I enjoyed hip hop ever since I was a young boy but I'd say I fell in love with hip hop somewhere in the mid-90s('95/96/97 ish) when I was around 10/11 years old, around the time that LL Cool J released "Hey Lover" with Boyz II Men, I was more into r&b at that time and Boyz II Men were at the peak of things and my favorites, that song just blew my mind, I got LL Cool J's "All World" CD which was the first hip hop album. The love affair with hip hop just grew more from there. I started watching a lot of the hip hop and r&b videos on MTV Jams Countdown everyday after school(Nas' "If I Ruled The World", Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise", Blackstreet feat. Dr. Dre's "No Diggity", KRS One's "Step Into A World". and of course Will's "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" were among my favorites at that time) and tape the videos on VHS tapes, listen to Hot 97(which is the top hip hop/r&b station in NYC/NJ area) and make audio cassettes from them, and watch the "Fresh Prince Of Bel Air" more around that time, I had a lot of those episodes on VHS tapes as well, still have a lot of that stuff, converted them over to DVD format when I got the VHS/DVD recorder back in '06, the mid 90s was a great time indeed. Around the time I was in high school back in '99 I started thinking about rapping myself, studying all the flows of the great mcs, I wrote my first song back 9 years ago now April 9, 2000 called "Playa 4 Life" inspired from Biggie's "Big Poppa" 'cause I wanted to impress a girl I liked at the time, lol, that was a lot of fun, I started out with the mc name Phat Teddy then later on I became known as Big Ted. I'd start freestyling and writing rhymes at a bigger pace a lil' while after my grandmother passed away on December 17, 2001, she liked to write poetry herself, it felt like her spirit went in me when she left, I just kept going to express myself and I know that's not gonna ever stop no matter what. I really haven't been feeling too much of that pop stuff that was out in this decade of the 2000s on the most part that the radio and TV has been playing, I would always search on the internet for the real hip hop. By the time I graduated high school in 2003, I noticed that my passion for hip hop was above most of my peers that graduated with me from there, some of them doubted me but I didn't pay much attention to them and kept it moving. The greatest thing that happened was when I got this computer back in February 2004 and started posting on here in March 2004 at JJFP.com, my passion has grown knowing that there's peeps from all across the world that feel the same as I do about this great culture known as hip hop, the real hip hop will never die as long as we're here.