"The Hip Hop Way" originally aired December 16, 2016. There’s a scene in the 1997 documentary "Rhyme and Reason" where the emcee Taz demonstrates how to hand someone a hat. It isn’t enough to merely give someone a hat, he explains, you have to hand it to them in a hip hop way. As he performs the difference, you can see he knows this is over the top, but you can also see there’s a part of this that’s true: There is a hip hop way to hand someone a hat, and it’s a little funkier than any other way. I think about this scene nearly every time I put on a ball cap—a slight tilt of the brim to one side is standard, and like Taz, I know this is both over the top and also, at the same time, serious. Culture is quilted together by the threads of these small gestures; the daily performance of the incidental trains our minds to see reality in a certain way. In other words, the vocabulary of hip hop culture is expressed in more than raps on tape, or ciphers on the corner, although it’s expressed