Welcome to The Tipping Point, URB.com’s new monthly hip-hop column. What exactly is The Tipping Point, you ask? In 2000, author Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. In the book Gladwell detailed puzzling sociological changes that mark everyday life. Tipping points, he wrote, are “the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.” Today, Gladwell’s dictum applies more than ever to hip-hop. Though the culture has always been in transition—really, it has never stopped evolving—I believe rap, in all its dot com and digital single glory, is at a musical boiling point; a point in which any one rapper, any one single, or any one album can completely change the current state of affairs (what up Drake!). But, to be clear, The Tipping Point isn’t just about big names, big singles, or big albums—change comes from everywhere, be it Nipsey Hussle’s renegade rhymes, Bobby Ray’s (or it is B.o.B?) neon ingenuity, Proton’s syrupy poetics, or the black pearl reserve of lady duo Nola Darling (and you thought female rappers were extinct). Change is bottom up, and, in a way, this column is dedicated to those who fight to impact the hip-hop landscape with innovation and intimacy and unflinching heroics. Hip-hop has long been awash in melodramatic mediocrity—the clich
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