Fresh is the Word The Bay hosts its own Hip-Hop Honors week.

In the same week that Atlanta rapper T.I. got arrested on gun charges and Chicago emcee Lupe Fiasco allegedly dissed A Tribe Called Quest, three events happened in the Bay Area that suggest the culture isn't dissolving, it's evolving. Both incidents, which happened during VH-1's "Hip-Hop Honors" week in New York, seem dubious. Note to T.I.: Never trust a bodyguard who has the time to arrange the purchase of assault weapons behind your back, instead of watching your back. As for Lupe's fiasco, should it really surprise anybody that the "Kick, Push" guy, who grew up in the ghettos of Chicago, listened to N.W.A., not Tribe, as a youth? If anything, it's to his credit that he sounds more like Q-Tip than Ice Cube, given his background. As the Lupe/T.I. drama reverberated through the blogosphere, the Living Word Festival and the Hip-Hop Chess Federation's King Invitational were busy enriching young minds. You know hip-hop is serious when it takes over museums, as the Living Word Festival did recently when pioneering NYC MC Grandmaster Caz held court at SFMOMA, joined by Oakland's Ise Lyfe and author Jeff Chang. A much smaller crowd than the television audience who saw the VH-1 event got to hear Caz (ironically, sporting a "Hip-Hop Honors" jacket) explain the culture's continued relevance: "Hip-hop is free. The essence of hip-hop is free. You don't need a membership card, you don't need to be signed to a label, you don't need to be hot or nothing to participate." Caz broke down plenty of game about the early days of hip-hop. But still, he had to give kudos to Ise Lyfe, who came so real with his. At one point, Caz took off his dark shades and paid rapt attention to the youngster's story about rhyming for the first time at a postmortem cipher for Tupac during a seventh-grade rec-room dance. SOURCE OF THIS STORY