Social Media Is The New Hip Hop

by Russell Simmons

I will admit without reservation that I am proud that hip hop changed the language of American culture, and also the language of inclusion in the rest of the world.  But that was nothing compared to what social media has done.  Social media is the new hip hop, the new rock and roll, the new equalizer, giving voice to the previously voiceless, the sound and thunder for social justice, the intimate forum for honest integration, which the new America yearns for, even before it becomes a physical reality – it is what the new America yearns for, what it aspires to.  Social media made this happen.   I watch its progress, I promote it shamelessly, I love it.

I remember stepping off a plane in Amsterdam and being greeted at the gate by a young guy who said, “Hello Mr. Simmons, welcome to the Netherlands.” I had never been called Mr. Simmons in my life. The only Mr. Simmons I knew was my dad. But, I had my first hit record with Kurtis Blow, Christmas Rappin’, and rap music had gone global and the respect we received was tremendous. The year was 1980. 

It was the beginning of a movement that for the following thirty years would connect hundreds of millions of young people around the world to the heart of mainstream culture. With just a pad and pen, hip-hop became the strongest cultural force this world  had seen since the invention of rock & roll that displaced two presidents and effected social and racial and gender change previously unimaginable, in the sixties and seventies. And thirty years later, what has come out of hip hop has become the New American Mainstream and taken over the globe.