LL Cool J Receives Icon Award

“LL Cool J is hard as hell.”

So went the opening lyrics to the 1985 track “Rock the Bells”. Fast forward to 2011, LL Cool J is still hard as hell-only now, he is also an icon.

Recently, at the 2011 BET Hip Hop Awards, the forever-young rap pioneer was bestowed the I Am Hip Hop Icon Award. The man who perfected the concepts of acoustic rap and the hip-hop ballad, as well as largely being responsible for turning what was once considered a fad into a pillar of music, no one deserves the honor more than the humble LL Cool J. At only 43, he has watched generations and trends come and go in the hip-hop scene; through it all, Cool J has been one of the few constants.

"When we first started the music, they didn't even play it on the radio in the daytime … Hip-hop was two hours at night or an hour at night on the weekends, and that was it. So to go from an hour or two hours at night to entire award shows and whole generations of people whose lives have been changed just because they're involved with the music, that's a big thing," Cool J said on the red carpet.

The clean-living Godfather of the genre continues to work in film and television, and has authored several books, so it is likely that the accolades and awards will continue for quite awhile. For LL Cool J’s contributions to music, this one could not have come soon enough.