Let me start this post with a little bit of an anecdotal story. This weekend I went home for the holidays. For me home is Queens, New York. I was driving my friend home as well. Now on this drive, as I always do, I listened to music. The entire way there and back, my friend and I both of who are white Jewish kids, were blasting rap of all varieties. We were listening to Kanye West, Jay Z, A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, The Roots, Biggie, and the like all the while singing along to these lyrics. In fact just this week I bought tickets to see J. Cole at the Mullins center and Chiddy Bang at Smith College. Then I watched this documentary “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes” by Byron Hurt and I found myself chuckling when Jadakiss said “after 700,000 its all white people”. I just wanted to put out there the mind-set I was in when I began watching.
With all this said, I really enjoyed the documentary. It pretty much hit the nail right on the head. The qualities that are constantly pervaded through the lyrics are these ideas of hyper masculinity that is made up of hyper mal sexuality and degradation of the female gender through both degrading women but insulting men by feminization. The film did a really good job at addressing the issues that people know are there but either through ignorance or choice doesn’t talk about.
Hands down I would say that my favorite part of the documentary came around the 40-minute mark when Byron when to the Hip Hop power summit in New York hosted by Power 105.1 FM. There he stood outside talking to some aspiring rappers who spit some rhymes for him. After they were done he asked them what they thought about the fact that everybody who spits a rhyme for him is always talking about rape, guns, violence etc… and all of the sudden the conversation changed from the lyrics they were spitting to addressing why they were doing it. These guys are out there, primarily, because they want a record deal, they want to get paid. The fact is that the only way they see it happening is if they rap about violence and bitches. One of the gentlemen saud he could spit something nicer and cleaner but as he said “that’s nice, but they don’t want to hear that right now”. They were addressing the fact that the days of rap where people can drop songs like “Self-Destruction” are fading away. It comes down to what is selling, just as every other industry in America is. Like Chuck D states, “It aint their fault its all systematic”.
I agree with your review a lot. I personally thought Jadakiss came across as a clown, but his comment you used was funny, and telling. Another interesting statistic Hurt used was that 70% of rap is consumed by white males. I fall into that category too, but I wonder why that is. Some of the people interviewed said it was because they wanted to learn about another culture. I think that is a little scary,considering what rap consists of.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering the very same thing. It very well could be just as the girl he interviewed stated that it gave an opportunity for a view into a different culture completely outside their own but as you said that is scary. Not just because of what the content is but also because of the point that the rappers at the power summit brought up, thats not what they are but rather a facade used in order to obtain a record deal. I too fall under that category of the 70% that listens to rap and I find it hard to pin point the reason to something like looking into another culture, could it simply be that I enjoy the beats and flow of the music without reading into some sort of subtext, I truly am not sure because self analysis is incredibly difficult.
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