Being Hip-Hop, Being Job, and Being

The notion of creating music as a way of creating or articulating reality has its roots in other genres. James Cone reminds us that blues music was created in the midst of the black struggle for being in another era, King David of Israel becomes a brilliant psalmist (that's “songwriter”) in the midst of deep pain, and Samuel Livingston traces humankind's first songs to the African concept of neferu (cultural manifestations of functional beauty). In other words, music has always had a purpose before it had an industry, and its economy was purely social, made up of those who would listen, identify, and be identified by those artists.