At this present moment, hip hop is changing and dominating the charts. It's as if you could go anywhere, say you're American, and they will bring up Jay and Kanye instead of Garth Brooks for the first time in ever.

"I have friends in low places, but not all places".

Hip hop and rap have become the quintessential, modern American musical styles. They're a part of our consciousness, how we see the world and how we view others. It's never been more diverse in its sounds, looks, beats, styles, aesthetics, etc.

And it has detractors. It has detractors within the community. There are still people -- my age and older and even younger -- who hate today's hip hop and rap.

"It's noise!"

"Whatever happened to real lyrics?"

"Whatever happened to real hip hop?"

"Turn off that amigos or whatever ratchet racket that is, our shows are on."

That last one bugs me. It bugs me because we, as a community who loves this music, accept it. We shake it off and laugh it way like "okay get with the times, bruh," yet there's an intrinsic understanding in the world of hip hop that their whining is valid.

We hear it on radio stations, blogs, interviews. etc. We all begrudgingly accept that there is such a thing as real hip hop and know it when we hear it.

It's Nas. It's Big L. It's GZA, Pharaoh Monche, MF Doom, Biggie, Eminem, and so on and so forth.

"Kendrick Lamar is the only real rapper left..."

We accept this aging relic form of hip hop as the "real thing" and everything else since has been some grand fallacy to sell more diamond studded grills and Supreme hats.

It may well be. I'm not a member of the Illuminati. Yet.

Then there's the newbies who show no affinity for the older forms of hip hop and instead focus on likes, hits and making tons of references to dealing when they in fact have never even seen baking soda outside of a Shop Rite.

For reference.

As the old guards' balls start sagging down below their ankles and the new guards can't see past their fake $900 Versace shades, we need to remember that either side calling out the other is purely economic and everyone is a shitty promoter trying to sell you a blank CD for $15 to pay their sister-in-law's bail. It's the shittiest hustle, but it will always persist.

Both sides assign themselves to an idea of hip hop, defined by signifiers and symbols with no attention paid to what hip hop really could be.

In all honesty though, to define hip hop (especially when you're a white guy from a rural town) is impossible. What I can do though is tell you a story:

A few years back I was doing a video for a local rapper. We were crammed in his studio -- which he was squatting in some nights commuting between East Brooklyn and Long Island -- with a sub from the bodega, a pouch of rollies and a 30 rack of Genesee. I brought lights from Home Depot.

I promise this isn't the rapper.

A few friends were with us, helping out and getting yelled at by me because I wanted to seem professional like a real asshole.

Soon enough though, everyone was drunk and falling asleep except the rapper and I. He couldn't pose anymore, he was more or less dozing off while standing up and straining to rap his verses for the shots. Once we both started fumbling around the very hot lights and very flammable everything else in the room, we called it a night.

He said "thanks for everything, bro" and gave me the rest of the tobacco.

This kid worked two jobs, skateboarded to his them -- 2 counties away -- and still managed to record an EP.

Through the smoke and bright lights I could see the paint peeling on the wall above the light switch. There was a doodle next to it of a woman in a cowboy hat. She had been crudely sketched with Sharpie, complete with pimples, a scar and ratty ass hair. Adjacent to her left cheek it read "Love you too."

To me, this is hip hop. Hip hop isn't a particular style or time or place or sound. It's not clothing, or platinum records, or Maybachs, or street cred or misogyny.

These are all the signifiers. The symbols and entities which constrain hip-hop.

The uncle who won't give up on Fubu or Phat Farm and gropes their co-worker, afterwards saying he was just kidding around why's she got to be like that?

I'll just leave this here. Where some other people left their careers.

The white nuvo hipster bros music critics who just heard De La Soul (link included for the white nuvo hipster bros amongst us) for the first time and think they're onto some crazy underground shit. They also think Muhammad Ali and Bob Marley "transcended racial boundaries" and don't get why you're getting so upset why you do you have to be like that?

Your scammer ass cousin who tipped $2 on a $200 bill and calls girls bitches when they won't give it up in the back of a leased '02 Acura. Or their friend's Infiniti GX. When they're in the car. Why can't he join too, why do you have to be like that?

These are the forces that have used hip-hop to further their own interests. And that's not even getting into how patriarchal, imperialist and racist the ways in which we define hip-hop are.

It's like saying this is hip hop. It's not. It's a potato.

Hip hop is a feeling.

Hip hop can't be explained or described or broken down to its "major components." Hip-hop cannot be deconstructed through any academic lens for the purpose of seeing "what's really going on."

I understand the intrinsic white, male and native-born privilege apparent in what I'm saying. I don't seek to move the discussion away from people of color or women or the LGBTQIA+ community or the immigrant victims of our violently capitalist state. All of those voices need to be in the discussion more than ever and that's becoming more and more possible with the influence of social media.

What I'm saying is that the way many people look at hip hop -- especially those vying for the idea of what real hip hop is -- are playing into a game devised by people who want to watch us squirm and fight each other instead of embracing the beautiful music we've all played a part in making.

THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN WHITE MALE MUSIC CRITICS DEFINE HIP HOP. HOPE IT'S CLEAR K THNX.

For so many hip hop artists and fans, this music is their escape into another world. Or it's diving deeper into this one and telling us how they feel. How they feel is real hip-hop.

Hip-hop is expression. Hip-hop is a feeling manifested over a beat which guides your l-ride, your time at the club, your walk to work or your conscientious takedown of the institutional barriers which make life unbearable for so many in this country and around the world.

For me, that feeling was watching the smoke of my twenty-third cigarette lazily glaze over a doodle of a hideous woman forever etched into a wall which was peeling to the point of near collapse. Seeing that she loved me too just made it better.