As expected, Killer Mike brought the knowledge on last night's Real Time with Bill Maher. Discussing race relations through the respective lenses of Baltimore, Ferguson, and the music-blaming Republican goggles of Bill O'Reilly — Mike spoke passionately and with purpose. Mike, like you, thinks O'Reilly is "full of shit" in every possible way — even saying he believes that the true O'Reilly is possibly just playing a laughably delusional character.
Killer Mike, rocking an enviously beautiful Run the Jewels sweatshirt, also took offense at other conservatives' habit of blaming music — specifically hip-hop — for the entire history of institutionalized American violence. Mike promptly schooled Maher and his guests on the actual history of hip-hop, tracing its roots back to the '60s.
Hip-hop, as an entity, was started in the late '60s. All these kids that were kind of the fallout kids of the Black Nationalism movement, Civil Rights, poor white people's movement, Puerto Rican Nationalism movement — they had street gangs in New York, in the Bronx, which were essentially burned out. At some point in the very late '60s, early '70s, these kids were like 'We're going to come up with our own peace treaty.'"
That 'peace treaty' effort gave birth to "the entity" of hip-hop, as Killer Mike explains in the clip below.
