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Hip-hopper Adam Mansbach penned a thought-provoking piece regarding how the term "hip-hop" is thrown around to describe everything from wack music to Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Yeah, I know. For that reason, there's a need to reclaim what hip-hop means. Mansbach offers:

What, then, is an individual, an institution, or a movement that claims 'hip-hop' required to do? Let's go back to the notion of a hip-hop mayor. Such an individual's philosophy of government would honor hip-hop's principles by seeking to privilege and amplify marginalized voices. In particular, such a government would be concerned with the young, the poor, and people of color--i.e., the people who invented hip-hop.

A hip-hop mayor would replicate hip-hop's philosophy of collage--which threw whatever was hot into the mix regardless of where it came from, from James Brown to Kraftwerk to Billy Squire--by seeking out and recognizing good ideas (and idea-generators) regardless of location, philosophy, or any other ideological impediment.

She would approach civic issues, from crime prevention to renewable energy, with the same audacious, outside-the-box inventiveness that led Bronx teenagers to dream up backspinning records and writing their names on subway trains.

She would realize that in hip-hop, as in other great American inventions from jazz to baseball, the individual could achieve greatness only when the community supporting her is healthy and intact. She would understand that even visionary ideas--like hip-hop, and democracy itself--can easily be derailed when the principles on which they're founded recede into the past. She would understand that 'battles' are important, but that they must be conducted within the boundaries of respect.

I cosign. It's funny because when I'm interviewed for THE MESSAGE, people will ask me, what do you think of the current state of hip-hop. And before I can answer, I have to ask them, what hip-hop are you talking about?