For some people, hip hop is more than just rap music; hip hop is a way of life. But hip hop’s glory days was the era of old school music. Hip hop today is just a pale imitation of the 70’s through 90’s when hip hop was in its prime.Back then rappers did not rap for the money, disc jockeys did not make beats for the fame, graffiti artists did not write for the fun of it and break dancers did not dance because they thought it was cool. DJ’s and rappers did it for the love and the passion of the music. The Graff artist and b-boys did it for the cred and the passion as well.

To Isaac Argueta 22, who writes lyrics, hip hop “is a way of life, [or] a form of expression through different ways of music.” Hip hop has influenced his whole life from the clothes he wears to his vocabulary. Hip hop has pushed him to be a more original lyricist like Big Pun, Nas, AZ, MF Doom and Action Bronson, instead of making music to be popular.

Argueta likes underground hip hop more than any other style because underground rappers are not known yet so they are what he calls “hungry”. They want to be known because they are struggling, and when this happens, their raps are more raw and original. The thing he does not like about music today is that no one uses real instruments anymore and the majority of beats are sampled now. No one captures their own sound.

But Argueta thinks that “old school hip hop will be recreated, but to an extent, because the sound of hip hop is always evolving.”

On the other hand, math teacher LaDonna Fletcher, aka DJ KILLA, thinks hip hop will not come back. “There might be an artist that might have that [old school] feel. But you had to have lived in that time to be able to produce true rap,” said Fletcher. Fletcher, who mixes mostly hip hop, tends to like old school music better than underground or new school mainstream.

Fletcher believes that the messages were more original and made sense, instead of nowadays where everyone raps about the same thing and half of it does not make sense.

For sophomore Michael Cornwell, hip hop is a way to escape reality, to listen to people’s thoughts and emotions in a creative and artistic way. “[Hip hop] has made me more open to different cultures; it has also opened me up to a new way of expressing one’s self,” said Cornwell.

Cornwell thinks that old school hip hop is coming back because people are realizing how bad music is and are starting to become true lyricists, and it will eventually make a full recovery.