There are few arguments more tiresome than the one over hip-hop’s political potential. It begins something like this: Hip-hop’s turn away from the socially conscious dates back to the early to mid-1990s, right around the time when Soundscan showed that hip-hop was truly integral to this country’s pop music. Over time, as hip-hop became flush with success, the agitating in the form of sloganeering and the implicit politics of gangster rap that were once the norm became scarcer and scarcer.

That’s meant two decades of arguing between people who think hip-hop is a wasted political force and those who think it has no such obligations. There is no right side to this debate. Broad generalizations about the music’s squandered transformative potential overlook the value of hip-hop’s sure creep into every corner of American culture, though hip-hop’s victories do tend to blunt its more incendiary impulses. The genre doesn’t do the heavy lifting it once did, and may not be equipped for it anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s a neutral force.

And any commercial and cultural power as large as hip-hop is guaranteed to have a host of dissenters, even from within, and it’s in that gray area that Killer Mike and J. Cole reside. These are rappers who have been adjacent to mega-fame but never achieved it themselves; artists who have long been ambivalent about making music that hews to the norms of mainstream hip-hop but don’t fancy themselves total outsiders; concerned citizens who see advocacy as a part of their jobs, even if those around them aren’t much bothered with it.

And it is these two men who, when confronted with events in Ferguson, Mo., made the loudest noise — not by making music, but by laying bare their innermost struggles. For Mr. Cole, it was in the form of an interview soon after Michael Brown’s death; for Killer Mike, it was an onstage speech the night a grand jury declined to indict Mr. Brown’s killer, the police officer Darren Wilson.