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Well, Chris, the criteria for being hip hop music does appear to be very blurred. I have a problem with you using hip hop and its bastard child, rap, as interchangeable when making your point. To say that hip hop is musical does not make rap, music. And it's like you determine a song to be hip hop if the person performing it has a MC in front of their handle, or otherwise identifies themself as belonging to the hip hop nation. To me. such music does not stand alone as being hip hop, and the only reason it can make such a claim is because a rapper is fronting it. (BTW, I always thought Lauren Hill’s was striking a blow for feminism rather than hip hop.) Or, is this to say that rappers can’t sing. I’m simply contending that you can’t sing and rap at the same time, so when a rapper breaks out in song, he/she is doing this between rapping. I repeat. Just because music is played or sung or sampled in the background when a rapper is rapping, does not mean the rapper is singing. As you allude to, when a person sings, a musician can listen to the melody and score it with notes on a staff so that another musician can read this and play it on an instrument. Can this be done with rap spitting? Or record scratching? I would think that rap purist would not want it classified as music. Art form? yes; Music? No. I know, I know, I’m getting technical. Which is a no-no in the hip hop culture with its “keeping it real” pretensions. (time for an emoticon) Just because I don’t take hip hop as seriously as you do, doesn’t mean I’m dissin’ it, however. This is a generation gap, of course. I’m disappointed with the younger generation of Blacks for marginalizing Jazz and the Blues to embrace the minstrelcy of hip hop that includes the babbling of rap. But I still take pride in the diversity of black music. Rap on.

Hi Troy, I'll check my history. Cynique from the little bit that I read. I feel that they are in non local reality. And are timeless and dimensionless,and probably exist in the dream space, or the place where intuition and creativity are born.

just scanning the posts... I would like to add an analogy... Rap is to Scatting as Jazz is to Hip Hop..... Not perfect, but similar.... As far as Jazz, is less of a marginalization as it is access , distribution channels, education, and of course cultural changes... However, when exposed, one will find that Jazz opens up a new world for a younger generation...

While I admire, your motivation and what you are doing, simply responding to you is acknowledgement without my financial support. I would have to see the reason for looking for a donation and I don't see it. Simply stated I run a blog right now among all of the other things I do that would probably blow your mind considering how much I do in a day, lol. But if you are really looking to start a mag or online review journal simply do it. You don't need an investment of financial support, you simply need time. Both Troy and I have dedicated countless hours to publishing and Black Literature on a several fronts. Troy has done this in a greater fashion with his search engine Huria and the AALBC platform. I have published a number of books by other authors and my own books as well. To start an online mag or review or even a print magazine that is bi monthly or monthly or quarterly, all you need is the love of reading and the time to write the reviews. Starting a website requires hosting and you can pay for that for less than 6 bucks per month. Once you have hosting you can sign up for an Affiliate program like the Power List through Mahogany to earn money on books purchased through your website. You can also add Google Adsense or an ad program as well as solicit ads from writers. In essence, an online platform for reviews can be run without an investment of any kind or fundraising unless you just don't have the 6 bucks per month. This is why I didn't invest. Once I read through and got the idea of what you were doing, I felt just dropping money in the bucket wasn't needed. I do hope that you will move forward and I hope that you will garner interest. But I do find it interesting that while I'm a new poster here on AALBC, I have paid for promotion of my books and I have an author's page. I also promote the website on my website and have done so for years. You on the other hand have taken the time for your first post on aalbc to ask for money but you have not stated how you have supported this platform. The interesting thing about Kickstarter is that it works because most of the people who successfully run a campaign have already supported other campaigns on the site. I think that might be the case here.

I don't find Cynique's commentary hostile at all. I think we are having a fantastic debate and it's forcing me to dig in the crates a bit. As far as are there albums that are Hip-Hop that don't contain rapping. There are a lot of them out there. I would consider Madlib's reworking of the Blue Note Catalog as one of these. I would also say that while people lump Erykha Badu in with Neosoul she is and was actually an emcee first and when you listen to Baduizm you are listening to a Wisdom "Drop Knowledge". In English that means that Badu is or was a 5% which makes her connection to Hip-Hop very evident although she is singing. This is why I say that you can't really place Hip-Hop into a box and not consider it music. Here on this video is the Pharcyde with their song Runnin, and throughout the song they are actually singing the hook in harmony. To further reinforce this I would like to add that Queen Latifah on the album Black Reign actually sang the lyrics to Winki's Theme - an ode to her brother, a police officer, who died in a motorcycle crash on the bike she gave him. Which brings up an issue that I often express to people who place labels on Hip-Hop. Rappers can often do what musicians or singers do, but singers can't do what emcees do. They can, but they aren't very good at it although with practice, just like singing, a singer can emcee and vice versa. So I guess if the songs appear on Hip-Hop albums then it can be classified as Hip-Hop by default right? This also kind of moves me to a discussion on Bone Thugs n Harmony. This group made it a point to use harmony in their emceeing and the songs were complex melodic rhythms which flies directly in the face of the comment that emcees don't sing. With The Roots (the band on the Jimmy Fallon show) you have a group that plays all of its own instruments. Which means they are musicians first, and they represent the Hip-Hop culture better than anything you could listen to. But they can also jam out with the best rock band or r n b band in the world. This song shows Black Thought the emcee actually singing as well as rapping which happens often. This song is called Silent Treatment. To go back to the question about whether there are forms of Hip-Hop that don't include rapping, there is no finer example than the instrumentals and albums made by DJs who are mixing and using the turntable as an instrument. While most would argue that DJs don't play music, what they do is a skill that is refined and studied like any instrument. I guess it doesn't play notes, but emcees have been featured in compositions at the Kennedy Center which has begun to change the way people view DJs and Hip-Hop. Black Coffee, an African DJ, actually did a complete set with an orchestra. This is a perfect example of how Hip-Hop can bridge the gap and allow access into classical music. Consider Lauryn Hill's Miseducation album. That is probably consider one of the dopest Hip-Hop albums of all time and it contains Lauryn being an emcee as well as a singer. Hip-Hop is a musical artform that blurs the lines of artistry and has to be considered music. Think about it, the last jazz album that Miles Davis made was Doo Bop. It's fusion, but it is definitely a Hip-Hop album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hoPqFiH6sg I'm still working on the playlist but some of these songs would be on that playlist so that should excuse me if I don't post it. Especially this last one that should feel like it was made it 60s. Pharoah Monche's Push. He sings the entire first verse and doesn't rap until the end. It's a perfect example of how musical Hip-Hop is.