I am falling out of love with hip-hop. The music that colored my childhood, informed an element of my surroundings and socialized me to a great deal has now come to represent a force too destructive for my collaboration. I can no longer co-sign on its bottom line.
I have come to realize how we all have been its victims. And no, please do not respond to my grievances with the requisite cop out, "It's just entertainment!" or "It's just a reflection of reality." Don't give me that tired old refrain of how popular hip-hop today is not "true" hip-hop for any number of reasons. It is what passes for hip-hop today for the masses, plain and simple.
I suppose I am coming to realize how I, and we all, have been victimized. Somehow, we went from fighting the power with Public Enemy to simply sippin' on "Gin and Juice" with Snoop and Dre. We "evolved" from keeping our heads up and looking for "Changes" with Tupac to "Big Pimpin'" and pushin' up diamonds with Jay-Z. What becomes of hip-hop?
With all of these changes, there are lots of voices contributing to the debate over the present and future of hip-hop. Talib Kweli remarks, "the 'hood needs us but rappers just ain't the right leaders." He goes on to relate, "The label wants a song about a bubbly life/I have trouble tryin' to write some shit/To bang in the club through the night/While people suffer tonight/Lord knows I try." Perhaps most remarkably, rap icon Nas insists plainly, "Hip-Hop is dead."
Byron Hurt, the writer and director of "Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes," a documentary that takes a hard look at mainstream hip-hop's violent, misogynistic, materialistic and homophobic slant, put things in perspective with his film. Around 70 percent of hip-hop consumers are white, yet the statistics show that black and Latino youth are more likely to internalize the music's parade of guns, g-strings and glorifications of gangsta culture. Perhaps this steady stream of negative self-identity is part of the reason that 49 percent of all gunshot victims are 15 to 24 year old black males. Perhaps mainstream hip-hop's unwholesome diet is a part of the reason that homicide is the leading cause of death for black men 15 to 34 years old. Perhaps this culture of hypermasculine, keepin' it real (which is actually to say violent and cold) is behind the fact that black men in urban America are more likely to die before age 25 than ever before. Or maybe it is just entertainment. Maybe art is just reflecting life and never the other way around. I remain unconvinced.
In "Enough," Juan Williams makes much the same argument. He states: "Too much hip-hop has become soulless music. It revels in the pathology of black life, degrades our women, and reduces our men to murderers. With the help of corporate backers, hip-hop does its damage to vulnerable black minds, plants negative attitudes about black people in white American minds, and also sends the message around the world, damaging the image of black people in a global economy." No wonder why my foreign hosts in places like Spain, Kenya, Turkey and elsewhere were surprised to find, upon meeting me, an African American who resembles Tiger Woods and Denzel Washington more than 50 Cent and Nelly.
In sum, everyone is indicted: the mostly white, corporate media moguls who write the checks for the Diddys and Russell Simmonses of the world; the hip-hop artists themselves who don't mind cashing out on their people for a quick and unjustified buck. And then there is us. The everyday folks who eat up the garbage we are given and create the so-called demand for our own destruction. Because let's be clear. The problem with hip-hop is not just a black problem or a Latino problem or a white problem; it is a national, cultural problem that is doing great damage to each of us. I'll be the first to admit that I am slowly growing out of misogynistic tendencies that have caused me to make immoral and inconsiderate decisions in my relationships with women. Clearly my own personal failings are to blame, but what factors along the way influenced my conclusions on such matters is up for debate. Could it have been the songs I blasted in my room, in my car and in my Walkman as a juvenile hip-hopper? I wouldn't doubt it for one second.
In terms of the future of hip-hop, I subscribe to Mos Def's outlook. He says, "We are hip-hop. Me, you, everybody. So the next time you ask where hip-hop is going, ask yourself: 'Where am I going?'"
Don't tell me you are disempowered when we are the ones buying the albums, dancing to the lyrics in the clubs, and not lifting a finger to change things in hip-hop. Hip-Hop reform is an idea whose time has come.
Paul Perry is a senior in the School of International Service
and a liberal columnist for The Eagle.
