Ask any head, ‘how did you fall in love with hip hop?’ and they will explain that hip hop fell in love with them. Hip hop finds you and when you are chosen you can only act on the omens and follow your personal legend. Hip hop speaks to and for the people. It is a language that the youth can relate to. It is a language of the streets. It is a language of love, and thus, hip hop is a language of the universe. Hip hop first found me in what was possibly its least pure form. I must have been 5 years old when I owned tapes by MC Hammer and Kris Kross. Although these are not the greatest examples of hip hop’s creative potential, if it had not been for this early commercialization of a profound underground culture, I may not have been introduced to hip hop until years later. I wrote my first raps around the same time I wrote my first poems and short stories, and so hip hop, poetry and literature were tied and co-existed in my life from the beginning. I was eight or nine years old and the catalyst that brought about this sudden need for creative and emotional expression was the divorce of my parents. Writing for me, as for many, was and continues to be life therapy. I was blessed to know (or at least have some idea of) what I loved and wanted to do at a very young age. Still, rapper seems an unrealistic career choice One might ask what do I really have to rap about, but I manage to find inspiration just as hip hop found me, and so I remain juxtaposed deep in the culture. As I matured, I grew closer to hip hop and proceeded to study and write both poetry and prose. It became obvious that the hip hop music that is often condemned for its ‘vulgarity’ could just as easily be applauded for its eloquence. For instance, in Grade 7 English class when I was introduced to the poetic devices, I immediately found these devices in the music I was listening to and sure enough such devices as alliteration, metaphor and allusion began to appear in my own lyrics. I began experimenting with rhyme schemes and over time I learned to develop more complicated patterns of rhythm and rhyme.