UnderGround Opinion: Synoptix Tha Distorted One!

Now, I’m an old school type of head. You know, the boom bap, soul beats and intellectual raps type of head? But, there seems to be a problem with my kind of people. They choose to keep their knowledge and enlightened sense of hip hop to themselves and will not share this knowledge that they have attained with the new school heads that need it in order to understand the culture and mature themselves musically. In instances like these I find myself asking, why?

I often hear heads asking where ‘the real’ has gone to, and then blaming it on the young ones saying that they know nothing about the roots of the art. Well, here’s my viewpoint. The young heads won’t wake up one morning and start quoting classic scripts from Big L, Rakim and KRS1! They don’t know about these people and so therefore need to be schooled about them.

The new school heads are exposed to the bubblegum and pop beats type of crap (can’t call it music) and will therefore associate themselves with it because it’s what they see in the media, meanwhile the real heads keep pointing fingers and blaming the youngns for not following true hip hop. Truth is, you can’t blame these people for not knowing because to them Soulja boy is real hip hop and this happens because no one is there to teach them what real is.

Some of us heads (if not all of us, I don’t know) started out listening to the commercial nonsense before we met someone who said to us:” Kid, this is what you should be listening to.” Or “What the hell is that bullshit! This is what hip hop is kid.”

And then letting you listen to Wu-Tang or Pac portraying their life through a beat for your young mind to relate to. Now, is this not what we “real heads” should be doing today? Schooling the young heads, which will in turn help the culture to flourish and not be misinterpreted by some clowns who want to make a quick buck at the expense of the art form that means so much to you and I.
Don’t you think that if that Dem Franchise Boys track were to be substituted by an optical illusion capital O killer cut, we would have more young’ns recruited to our side? How did it feel when that older brother, Cousin or friend introduced you to that Illmatic tape by Nas? You were most probably intrigued by this music and felt like you wanted to be a part of it, and now you are! So now it’s your turn to give back what hip hop gave you.

Hip hop helped you grow and opened your eyes to the injustices and beauty of the world. Wouldn’t it be great if you could give the same gift to someone else? So the next time you see a kid in a multicolored hoodie with Soulja boy playing on his phone speaker, don’t diss him and blame him for the path that hip hop has taken but rather show him what real art is and then next time he might know how to sift through the wackness to get to the dope.

This is our job as heads because this will save our music from destruction and therefore build a new breed of heads who can continue the culture and help it grow. Let’s stop monopolizing hip hop, it’s ours to share.

Writing: Sipho “Synoptix” Khumalo
Pix: Synoptix