July 17th 2010

About Lesson Six



Lesson Six is a collective of writers, bloggers and music lovers that have become disillusioned with what mainstream rap has become. We believe that great hip hop is still out there, we share it with you every single week. While we don’t label ourselves as underground or indie, we do have some strict perimeters. While I could spend all day coming up with a line that describes our manifesto, Scroobius Pip has already done it better…

“Guns, bitches & bling were never part of the four elements and never will be”

We believe that if we stick to avoiding those three things, we can help reinstate the love of hip hop in those who have become similarly disillusioned. We call this, Cliché-Free Hip-Hop. If you think we’re straying away from this message, you can hit the red report button on the article and we’ll take another look.

Follow

We’ve got numerous ways for you to stay up to date with Lesson Six happenings. You could follow the blog itself with RSS, hear our quick thoughts through our Twitter account and listen to our playlists over Spotify.

Contact

Whether you’re a budding writer, an artist with some music we should listen to or just someone looking to get in touch, you can email us at staff at lessonsix dot com.

We’re open to all suggestions and submissions of music, however, we’re currently a small two man team and there are only so many hours in the day. Nevertheless, we’ll try to review and respond to everything we get.

Comments

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1592839859 Shaked Ben Samun

    “Guns, bitches & bling were never part of the four elements and never will be”
    Word up guys ! thanks for keeping hip hop alive.Sharing is caring.

  • http://www.dangerously.ca rap legend Jesse Dangerously

    I’m not huge on guns, denigrating ways of speaking about women, or jewelry either… but it’s kind of off-putting to see someone as distant from the roots of hip-hop as arrhythmic UK spoken word artist Pip being cited as what does or doesn’t belong at the heart of hip-hop.

    I say this as someone pretty distant myself, but then I don’t try to enforce prescriptive laws derived from the “four elements,” which of course were invented after the fact to sum up 70s Brooklyn to outsiders like us in bite-size chunks.  Definitely all those 13-17 year old kids that invented hip-hop for something to do weren’t like “okay it’s these four things and NOTHING ELSE – hey man TAKE OFF THAT GOLD CHAIN WE HATE THAT IN HIP-HOP.”

    I’m writing this criticism because what I can glean from this mission statement (and the great art you tend to highlight) is a general idea that I am interested in the type of hip-hop you’re trying to focus on, I just think it could be expressed in a way that’s less hostile to rap music’s vast and varied history.

    Give it some thought is all I ask!

    thx,
    rljd

    • http://twitter.com/Lesson6 Lesson Six

      We’ve always tried to make clear in our posts, we’re not against other forms that hip-hop has turned into, we just feel that this half we’re representing is underrated and doesn’t get enough credit. So we set up this site. So maybe we need to make this clear in this statement (we haven’t actually revised it since we started two years ago).
      Also that quote, despite it being from a UK spoken word artist, kind of summed up how we felt at the time. We’re a hip-hop blog, not a rap blog, and Pip sums it up pretty well in that one line.

      I think you’re right though, we probably need to re-write this, sometime soon…

      Thanks for the interest,
      Lesson Six

      • http://www.dangerously.ca rap legend Jesse Dangerously

        Likewise, I agree that the stuff you’re representing is underrated!  I mean it’s the form of hip-hop that my own art takes, so I must see some legitimacy there haha.

        I just DO think that materialistic rap is more classically hip-hop than this alternative vein… and I also think that the alternative vein is just as sexist as mainstream rap, so I find the b-word as expressed in Pip’s line is more about being above thinking about women at all than putting them down (he’s pretty condescending about them in his work).

        Butttt that’s just me, ha.