Love Wool

The internal hand-wringing over hip-hop’s generation gap which pits old against young, dyed-in-the-wool formalist traditionalist against melodic experimenter, New York against Atlanta overlooks a very plain fact: For most of the last two decades, hip-hop’s primary topical concerns haven’t changed all that much. How they’re expressed evolves, sometimes mutating at rapid clip, but the stars of today would have lots to talk about with the stars of a decade ago. Or a decade before that.