Growing up on rap music has taught me many things. How to dress, how to dance, how to speak different regional dialects, but most of all this music has taught me how to believe in myself. You see when you grow up in a poor neighborhood with poor parents it is very difficult to believe in yourself. You come to accept the way things are and just assume that fate has put you into a position in which you are condemned forever. The only people that I saw growing up doing good were the dope boys in flashy cars with big smiles on their faces and the white people I saw on television. That was when I first noticed the gap between the “haves” and “have nots”. Then one day, I turned on the tv and saw rich black people. No, not Oprah.

Will Smith. He was on this little show called “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and my entire world changed. Here was a poor black kid taken out of his environment and put into the rich predominately white world of Bel-Air. It was eye opening for me that we could not only survive but thrive in a whole other world. The whole shows premise is what Hip Hop is about and why so many people regardless of race tuned into the Fresh Prince because it gave us a look into the rich white world through a character we could relate to.

I was always into rap music even as a very small kid I would dance to MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, but never actually listened to the lyrics until one day I saw this music video by this fat black guy named Notorious B.I.G. called “Juicy”. I’m sure all of you reading this know the song word for word, why because it preached upliftment, was heart felt and had a hot beat, not to mention biggie’s easy to listen to flow. How many of you know the actual verses from “Ay Bay Bay”? That’s what I thought.

In any genre, the music that really sells is the music that connects with the audience, not the music that only makes them dance, otherwise techno music would be the number one seller. These two moments are just two of the many moments in hip hop that have shaped me into a successful person, where my parents failed, hip hop succeeded. What’s your story?