An Interview with Touré

This interview was conducted by telephone on February 22, 2006, between College Station, Texas and New York City.

WALSH: In your new book, Never Drank the Kool-Aid, you make an important distinction between the rapper and the MC. Why?

TOURÉ: Why do I make that distinction?

WALSH: Many people do it from an elitist standpoint, but, in your description, you don't seem to do it from a perspective where one is more important than the other.

TOURÉ: I think I do. I think those of us who go back to the 1980s with this culture, definitely have a shred of elitism. There was a time when it seemed that most rappers—excuse me, most MCs—were great, or at least, innovative, but now there are people who seem just strictly commercial. So, yes, I make a distinction between the MC who's just a serious artist who has flow and diction and innovates and creates and has intricate things going on in his work, versus a rapper who is stringing rhymed words together in a fun way. The rapper is not advancing hip-hop culture or the science of hip-hop music. The MC is.

WALSH: In your essay, in which you identify your uncle as a rapper, you elevate the rapper to someone who is more of a total package, a person with fame and everything.

TOURÉ: Well, rapper . . . that definition changes from what I just explained. That was for me to make a point about Puffy. In that piece, it suggested that there was not an elite distance between one to the other, but there is. There is.

WALSH: KRS-One is one of the people on your greatest MCs list. It seems that, since forever, he has written so much on what's wrong with hip-hop. Q-Tip, maybe during '96 or '97, was saying that hip-hop was dead. In your opinion, was it dying? It's obviously still here, and some would argue that it's stronger than ever.

TOURÉ: I can't imagine a serious case for it being stronger than ever, unless you're just talking about financially. Somewhere around '94 or '95, something started to change. Before that most of the people in the culture were interested in the culture creating music that somehow advanced the culture a little bit with new words, new samples, new concepts of the songs, new ways the music uses samples, new flows, something different and fresh. Chuck D famously said hip-hop was black America's CNN to talk about how hip-hop allowed all of black America to be aware of what was going on throughout the country. Those of us from New York had a sense of what was going on in the streets of LA because of the music that guys from LA were making. That sense of black America's CNN has been lost. The drive to innovate has been lost completely. The aggressive lyrics that challenge authority, that challenge the country, that's largely gone. That underdog, underground spirit that meant so much to the culture is gone. In the early '80s, when hip-hop was still very young, there was a feeling that hip-hop could possibly die and each new single kept it alive one more moment and that sense gave the culture an extra battery to keep it alive and vibrant. We were protective as fans and the artists held the culture in high esteem. It was almost like a religion. It's not like that any more.

WALSH: Today, the trend—referring to artists like Juelz Santana, The Dipset, Young Jeezy, the Clipse—is straight up music about crack on every song. In one of your interviews with him, Questlove even talks about how crack was, in a sense, good for hip-hop.

TOURÉ: Crack definitely helped to shape the world in which hip-hop was born. The destruction that we saw surround us rapped about, as well as the money that the dealers were making, was to fund hip-hop, in many cases, to start an actual record label or just...