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Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Ladies First: Nicki Minaj and Lauryn Hill [Guest Blog]


Today's post comes from my friend Sir Vantes.  You can find his Tumblr here.  Enjoy!
All I know is…
Among the different forms of hipsterisms, elitisms, sexism, internalized racism, and the simplifying of the complexity of mainstream hip-hop for the sake of being comprehensible and potentially enjoyable for as many people as possible for the sake of maximizing commercial profit…
There are a lot of divisive forces in motion in hip-hop which push us towards being at odds with one another over trivial matters as opposed to being all about that U.N.I.T.Y we sometimes sing about.
Now, Lauryn Hill and Nicki Minaj together wouldn’t be a magic cure for all that. And there would still be people who would without hesitation opt to “take sides”… claiming one artist is so much better than the other; which, even if one could prove that to be true, this would still not be reason enough to only praise one while dismissing the other and people’s freedom/ability to enjoy the other.
But that said, I would have loved to see them embrace one another onstage both. I think it would’ve been a powerful and beautiful thing for hip-hop to see them together; an image that could’ve contributed to a dialog that argues against viewing these two artists, as well as what they represent, as polar opposites.
But instead egos have gotten the best of us all again and now we’re bickering over shit that shouldn’t matter this much.

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