Check this out.

Now, setting aside the bizarre religious elements for the time being, I think that wholly ridiculous site serves as an excellent example of an all too common theme. Articles like that (well, not quite like that--like that minus Christianity) come out all the time. They try to get people in on the hip lingo (or "slanguage", apparently). And they always fail, sounding strained and cranky, as if the very concept of those words should be indecipherable to any reasonable person.

Now, the fail because they are outdated. Always. That is beyond question. But even a guide to outdated slang is still interesting and funny and maybe even useful if done right. They fail because they take somerthing that is alive and fresh and suck all oxygen out of it.

They are right on precisely one count--that hip-hop strength lies in its language. The word play, the rhetoric, the hyperbole--that's the stuff that gets you to fall in love with rap. But they always focus on the made up words, the slanguage, as if decode everything was what mattered.

I maintain you can listen to any rap song with a word you don't know and understand it by the end, even though the song probably spent .02% of it's time defining it for you. I can't really convey what the word fresh means, and having tried to explain it to people before it ends with either party satisfied. But if I give a spin to OutKast and "So Fresh, So Clean" I bet you by the end of that we're all going to understand what's going on.

This is because the slang of hip-hop, like any slang, works in the cracks of things. It's about the rhythms between the languages, the pauses and modifiers and all that noise. That's what makes a word. That's what makes a term. And, I'll argue, that's what makes hip-hop hip-hop. But you don't get that from stuff like the articles at the top of the page. As is usually the case when outsiders try to take on things, all that's left is reductionism and dry words on a dulled page.

In short--old people and Christians, stop writing those articles and start listen to the dang songs.