Well I could stand prophecy to that, I work at Circuit City evening shift, in the entertainment division, to promote the new klipsch speakers we had a library of songs, loaded up on xm radio, the dj was playing all the latest ish, no one in the store wasn't even rocking even though the speakers were tight, but when the dj flipped to slick rick's walk on by, heads were rocking, no offense but even the white folks at the store were drumming on the shelves to the beat and they knew the words line for line,
It was an amazing to see the power hip hop had when it was real, the energy was just amazing even though the songs were a decade old, they still felt just like yesterday.
But to add my 2 cents, I believe (real) Hip Hop has died because of us - the new generation - we support music thats not music. We pay artiste money by rocking to songs bout violence, low morale to women, and songs that are not even songs ex."wat da hook gon be". So in turn by doing so, we make it easy for artistes to get that money or to get that big hit cuz its so easy. So, I believe it is not the artiste that is to blame, they only give us what we wanna hear, and if it is crap we want, they give us crap, So at some point only when we choose to stop listening and seeking out those rare gems and promoting them, Then and only then we will get our "gems" back.