first plugged in their two turntables and a microphone, powered by our war-words and spit. In our cheap Converses, appropriated Adidas, low-budget Levi's, and cool co-op Kangols, we created a counter culture that you couldn't get over the counter. And back then no one wanted you over the counter anywayz, not Virgin or the Tower (of Babel). Not Sony or MCA or Atlantic, BMG either. Not white (washed) boys in segregated suburbs straining to grasp slum syllables while stretching our sold Salvation Army skins to fit their permanent privilege. Not music moguls and mass-media mobsters who buy our muse for their amusement and market our azzes for mass consumption to the highest (and lowest) bidder.

Back then bling wasn't the thing, and the only platinum was a Pi?ero poem about a black woman with a blond wig on, and there was no half-nekked salt-shakin' sistas on MTV (or BET and VH1), and fuck Bentleys, you couldn't even catch a cab on 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard. There was no corporate conglomerate to vomit back (and forth) our surreality, and no preacher-pimp publishing company would touch you with a 10-foot billboard.

But nowadays, I see you on every (clear) channel of the tell-lie-vision, on (and off) every stage, hear you laughing (and crying) on the radio, watch you acting (and re-acting) in movies, hawking your 'hip hop' franchise fashions like French fries, your basketball shoes like rhythm without the blues, soda pop and pimp juice, and a million other mega-million-dollar marketing schemes you're tied into and tied up in, and I am faced with a painful question: You started out rebelling against the system, pounding on the doors of perception, but was that only 'cause you couldn't find the key to open the door? And now that you smacked the doorman and snatched the key, art turned alchemy, it's solid platinum, hanging from your neck like a slave chain. Sure, sometimes I think I see the old you peeking out shyly from underneath your worn Kangol, a glimmer of a vision in your eye, now obscured by the 'bling' and all them other material things. And I swear I can still hear you spittin' sweet sedition way left of the de-funkt dial on my battered boom box, but just when you about to bring the noise, it's inevitably drowned out in a bottle of counterfeit Courvoisier and a cup of (jim) crow. Tired of living the amerikan nightmare, you wanted the amerikan dream, so a microphone became just another way out of the hood, like a basketball or a kilo or a fast car. In the end, you weren't tryna bust out of the shitstem, only bust the door down to get in.

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