The rhetoric that hip-hop is dead has been a repeated concept for years. A lot of fans fervently defend it, especially today, highlighting the rich, vast underground. Ultimately, for them, as long as the music is still strong, everything else will solve itself. However, artists like Nas and Q-Tip weren’t so inclined to dismiss the music itself. Instead, they looked at how capitalism hollowed out the essence of the culture and turned it into a husk of a genre.

In a 2004 interview with Believer Magazine, Tip mused about his creative process and the state of hip-hop. Interviewer Touré noted how the underground nature of the culture eventually ballooned into the mainstream, growing “into this monster.” When prompted about the idea that hip-hop was dead, Q-Tip readily admitted that it looks a lot different than what he grew up with.

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