Film and panel discussion Jan. 25
By Bill Beene
Of the St. Louis American
I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to publicly quote Gil Ford, the region IV director of the NAACP.
He was on the mic at a recent vigil for last year’s murder victims when he hit attendees with this sarcastic but profound truth.
“We knew that when Teddy Pendergrass said, ‘Turn off the Lights,’ he meant go bed. And when Marvin Gaye said, ‘Let’s get it on,’ we all knew he meant go to work.”
Of course, Teddy and Marvin’s serenades were begging for sex.
Ford’s point was that the preoccupation with sex – and other sordid and trivial pursuits – in hip-hop were actually inherited from a previous generation.
Old-school recording artists were more romantic and didn’t croon about sex so profanely – like new-schoolers – but it was on the brain and in the music.
The new school has taken it to level of absolute disrespect, rapping about sexual exploits and producing videos that sell sex with scantily clad, gyrating women, calling their “objects” whores and bitches in the process.
While millions of people subscribe to the music, many people continue to speak out against the over-sexed music and the black male thuggism, homophobia and hyper-consumerism that come along with it.
Filmmaker Byron Hurt, a former fan of hip-hop turned arch critic, has jumped into the fight, trying to knock out rap’s woes with a new documentary, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which airs February 20 as part of the PBS series Independent Lens.
The film is part of a larger national community engagement campaign that includes panel discussions and other efforts. I will rep the American as a panelist for Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes viewing and post-discussion, along with Montague Simmons of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and MK Stallings, writer and president and founder of Urban Artists Alliance for Child Development.
It goes down from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., Thursday, January 25 at the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park. The museum has made the film part of its free Community Cinema Series.
The question is, can this campaign turn things around? Probably not, but who knows.
In addressing issues of masculinity, gansterism, sexism and homophobia, the films faults white, male-driven American cultural practices of screen and actual violence. The film actually blames gun-totting and gun-fighting in the ‘hood and in rap songs on the Old West and shows clips of cowboys shooting one another. Clips of sexy, bare-chested Hollywood gunmen from the Terminator and Rambo also help to make the filmmaker’s case. Real life images include President George W. Bush and American soldiers.
On the sex tip, one subject says many black male rappers treat black women the way slave traders once did.
Hurt uses footage from a spring fling sponsored by BET, to illustrate how
sex-crazed many young black hip-hop males are, but he never gets to the root of that problem. Meanwhile, major record labels (mostly ran, again, by whites males, as pointed out in the film) take a hit for selling whatever sells without any sense of social or human responsibility.
As for homophobia, rapper Busta Rhymes refused to comment on gay
males, which Hurt equates with the hard persona of the youth black male rapper. Culture critic Kevin Powell points to life in impoverished ‘hoods, where youths have to be hard to stay safe.
Much as this may be true, hip-hop – like inner city schools – can’t be fixed until the community is fixed.
Many people blame the music for violence, sex and hyper-consumerism, but art imitates life. Sure, the music may help to perpetuate problems or tighten their hold on us, but artists create from their own experience and that’s what they’re spitting.
For more info, visit http://www.itvs.org/outreach/hiphop/.