"Shaking it, jiggle it, yo. Who made that track? I'm asking who Young Leek be."

In Tricia Rose's Essay "A Style Nobody can Deal With: Politics, Style, and the Postindustrial City in Hip Hop," she begins in saying

Emerging from the intersection of lack and desire in the postindustrial city, hip hop manages the painful contradictions of social alienation and prophetic imagination. Hip Hop is an Afro-diasporic cultural form which attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity and oppression...It is the tension between the cultural fractures produced by postindustrial oppression and the binding ties of Black cultural expressivity that sets the critical frame for the development of hip hop.

I believe that to relate hip hop back to the Barksdale crew and inner city Baltimore of The Wire would mean to talk about nearly every episode of the show. The presence of a hip hop lifestyle is never explicitly stated by any of the characters because they live and breathe the lifestyle. They aesthetically fit into the roles and their music is rarely talked about, but is omnipresent. Relating back to Rose's statements, all of these people have been marginalized and forgotten. When the show enters the season featuring the public school system most prominently, it becomes obvious to the viewer that none of the Barksdale crew (or anyone involved in the drug trade) ever had a chance no matter how intelligent they are. The system has completely failed them and pushed them to the outside of a society. To rebel against this society and come together as a community, they have turned to hip hop. It is their lifestyles represented in art and there are few episodes that don't feature a song that was popular at the time playing at Prop Joe's or some other store.

The scene there is so thick that when Bodie goes out of town on a drug run to Philly, the following exchange occurs:

Shamrock: We done gone so far from Baltimore, we're losing the station. Yo', try a Philly station or some shit like that.

Bodie: The radio in Philly is different?

Shamrock: Nigga, please. You gotta be fucking with me, right? You ain't never heard a station outside of Baltimore?

Bodie: Yo' man, I ain't never left Baltimore except that Boys Village shit one day, and I wasn't tryin' to hear no radio up in that bitch.

Chris and Snoop, who work for Barksdale's competitor and enemy, Marlo Stanfield, discuss killing New York drug dealers who are taking their business. As they are trying to decide how to decide how they could possibly tell if someone is from New York or not, they discuss Baltimore club music. Chris drops references to numerous rappers and artists, Snoop confesses that she doesn't listen to Baltimore radio. It seems impossible to Chris, who thinks that anyone from Baltimore running in the same circles as them would definitely know pop music there.

(Watch clip here. I highly suggest you do because Chris and Snoop are amazing.)

Finally, the problem is resolved by another pop culture reference involving hip hop:

Chris: Y'all gonna pop out and pop off. Drop who you can.

O-dog: Yo, let's go all west coast with this.

Anoop [laughing] Say what?

O-Dog: Drive-by. That's how they do. Drop a motherfucker and not slow down. Like Boyz n da Hood. Shit was tight, remember?

All of these references and cultural norms provide a seeming sense insulation and comfort where there was not before. These networks are a means for all of those involved in the seedy and unpredictable life of the Baltimore drug trade to form a community. And while this community may not seem like the most ideal to some, it is all that some characters have.