A lot of the exercise of embracing identity as a political affirmation is not just simply parked in the question of skin color or culture, but more it is a political affirmation with all these implications and more.

We should remember what a rapper like Tupac Shakur was doing, to a certain degree, who came from an experience of politicization very close to being a "Panther Baby". He knew, he came from that experience of the Black Panthers, and accounting for all his contradictions and process of growth, he achieved politically through gangsta rap things that no conscious rapper has achieved, such as establishing political, ethical, and moral codes between Crips and Bloods in the United States.

MTV and the culture industry never are talking about community relevance, hood organization, they aren't talking about ethical codes, they aren't talking about forms of political organization, they don't speak about codes inside the jails. What they talk about are superficial things.

On the aesthetic level, decolonized music presents itself as a direct antagonist to the traditional values promoted by the culture industry.

Every day of my life I have been in situations, not just in Mexico, in the US too, in which I identified the form of operation as racism. There are situations in which a smile, a laugh, a greeting are racist exercises.

Power, as it is, has a whole apparatus operating that goes about cutting down, closing doors, so that protests, exercises, platforms, and organizations, such as the Zapatistas, can't grow further in the barrio.

We have to remember that the experience of gangsta rap as such in its foundation is an anti-systemic experience primarily. And it is an anti-systemic experience that is not in some cases politicized, but in general results in a much more transgressive, much more uncomfortable music for the structures of power, than conscious rap or political rap.