Last winter, a rapper whom most people haven’t heard of posted a photo on his Instagram account showing a black male model walking down a runway in a colorful skirt. In the caption, the rapper made a disapproving reference to Kanye West, implying that if it wasn’t for the flamboyant fashion sense that West had been exhibiting of late—he had performed on television in a black leather skirt by Givenchy—black men would not be going around dressed like this. The post was tagged “half a fag.”

The Instagram account belonged to Lord Jamar, who is forty-five years old and a member of the group Brand Nubian, which peaked more than twenty years ago but continues to command respect among fans of nineties-era underground rap. As a solo artist, Lord Jamar had struggled: after putting out one album, in 2006, he tried to fund a follow-up on Kickstarter, in 2012, but raised less than a quarter of his ten-thousand-dollar goal. Whatever his past glories—Brand Nubian’s 1990 début, “One for All,” is considered a classic by some—Jamar had become a largely irrelevant figure in contemporary hip-hop. But then there was the Instagram post, followed shortly after by the release of a song called “Lift up Your Skirt,” in which Jamar attacked West for his wardrobe and for generally being the “pioneer of this queer shit” in hip-hop. The track did its job. Suddenly he was being asked to sit for interviews and expound on everything he believed was wrong with modern rap—not just the fashion stuff but the general softening of the culture, as well as the infiltration of the genre by white artists.

“You can’t just arrogantly wear whatever the fuck you want to wear on some ‘self-expression’ bullshit,” Jamar said in a clip posted on VladTV, a popular hip-hop-themed YouTube channel. “Because in order to preserve a culture there are certain guidelines and boundaries that have to be there.” Jamar’s incendiary comments, informed in part by his beliefs as a member of the Five Percenters, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam, made for great copy. A little more than a year later, he has become hip-hop’s most prominent reactionary: a fierce defender of “traditional” values in rap at a moment when the genre, and the increasingly diverse culture that has grown up around it, is changing rapidly. While established artists like Drake and Kanye join younger up-and-comers like Chance the Rapper, Chief Keef, and Young Thug in pushing the boundaries of what hip-hop can sound like and rejecting old ideas about how rappers should be expected to act, Lord Jamar has become a spokesman for frustrated fans who long for more straightforward times. “I’m that voice of what hip-hop used to be,” Jamar said in a recent phone interview, from his home in New York City. “I think I represent the hip-hop conservatives. And I use the word ‘conservative’ in the sense of conservation: I’m trying to conserve hip-hop and its essence.”

Asked whether he has any sympathy for artists who are driven to chart their own path instead of following their predecessors, Jamar responded with ambivalence. “I have no problems with pushing boundaries,” he said. “But everything has its limits. How far do you go with this pushing of boundaries before you’ve turned it into something else? That’s what I want to know. How much water can you add into the whiskey before you no longer get drunk?”

It’s lines like this that have made Jamar a phenomenon on rap blogs and social media since he first appeared on VladTV, where his gifts as a provocateur have been harnessed to great effect by the site’s proprietor and viral mastermind, Vladimir Lyubovny. Vlad, as he is known, is a Russian immigrant whose family moved from Kiev to California to escape Soviet anti-Semitism in the late seventies. Since last February, he has conducted multiple interviews with Jamar for VladTV, and has made a point of asking other rappers to respond to his comments, knowing that their reactions will generate even more headlines.

Through these interviews—which Lyubovny chops up into short, shareable clips and rolls out one by one over the course of several weeks—the former computer programmer has almost single-handedly put Jamar at the center of the hip-hop culture wars. “He’ll come in and do a crazy interview and it’ll do big numbers,” Lyubovny said last weekend, from Los Angeles. “I’ve made Jamar into an Internet celebrity.” Jamar thinks of it differently. “Vlad’s been like my distributor, basically,” he said. “He’s the distributor of the message.”

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The notion of bringing hip-hop back to its roots is nothing new: every few years, it seems, someone will get on a soapbox and proclaim that things have gotten out of hand, and that a return to basics is urgently needed. Lately we’ve been hearing this not just from Lord Jamar but from fans of self-consciously “lyrical” rappers like Kendrick Lamar and the young nineties nostalgist Joey Bada$$. But for Jamar the problem goes deeper than aesthetics: what he sees when he looks out at the contemporary hip-hop landscape is a culture that’s in the process of being stolen from the people who created it. Kanye’s skirt, as he sees it, is the result of a long-running campaign to make rap more palatable to the white people who listen to it.

“To the average white person, a strong black man is scary,” Jamar told VladTV in an interview last year. “So what do we do? Let’s feminize him, emasculate him, sissify him, to make us feel more comfortable.” More recently, he was quoted saying that the way things were going—with Macklemore winning the Grammy for Rap Album of the Year, and other white artists, like Mac Miller and Action Bronson, being embraced by critics and fans who don’t even seem to notice their race—it wouldn’t be long before it starts to “seem odd for a black man to do hip-hop.”

“At the end of the day, it’s another hijacking of the genre, which we’ve seen in history time and time again,” Jamar said when we spoke on the phone. “Look, it happened in rock and roll. It happened with jazz. Twenty years from now, we’re gonna have the equivalent of Kenny G rapping. Because Kenny G is jazz now! So we’re gonna have some Kenny G-type rappers, and it’s gonna be a white dude with balding hair, in a suit, doing it at the lounge in Vegas.”

If this strikes you as paranoid or cartoonishly unlikely, consider that white rappers have been proliferating and finding great success, while an abominable genre known as “frat rap,” which consists mostly of college-age white guys in baseball hats rapping for other white guys at house parties, has blossomed into a full-scale subculture. “It’s like they’ve circumvented us,” Jamar said recently on the Combat Jack Radio Show. “Before you had Eminem, but he wanted the approval of black people—he looked up to black artists, and he busted his ass to get that approval respectfully.… Now you’re getting into a generation of white m.c.s who worship just white m.c.s, and have an audience of just white people.”