Encompassing a wide array of styles and ideas, hip-hop and R&B go together like two swinging double dutch ropes. Some aspects, like the so-called conscious movement, are celebrated as often as they are mocked for their earnesty. But conscious hip-hop’s basement-dwelling cousin, hotep, often flies under the radar.
Conscious, while not diametrically opposed to hotep, represents a distinct school of thought within black culture that factors heavily into how hip-hop is commodified and consumed.
Confusing consciousness—staying woke!—with assorted ankh foolishness and fantasy, struggle and sex, hotep is predicated on misogynoir masquerading as intellectualism, an inexplicable obsession with Egypt and a belief that within each hotep’s dick, vagina and/or ass lies the truth about colonialism, Africa and Black America.
Hip-hop and R&B have always been a site for conscious black identity negotiation and politics, often at its own peril, but the way hotep functions—within hip-hop and outside of hip-hop—is worth exploring. Hoteps come in all different shapes, sizes, shades and income brackets. Together they make up a small but bold semen stain on the crotch of conscious music and black culture, but that’s what black soap and shea butter is for. That’s what the following playlist, a compilation of three of the most hotep songs, ever, is for.
Q-Tip: "Renaissance Rap"
"We made it cool to wear medallions and say hotep!" Q-Tip raps. Hotep, signifying a pose, affirms itself as cool, as part of an aesthetic and renaissance. Q-Tip is cool, for an oldhead, for a hotep.
I’m not a hotep, but I briefly went to an afrocentric grade school, which is one of the blackest—and incidentally, most hotep—things you can do. The instructors, mostly men, wore dashikis and kufis, brushed their teeth with miswaks in the hallways. Like Q-Tip, they were Muslim. But unlike Q-Tip, they were varying combinations of Sufi, Five Percenter, Prislam and/or Nation of Islam.
"You know why they call the projects the projects, right?" Mr. Hall Monitor would ask at least once a semester. "Because projects never end! And the end result is AIDS!"
"Don’t worry about Tuesday’s exam, black people work well under pressure! Your ancestors would not sweat an exam!" the Social Studies teacher would say.
"Thank you indubitably for your notions!" my boxing instructor would thesaurus to me like Oswald Bates' "In Living Color" sketch.
Jill Scott: "The Thickness"
Today, I’m often reminded of hoteps from less benevolent sources like the men in select cities who look at me like I’m singing Jill Scott’s "The Thickness" at the top of my lungs, drawing attention to the flesh around my lungs; the flesh of thickness that makes hoteps see me as a time-traveling alien Queen who built the pyramids. Hoteps are usually shaped like rulers, avocados or condom packages but somehow they want every women—their queens, as deemed by whatever God they worship—to have birthing hips, tiny waists, full breasts and an ass that won’t quit nearly as much as they do.
These men call me "Nubian Princess" or "African Queen" or "thick", but they do not know me. They do not see me, at least not the way I see them. I know a hotep’s aura: incense, belly button lint and the spirit of crickets who were slam poets in a previous life.
Hotep: "Everyday Is a Struggle"
In "Everyday Is a Struggle", Hotep takes his soothing, muddled ode to black poverty and makes a trash video. Hotep, who is in a power struggle with his own hairline (hence, the hat), feels a lot for himself and for the black proletariat.
Black love is represented as a pregnant, bald-headed black woman and dreadlocks-having black man. Their refrigerator is empty but they’re full of black love, enough love for Hotep to jam out on his stoop.
But not enough love for Hotep to not lose his shit next to a fence and check out a heavyset blonde white girl. So much for black love.
Later, Hotep and his boo go to Ashley Furniture. If you glance too quickly, you might think it says Ashy Furniture, but no, it definitely says Ashley Furniture.
"I think I need a hug y’all!" is a real lyric in the song. So is: "What happened to my ancestors’ dream?!" So many questions but Hotep doesn’t have the answers. None of us do. I certainly don’t.