Prince plays basketball. When doing so, he wears a tight, almost sheer, long-sleeved black top, tight black pants and red and white Nike Air Force high-tops. We know this because writer Touré, after a face-to-face interview with The Artist left, “feeling used,” so he emailed His Purpleness and asked to play one-on-one. Touré, a Rolling Stone contributing editor, has also ran sprints with tennis star Jennifer Capriati, swirled 180° at full speed in a black Escalade driven by rapper DMX, and held hands before a concert with soul singer D’Angelo—all to report a deeper story than the ring-kissing or dunce-capping of artists that often passes for entertainment journalism.

“I told myself that I would write about hip hop with the goal of expanding the complexity of the conversation about the culture,” Touré writes in Never Drank the Kool-Aid, his 2006 debut essay collection that reads like a thinking man’s journey through hip hop culture. A prep school grad and college dropout, 36-year-old Touré is perhaps the most visible of a generation of writers who chronicled hip hop’s takeover of America. His articles and criticism have appeared in The Village Voice, Vibe, Playboy, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Best American Essays among others. He’s crossed over to TV, becoming CNN’s first pop culture correspondent, working the red carpet for BET and (this February 20th at 8pm) hosting his new show, I’ll Try Anything Once, on Treasure HD. He is the author of the novel Soul City and the short story collection, The Portable Promised Land.

I hooked up with Touré one night via email. It was close to the holidays and he’d recently become a father. Life was good, and time, short. I took what I could get.

In the spirit of hip hop, here’s a November Huffington Post call out from Orlando Lima, former Vibe executive editor: “I'm contemplating a comeback from retirement because Touré, Wilbekin, Light, Smith and these other public hip hop experts are sitting on their asses while the [Jason] Whitlocks of the world run roughshod over my culture.” What is your responsibility to hip hop?
Hip hop is bigger than all of its defenders and detractors. Neither I nor Danyel [Smith, current Vibe editor in chief], Alan [Light, Vibe cofounder and editor of Tupac Shakur and The Vibe History of Hip Hop] or anyone has to defend hip hop on CNN or Fox or Oprah every time someone who doesn't understand hip hop bashes it. Whitlock is not a serious threat. Nor is O'Reilly or anyone like him. Those of us who love and understand hip hop don't listen to them and those who listen to them didn't understand our culture before.

What’s the serious threat then?
Insiders. Terrible, uncreative rappers, lame producers, execs who just throw whatever into the marketplace, fans who don't love hip hop but buy it anyway, magazines that cover it uncritically and thoughtlessly—they’re corrupting hip hop not demanding quality and complexity.

So Orlando’s being a dick.
I don't think OJ's a dick, not at all. He's got a right to say whatever he likes. That said, no one's waiting around to hear what he's got to say about anything. He can come out of retirement. I'm not sure anyone would notice. I didn't even know he'd retired. Or that he was writing important work in the first place.

Is hip hop dead?
The political spine that once existed has been lost and hip hop has not developed the emotional complexity I expected. You can hear about the human heart in rock, in soul music. Hip hop isn't yet doing that. But hip hop isn’t dead.