Tuma Basa, the Director of Black Music & Culture at YouTube, has shared plans to honor Hip Hop on its 50th anniversary–and beyond– with a new, all-encompassing program.
“To acknowledge this milestone of Hip Hop’s evolution over the last fifty years, we’re excited to announce FIFTY DEEP – a cultural campaign on YouTube that salutes how far we’ve come. Our mission is for every generation to dig into the gems of YouTube’s archival treasury of Hip Hop,” he wrote in a statement, announcing a rollout that began on August 11.
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During a chat with HipHopDX’s Head of Content, Jerry Barrow, the Congo-born Hip Hop specialist discussed 50 years of the culture.
“My impression so far of a lot of the Hip Hop 50 is that the youngest generations are being left out, and I don’t think it’s intentional,” he shared. “I feel like, uh, a lot of this is being framed toward the nostalgia market. Like for us, my generation, your generation, for us, and we’re having so much fun, we’re forgetting that these kids are at the party too.”
He then pivoted to the 50 DEEP program and what it seeks to offer.
“So that’s part of the hole we’re trying to fill with 50 DEEP,” he continued. “We’re trying with this library that we created. We’re simplifying it for somebody who is born in the 21st century and may not know anything from before 2010s even. That we make them culturally curious. We’re not doing a ‘you wasn’t there’ on them. We’re not creating a picture and they got cropped out.
“YouTube is the institutional memory of Hip Hop. So we have everything, we have all the videos, we have every version of every song. I posted when the Native Tongue Decision version of De La Soul’s ‘Buddy’ just got added. It was actually on YouTube already; it just wasn’t on the official channel. Now we have the high quality and also the proper monetization. Everything’s cleared, but it was already on YouTube.”
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About the timelessness of the new campaign, he explained that “50 DEEP is not just for this year. That’s why we didn’t add a year to the name 50 DEEP. It was like, ‘we’re rolling 50 DEEP, we’re coming strong.’”
He added: “50 DEEP is designed to exist in year 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, like into perpetuity. We’re using the birthday as an excuse to make this happen as a reason. It is not an opportunity, it’s a responsibility. This is because we are the leaders. Even if not by our own doing, we are leaders in music consumption. We don’t wanna just do this on August 11th, we just don’t wanna do this in 2023.”
