An Interview with Joan Morgan

MORGAN: Okay, let me contextualize this for you. When I started writing, there was no such thing as "hip-hop journalism." I am part of that generation of writers that, for better or worse, created that as a genre and it really was a term that other people applied to our writings. When kids would come up to me and say, "Wow, I want to be a hip-hop journalist, too," I would just say, "You just need to be a good writer," because I didn't start out as a voice writing about hip-hop. I started writing about the central park jogger case, actually. I also covered the Mike Tyson trial. So, hip-hop was something I wrote about, but I didn't come in with the focus that some of the younger journalists do today with the idea of being a hip-hop writer, a hip-hop journalist, documenting the culture. I took my first music piece reluctantly, quite honestly. I didn't even really want to do the Queen Latifah piece-not anything due to Queen Latifah-but I just wasn't interested in music journalism at all. I just didn't quite see the value of being a music critic. It was just when I figured out that you could do cultural criticism like that, and hip-hop could be a way for me to write about the experiences of my generation, that I saw the value. I probably wouldn't have been able to get space in the same papers, the same publications, if I just wanted to write about young black people's experiences at that particular time, but to do it through a hip-hop artist, we could do both. So once we figured that out, this kind of journalism took place and evolved. It was two-fold-it was cultural criticism, first and foremost, and then it became this method to document the culture because there weren't that many of us, people of color, doing it. The majority of people who were writing about hip-hop in the mainstream were, you know, white Ivy League guys. So, it was me and a few others. There were people like Nelson George and Greg Tate who kind of