When radio jockey Don Imus' foot made that nationally exposed beeline for his fat mouth, Sulaiman's grassroots promotion of Like a Thief in the Night was in full swing. Unable to escape the Crypt Keeper-like image of Imus' mug plastered all over national media outlets, Sulaiman needed to know more. A Google search of "nappy-headed hos" made him angry, but not because it was such a blatant racist remark. His three young daughters came to mind first, along with the world where their father's future legacy in the hip-hop arts might be tainted by the vocal blasphemy of an old fogy radio man with no clue to the ramifications of his words.

Rush Limbaugh wasn't the "fat, pill-popping loser" here. It wasn't that "bowtie-wearing pussy" Tucker Carlson. It was hip-hop that was raped of its integrity once again.

"It's a social issue, in a way. It's an issue with gender, but it's also an issue dealing with race, which is the most explosive issue in America," Sulaiman says. "This particular terminology he used, Ônappy-headed ho,' that is not born in hip-hop. It's not necessarily like a Ku Klux Klan-type of talk. I've heard this terminology before and I've heard it from people who look like me. So there we have to answer real questions. Like, is it OK for someone who looks like me to say that about our own women? Is it admissible? Is it OK? It still hurts."

Hip-hop music is in a constant wave of change, be it positive or negative. When controversial urban solecisms are uttered by white folk, the media always blames rap music.

On this day we find Sulaiman's proletariat adventure in a grocery store in Harlem - a borough over from where his brother lives in Brooklyn. Tomorrow, the Rochester-born realist-lyricist will borough-jump again to deliver an advance of his debut to Abi Odun of the legendary Last Poets, whose thoughts make up the track "We Are the Revolution."

The Last Poets' words were often controversial. Imus wouldn't know of their prose because he's the problem with the rap art - never followed the lineage, only used the popularity knockoff to better his cause. He was bit in the ass this time, but Sulaiman doesn't see hip-hop getting off so lucky.

Case in point: Dr. Dre's The Chronic, according to Sulaiman, is "a classic hip-hop album that changed the face of hip-hop for everything that went after it."

"Man, I fear the day my daughters hear something like that," Sulaiman says of the record's misogynistic levels. "It's not that it's just these guys making this music. Or when this music comes on in the club, it's not just a bunch of dudes on the dance floor. So many women - educated, intelligent, beautiful women - they love The Chronic, too. So it's a real problem for us as a community. It's not just rap records. It's not just the record labels. It's not just the producers. It's not just Imus. It's not just the people who buy it; it's not just the people who listen to it; it's not those who dance to it in the club. It's a social disease. Imus is like a blister that's just showing the time of a larger disease."

Sulaiman's message is clearer than most in his field. He's a man with a pad and pen - no glamour or glitz, no mainstream back rub, no bratty mightier-than-thou attitude. A mind struggler, lyric juggler, hip-hop sleepwalker, but most of all a provider, Sulaiman would like to see the vicious cycle come to an end.

In one of a collection of a cappella romps on Like a Thief in the Night, he proclaims, "We need more black John Mayers to win Grammys for singing songs about our daughters / Because we are caught in a culture of defeatism."

Right now the dialogue between cultures has lost any semblance of togetherness, Sulaiman says. In a nation for which many peoples are scaling walls and fighting through barbed wire, communism, and apartheid to join in on its freedom, we've become separated by words. What's right verses what's wrong seems to be a common theme in Sulaiman's dome, which includes a past stint on HBO's Def Poetry Jam.

Here he is, an ex-high school English teacher - a second generation West Indian with an Upstate New York accent - hoping to push hip-hop to extraordinary levels at a time when flash'll get you laid, true lyricism doesn't always pay, and where Sulaiman says, "It would not be absurd for someone to have a song called ÔNappy-headed Ho.'"

"I'd rather hip-hop take responsibility for itself," he says.

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