Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes

Hatip to Lashawn Barber gives here opinion
about what drives hip-hop

by Lashawn Barber

A new style of music called rap (also called hip-hop)infiltrated my small southern hometown sometime around 1980. I remember playing The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” on my stereo before and after school, trying to learn the words. I was a 13-year-old cheerleading, crush-on-the-quarterback-having fan of rap music.The kids I hung around all listened to rappers like The Sugar Hill Gang and Kurtis Blow, including some of the white kids.

I’ll never forget how funny the lyrics of The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Apache” sounded coming from a white guy who sat behind me in math class. Imagine someone with a serious southern drawl chanting, “Apache, jump on it!” Toto, we’re not in Harlem anymore!But that was 27 years ago. The rap music I grew up with began to evolve as people experimented with the genre and pushed it to the extreme. Throughout the 1980s, new styles of music and dance influenced by rap hit the scene, and it all was still innocent, relatively speaking.

Gangsta rap, supposedly only a subgenre of hip-hop, though gangsta rap is what people associate with hip-hop, became popular in the early 90s. I admit that I used to like the in-your-face, aggressive, heavy sound of Public Enemy, but my taste in music had grown up with me, and I left rap behind. In the knick nick of time. (New York Knicks on the brain…)During the 90s, I first noticed how overtly sexual rap music and videos had become. The “fun” rap associated with my youth was gone for good. The new rap was not just aggressive; it was downright subversive. Admittedly, music that young people like tends to be somewhat subversive to begin with, but gangsta rap broke the mold. It was dangerously subversive…and nasty.

One of its defining elements is the nihilistic, gotta-get-mine-don’t-care-if-I-die, fu**-you, murder-you fixation on instant gratification and thuggishness in pursuit of “females,” who are no more than sexual props, objects by which thugs use to get off in the most degrading way.Well, that’s my opinion of gangsta rap, anyway. There is no way to separate music from culture, so it’s no surprise that gangsta rap is a subculture.

If you can stand it, watch a few disgusting gangsta rap videos on Black Entertainment Television (BET), and you’ll see that everything I wrote is true. Don’t take my word for it.It must be time to air dirty laundry, because PBS is airing a documentary called (Link warning: some images not appropriate for children) “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” (and here) created by a black filmmaker named Byron Hurt. From Reuters:

[Hurt] goes on a journey of discovery around the United States, challenging hip-hop artists and record producers in the multibillion dollar industry…The documentary, due to be aired on national PBS television on Tuesday, has been screened to dozens of audiences of young people and students, said Sabrina Schmidt-Gordon, the film’s co-producer. Most critics of hip-hop argue that it shows women as sex objects but the documentary focuses on images of hyper-masculine men and says black youths fall into the trap of trying to emulate the thug life of the videos.

“We are hoping to…challenge that narrow, destructive vision of masculine identity particularly for young men and boys that are the faces of hip-hop,” Schmidt-Gordon said in an interview.
“They are the ones who are dying young from gun violence and women are victim of domestic violence. Our communities have most to lose by buying into violence and sexism,” she said.
I’m no shrink or “social scientist,” but in my lay opinion, gangsta rap took root so strongly in the black subculture because so many of its boys are growing up without fathers.

No documentary would be complete without at least mentioning the utter instability of families in the black community, and not just in so-called ghettos. It permeates all socioeconomic classes.
Continuing with my amateur assessment, I’d say there’s an important difference between listening to gangsta rap and becoming completely absorbed in the lifestyle. In other words, if suburban kids from intact families are listening to gangsta rap and are tempted to emulate the lifestyle, a father in the home and a strong community may serve as deterring and stabilizing influences.

I missed the first airing of “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” but I’ll catch it this Saturday. I want to know what “hip-hop artists and record producers” have to say. Well, that’s all I have to say on the topic. I look forward to reading your comments about rap, gangsta rap, and the documentary.By the way, if you allow your children to watch those nasty, vile, disgusting, and degrading videos on BET, black or white, you’re an unfit parent, in my opinion.

Have a nice day!