At 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, N.Y., you’ll find an apartment building. It’s a large brick structure with no distinguishing features. Who would have guessed that in 1973 a resident of the building, Clive Campbell — aka Kool DJ Herc — would help discover one of the most contested, profitable and dynamic music forms in recent memory?

From its early days in the Bronx, hip-hop has been an artistic medium made for and by the black community. Pioneering acts like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force and the Cold Crush Brothers combined breakdancing, graffiti, DJ-ing and emcee-ing into an organic art-form that addressed the hardships of working-class life in an almost exclusively African-American context.

Fast forward to the 1980s and new acts like the Juice Crew, Boogie Down Productions and LL Cool J continue in the same mold but complicate the genre with more complex rhyme patterns and beats. The genre crosses to another coast, and acts like Ice-T, N.W.A. and Too $hort come to prominence. Toward the turn of the decade, hip-hop gets a makeover, and the untelevised revolution becomes a distant memory. Guns are in. Misogyny is in. Violence is in.

In the 1990s, an East Coast-West Coast rivalry engulfs the genre. Christopher Wallace and Tupac Shakur are murdered. Nasir Jones and Shawn Carter have it out for control of the New York City hip-hop scene. The Midwest starts to find its voice. Commercialization catapults acts like Vanilla Ice and the untouchable M.C. Hammer to short-lived stardom. Battles and ciphers become spaces for emcees to showcase their talent.

In the 2000s, album sales decline, and “gangster rap” falls out of favor. Club bangers are in. Rappers start singing in order to appeal to the sensibilities of a new market interested in hearing simple songs. Slow whines are in. Crossover acts are in. Lyricism is out. Freestyling is out.

So where does that leave us? Today is April 20, a day that celebrates cannabis, the official plant of hip-hop culture. Also today, industry titan Dr. Dre’s long-awaited third album Detox is supposed to hit stores, according to a video posted on Just Blaze’s Twitter account. With a mainstream audience that doesn’t buy compact discs anymore, how will the album fare? A commercial and critical flop would not only signal an anticlimax to a legendary career; it would also validate the idea that people are simply not interested in hearing gangster rap.

In the National Public Radio broadcast, “Is Hip Hop Dying or Has It Moved Underground?” Elizabeth Blair notes that “young people find the images and lyrics in gangster rap degrading.” Mainstream audiences want to hear vulnerability.

The uproar against Student Entertainment Events’ choice to have Nelly, at one point an enormous pop star, headline Art Attack seems appropriate. Songs like “Hot in Herre” and “Shake Ya Tailfeather” hinge on the degradation of women and brain cells.

Just because, however, the public no longer wants to hear Dr. Dre’s “simplistic pimp shit” or Nelly’s misogynist lyrics doesn’t mean we’ve somehow evolved. The most palpable change in mainstream hip-hop over the last decade or so is simply that, before, Nelly degraded women and laughed about it and now Kid Cudi degrades women and cries about it.

Who knows? If a young Clive Campbell knew how the medium would change; if he knew that people would become millionaires off of his invention, and he’d be stuck in a hospital bed without health insurance — would he have hosted those block parties?

We can only hope.

Michael Casiano is a junior American studies and English major. He can be reached at casiano at umdbk dot com.