In America in 2024, we have all watched major American cities burn the result of a powder keg that exploded around incidents of police killings. We should all know the names by now: George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Breanna Taylor, Stephon Clark, Philando Castille, and more.

As the list goes on, the debate surrounding race, policing, mass incarceration, and the war on drugs, it seems, has reached the tipping point. Fault lines have been drawn as our divided country simmers in a cauldron of internet conspiracy theories and news stories that may or may not be true. Commonly held facts and assumptions that should guide any democracy are hanging by a thread.

To understand the vast societal shifts in contemporary America and the proposition of understanding where we are now, we have to analyze it through the eyes of an art form that, for close to 40 years, arguably has been the voice of many generations and an analytical mirror that has reflected the ills of the United States of America.

That art form is Hip Hop.

In an irony-filled twist of fate, the music that has caused thousands of controversies, internal war, and conflict has come to define America in 2024.

This proposition is not easy, and the narrative will go down many roads.

USA vs. Hip Hop will tell this 40-year story through the eyes of the gangsters, the cops, and the artists who wrote the lyrics and created visuals that not only have shifted the world, but are a living and breathing experiment where Crime and Punishment can be unpacked and traced.

The starting point for our story is in two places:

First New York City in 1980, as Reaganomics left the poor to rot, a new form of music was born in the South Bronx. Over in Harlem, Nicky Barnes, one of the 70’s biggest drug kingpins, decides to cooperate with the government against his fellow members of The Council.

On the Left Coast, 1981 was engulfed with a crime wave in Oakland, California. While not an obvious place to start any story as it relates to hip-hop music, it is arguably one of the most important geographical cities where the symbiotic relationship between the fall of the Black Panthers and the rise of a young man named Todd Shaw.

This is the 40-year odyssey of The United States of America vs. Hip-Hop.

*Episode Note-We were honored to have Executive Producer Ice-T narrate Episode One!

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