It Was A Wonderful World

This week I chose to blog about Toure’s tribute to Biggie’s death. If I had just read this piece I would have believed that he was sincere about being done with hip-hop. However, in the introduction he tells the reader that the piece wasn’t actually about that at all; instead it is just Toure trying to demonstrate the pain he felt at having Biggie and Tupac killed so soon after another. It is a testament to his writing that he was able to do this in such a way that he could make himself sound serious about being done with hip-hop.
One of the first things that I noticed was how Toure referred to the Hip-Hop Nation. I don’t know if I’m just being forgetful or not, but did we discuss the popularization of this term and why some people choose to or choose not to use it? All I seem to recall is a conversation about the concepts behind the idea of the hip-hop nation and why the class was called such. But when was it first used? And who was the first person to use it? I apologize if we already went over this, but I cannot recall.
Also in his piece Toure describes the evolution of hip-hop as it became less about yourself and how you feel empowered and more about making money/hatred. He brings up the point that for a while all of the hip-hop icons were still alive. But at a point they began dying, and none of them died of natural causes. In this era (is it a coincidence that it was at the end/just after the Golden Age of Hip-Hop) rappers and cultural celebrities began being shot and murdered. It was also in this time that the East/West coast feud began.
To me, this is important as I am very interested in the criminality of the hip-hop culture, and how/why early hip-hop culture was more about partying and having fun while as time progresses we see more violent and criminal hip-hop music while also being more and more related to gang activity. What caused this paradigm shift? Why, with the death of Tupac (was this a turning point? I could use some help with dates/chronology), did hip-hop begin to become more and more criminal in its nature? These are all questions that I obviously don’t have the answers to, and I would love to hear the ideas of others that are more knowledgeable than myself.