Hey NOVoodoo, what's your favorite hip-hop song? Enlighten me.
Well, that's a lot of pressure to put on a recommendation. That's sort of like saying, "I don't like rock. Show me one rock song that will change my opinion." Where do you even start? There are as many sub-genres of hip-hop as there are rock 'n roll.
I find that most people who don't like rap music always focus on the lyrical content of mainstream rap, and to those critics, you have lyricists out there like Jay Electronica, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Saul Williams, etc. to act as counterpoints to that argument.
Really though, I think that good hip-hop is an amalgamation of good lyrics, well produced instrumentals, and an artist that has a sixth sense for how to recite their rhymes, in terms of their "flow" (ie: a mastery of cadence, tempo, rhythm, etc.).
One artist that really encapsulates all of that to me is Common. "The People," "The Light," and "The Corner" are a few of my favorites of his recent work that I think, when viewed as a collective body of work, really demonstrate the value of hip-hop.
There are so many varieties out there though, that it really depends on personal taste. Someone could hate arena rock but love jam rock. It'd just be a shame if that person heard arena rock and never delved any further into the genre of "rock 'n roll" because of it, like most people do when they hear bad hip-hop.
