When James R. Clark of Better Family Life first asked me to participate in a Town Hall Meeting devoted to hip-hop scheduled for next Thursday, February 24 at Cardinal Ritter College Prep, I didn’t think he had the right guy.
You see, every day I go to work, I sit next to Bill Beene, and he has forgotten more about hip-hop in St. Louis than I’ll ever know. So I tried to back out in favor of Beene.
Then, James said something about my coming “highly recommended.” So, naturally, I asked who else would be there.
As he began to list names of people he had invited, James mentioned the city coroner and some dude in criminology studies.
Oh. Okay.
If the criminal and coroner’s perspective were going to be represented, then I wanted to make sure that somebody would sit up there and talk about hip-hop as an art form, rather than a weapon or disease.
So, that’s what I will do next Thursday. And that’s what I will do right now, to get a jump on my fellow panelists (a shout out to Pretty Boy Orlando Watson, my girl Alice Prince and the American’s own Jamala Rogers).
Better Family Life n a wholesome, do-good group n says that it intends for the event to educate parents that they “no longer can trust entertainers” and also to bring “awareness and accountability to entertainers.”
I am sure I will learn a lot from my fellow panelists, but, going in, I see a target on the backs of artists and listeners. And anybody could predict one argument: that hip-hop is corrupting our youth and at least partly responsible for the chaos on our streets.
It’s not difficult to see the source of this idea. There is no shortage of drugs, violence and chaos on the streets. The streets also boom with hip-hop, and the lyrics are often just as busy with drugs, violence and chaos. It would be easy to conclude that the music is fueling the chaos.
It would also be a mistake. This is a classic case of blaming the messenger. It’s also a strategy that could make a bad situation worse by providing the wrong diagnosis.
If you want to reach the kids, telling them that their music is evil is not the way to go. To blame an art form for social problems will only alienate the people who sustain themselves on that art form. And, if we wiped hip-hop off the face of the earth tomorrow, it would create no new opportunities for black youth. The social chaos of our streets is the bitter fruit of absent opportunities, not music.
Let me tell you a story. Two young guys came to our office one day. Their names are Chip and Pierre; together, they form 1 Dime, a local hip-hop duo. They were dropping off recordings of songs that include “objectionable” lyrics about tough street situations. But, on their way out, they asked me a question: “You still need that staff writer you were advertising for? ‘Cause that’s all we do is write.”
These guys see themselves as reporters, and rightly so. As they rap in one song (and, please, pardon the language), “I’m rubbing shoulders with these niggers on these mean streets.” If you rub those shoulders, and many of our youth do, things rub off on you. Writing about it is one way to clarify your thoughts, clear your head, and perhaps one day escape your situation.
Plenty of folks paid their way up the hip-hop ladder dealing in the underground economy n drugs, sex n yet now make their paper solely through music. You can literally rap your way off the streets and out of crime, if you are lucky.
As Chingy spits, “I grew up on the North Side, where cats robbed me alive. Had me banging and drug selling, on my way to being a felon.”
Does he glorify crime by telling us this? I don’t see the glory. I say he is simply doing what every good writer does: he is writing about what he knows.
Of course, there are rappers with no taste of the streets who try to get on by faking gangster raps. Guess what? They don’t make it. The audience looks right through them.
As for those who rap about what they know n the streets n and in so doing connect with an audience who knows the same streets, they are only doing what all artists, and all people, do. They are sharing a culture.
You don’t like that culture, the culture of the streets? Then work like hell to vote Matt Blunt and George W. Bush out of office. Write your legislators right now and tell them to vote against the recently proposed state and federal budgets that would eliminate many of the taxpayer-funded programs that actually support youth, rather than death.
And fight like your life depends upon it for every single economic initiative that will bring jobs to St. Louis. Kids need jobs, not moral rants about the music that makes sense to them.
I say we should tell our kids to enjoy their music, but put on some pants that fit when they go to a job interview. And tell them, when they are in public, to call older folks by terms of respect, even if it sounds stupid and they write sarcastic raps about it later.
We should do all those things n and let our children enjoy the music that makes sense to them.
If we concentrate our energy on attacking our kids at the one place that feels good to them n their music n then they will shut us out, hard and cold.
And, then, we can have all the Town Hall Meetings we want, but we’ll only be talking to yourselves.
The Hip-Hop Town Hall Meeting, co-sponsored by Mizzou, will be held 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 24 at Cardinal Ritter College Prep. Other panelists not name-checked above include IsIs Jones, Keith Antone Willis Sr., Onion Horton, George Cotton, Sylvester Brown and D-Stone. Call 746-0760.
