The old white woman behind me took out a used hanky and wiped excess lipstick off her front teeth before thumbing through the playbill, while the Chinese girl to my left unraveled the pink J. Crew scarf I wanted from the sale rack last season and laid it nonchalantly on her lap.

“Thanks for taking me out on the town tonight baby girl”

Yeah that’s right, I took my moms to meet drug dealer, double convict, Tony Award winning, Def Poetry Jam legend, Lemon Andersen in his one-man production of County of Kings – and she was feeling it. Not just ‘cause she’s cool like that, (though she is), but because Lemon brilliantly executed the transformational forms, faces, and power that Hip-Hop has unabashedly and single-handedly commanded on a worldwide basis.

Don’t get me wrong, Slam is no new form of artistic or lyrical expression and is not just performed as a struggle-instigated street song by newly born corner poets or young caged up jailbirds. No, slam has been around in its competitive form for about twenty years and is appreciated and performed by individuals in various walks of life. To be fair, considering that oral history has been utilized in several countries in Africa longer than citizens of the current planet can fathom, and that Homer wrote one of the first documented ‘story telling’ forms of performed poetry in his 8th Century BC classic, The Iliad, who knows the real ‘beginning’ of anything? Just as DJ Kool Herc migrated to the Boogie Down to establish his rightful place as the grandfather of Hip-Hop (what’s up Jamaican immigrant influence!), Marc Smith (a.k.a SlamPapi) started a poetry series at the Chi-Town jazz club, Get Me High Lounge, to combat his belief that poetry at the time was a detached experience for most interested but turned off individuals. Eventually, Marc moved the series to Green Mill (former regular spot of Al Capone) and the Slam Movement spread all over the nation at rampant speed.

But I digress. So this white woman is really ill-bouncing during Lemon’s performance, and talking (out loud) about how she is pleasantly surprised – which makes sense considering that the show was perfectly executed, but I’m still like, “what?” Then it hit me. When Hip-Hop takes on the form of disenfranchised intellectual, political activist, corporate America, sweet sixteen party play list, or poet, society begins providing it labels and justifications for being in order to differentiate the noted form from loaded, negatively associated images that the annotation ‘Hip-Hop’ conjures. The thing is if everyone were to be real about it, Tupac was a political activist, Jay-Z is a corporate America mogul, ‘mainstream’ Hip-Hop blasts in country clubs, most artists are disenfranchised intellectuals and Slam poetry is quite obviously influenced by isolated breaks, beat mix-matching and inflection (do I hear Hip-Hop roots as influencer? That would be a yes). The Griots of West Africa, for example, stylistically utilize their vocal instrument in the same fashion we are used to hearing modern-day ‘rappers’, but they are not labeled as such because society wants to separate Hip-Hop from its positive international roots and influence. Instead, though the oral history of these singing poets date back hundreds of years and influenced several forms of African-American tradition (i.e. signifyin’, the dozens, jazz poetry), society makes a point of re-labeling by saying, ‘that’s not rap, that’s a (what label can I think of?) ‘cultural experience’ like Hip-Hop isn’t and to associate the two would be a perverted distortion.

Lemme tell you something, Hip-Hop is one of the most permeating and transformational influences in our society. No amount of fear-born discriminatory labeling bullshit is going to change the very evident point that four of the top five Billboard 100 songs are in the Hip-Hop category, that according to Forbes the earned $300 million of the top twenty ‘Hip-Hop Cash Kings’ was a 40% drop from last years earnings, or that Hip-hop is not just a strong aspect of our national fabric but has globalized into most all countries worldwide. So go ‘head Lemon Andersen, you are clearly the man and one of my favorite people at the moment. For those of you who are still ‘pleasantly surprised’ by the chameleon called Hip-Hop or missed the advent of its love child, Slam, all grown up and on the Public Theater stage, I suggest you stop re-labeling and call this innovative spade, a spade.