![]() Investing the time and coin necessary to cultivate the level of storytelling hip-hop deserves is often seen as too high a tab. When it comes to funding this mission, that's a different story. Because like Tarana Burke told us in Episode 5, loving something means holding it accountable, and calling it out when it wanders astray. Work that doesn't just celebrate hip-hop, but also asks tough questions of it. Work that challenges the artists we cover, on mic, face to face. And as production has drawn to a close, we, too, have started to wonder if we'll ever be in a position to do this kind of work again. We were asked to finish the season in progress, which had launched a week earlier, and we chose to do so - for many reasons, but most importantly for the sake of the artists, experts and professionals with whom we'd spoken in over a year's worth of reporting, who we knew were unlikely to find a platform quite like our show anywhere else. Louder Than A Riot was discontinued in March due to budget cuts at NPR, and most of our staff was laid off. So with the rules of the game laid out before us in the run-up to this season, the concept of scarcity was already on our minds when it came for our own show. When scarcity is the default assumption, there's no space to imagine a world with enough to go around, and some of the voices in the conversation get their volume turned down. These expectations can sometimes make hip-hop feel less like an art form and more like a blood sport - where there's room for just one queen at a time, catty rivalries become canon narratives and only a few kinds of success are seen as legitimate. ![]() It's the impossible choice between being disrespected and being ignored, and the insistence that there is no third option. It's the social conditioning that puts bite behind all the other rules' bark, forcing the people at the edges of the culture to put up with harassment, alienation and erasure. ![]() It's the belief that access and resources are so scarce that they have to be fought over, tooth and nail. The scarcity mindset is not exclusive to hip-hop, but it is pervasive within it, so much so that it can be hard to define or even recognize up close.
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