DRUM MACHINE GENOCIDE....BLAME HIP HOP??

For the past 3 years rap music has gotten a bum rap. Criticized by media pundits, caricatured by mainstream television and downright slammed by politicians. Its enough to make a person become disgusted by anything urban altogether. Most Americans view hip hop in a negative light, disassociating it entrepreneurship, community upliftment or anything positive. We sometimes wonder "why all the shit flinging at hip hop and rap music?"

My first exposure to hip hop was the "Fight the Power" music video by Public Enemy. The year was 1990 and I was 8 years old. The video touched me because I had never witnessed a scene like the video depicted.....hundreds of Black people marching through the streets, Black power fists clenched, screaming "we gotta fight the powers that be!!" I was born in 1982, and I missed the heyday of the Black Panther party, 1960s radicalism, and the Black Power revolutions of the 1970s in the Caribbean. The video depicted no tomfoolery, no buffonism nor any sexism. Just Black people calling for unity en masse. Fast forward 18 years and we see that this sentiment has been lost in hip hop, leaving many to wonder "how the hell did that become this??"

Rap is a form of music branched off of hip hop culture (many argue if hip hop is even a culture...that's another blog). Rap was birthed in New York city, combining elements of West Indian, Afro American and Latino culture that existed in New York for decades. Rap has always contained themes of social revolution, as well as partying. The Furious Five and the Sugar Hill gang are good examples of this; however like most forms of music (after reaching the twenty year old mark), rap later became mainstream and exposed to the entire world. Whether this was good or bad can be argued by hip hop purists (something I'm not). Jazz, blues and rock 'n' roll all started off as small movements, with Black musicians from the Southern U.S. playing in small clubs to local audiences. Then came the birth of the record industry. Politicians and charlatans alike wanted to get theirs hands on traditionally African-based music and market it to the rest of the world. If you notice the "golden age" of rock music (1950s-early 1960s) began to lose its shine by the early 1970s with the birth of disco, you might be on to something. Rap music went from New York street corners to international television in a matter of less than two decades. The record industry snatched it up, packaged it and sold it. This made some people rich, some people poor and made some people look outright foolish.

By the 1990s images of Black-on-Black crime, police brutality, gangs and drugs became normal television fodder. White suburban kids ate it up. Suddenly manhood became defined by Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg, with James Dean and Elvis long gone. Many rap music pioneers say the music put money in their pockets and took them away from a life of crime. Through all their "reality rap" based rhymes (depicting street life in the most colourful ways) the message was lost on many. Public Enemy founder Chuck D once stated "rap music is the CNN of Black America" and many took that as "rap music shows whats cool about Black people." Suddenly rappers who once rhymed about the harsh realities of urban life became champions who managed to escape the ghetto. The social and community revolution aspects of the music became lost, while other got fat pockets. It became profitable to market Black-on-Black crime and genocide of the impoverished. Rappers didn't talk about partying or the social decay around them, they talked about how cool it was to spray rival drug dealers with machine gun fire and how their record company advances bought them the finest women (prostitutes) in town. Rap was finally known across America.

I do not blame hip hop for the realities created by historical inequalities. That's plain short sighted. In my opinion hip hop needs to be more real about adjusting and fixing the historical inequalities we see in poor neighborhoods across America. How many more years can rappers continue to glorify how exciting the ghetto is, without pointing out the reality that any ghetto is pretty much a socioeconomic trap? A trap that many fall into generation after generation. A trap that not everyone receives a multimillion dollar record deal from. Look around you, people in the ghetto need more than smiles and prayers. They need their noveau riche representatives to be real with what needs to be done to make sure no more ghettos exist.