Hip-Hop Head Interrogates the Music He Loves

New America Media, News Feature, Daffodil Altan, Posted: Feb 18, 2007

EDITOR'S NOTE: Filmmaker Byron Hurt confronts sexism, homophobia and manhood in his new film about hip hop and where it's gone wrong. Daffodil Altan is a NAM editor and writer.

SAN FRANCISCO – SAN FRANCISCO – Byron Hurt has loved hip hop almost all his life. And it’s his love for hip hop that drove the ex-college football star turned filmmaker to consider what’s gone wrong with it. The resulting hour-long documentary is a candid, provocative look at the betrayal Hurt finds in the misogyny, hypermasculinity, homophobia and materialism that now dominate much of the multi-billion dollar hip-hop industry.

“One day I was just sittin’ home at the crib watchin’ music videos and I was seeing video after video after video of rappers posing and posturing, throwing money at the camera, mad women around them dancing and I was like, ‘Yo, I need to do a film that breaks all of this stuff down,’” says Hurt near the beginning of the film. The result is a compelling conversation culled from interviews with hip-hop culture critics, industry executives, young aspiring rap artists, female fans, scholars, a few transvestites and some of hip hop’s heavyweight artists: Chuck D, Russell Simmons, Talib Kweli, Busta Rhymes, Mos Def, Dead Prez's M-1, and Fat Joe.

A self-proclaimed “hip-hop head” who grew up listening to LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” before running out onto the football field, Hurt explores the conflict that many hip-hop fans feel when listening to violent lyrics or watching sexist videos. The positive, politicized hip hop hatched in the late 1970s is a far cry from the hip hop that is being exported around the world today, the film declares.

Dr. Joseph Marshall, founder of Street Soldiers, a violence prevention program for young black men, and host of a radio show on a local hip-hop station by the same name hates the racist, sexist images of young African American men now being seen around the world. “That’s not us. That’s not us,” he protests. “That is a merchandised image of us.” Marshall echoes Hurt’s concerns, especially the way the young men he works with interpret hip-hop images and lyrics. “They are carbon copies of what they see in the videos; they’re acting out what they hear in the music,” he says. This is especially worrisome, he says, when what they see and hear is violent and sexist.

The film suggests that hip hop is connected to homicide being the leading cause of death among black men between 18 and 34 years old, and that after they turn 18, one in four black women is raped. The film doesn’t shy away from looking at the ways American culture – with its long history of promoting violent, sexist images and stereotypes – plays a role in the music's culture.

The film visits the very places where hip-hop videos seem to play out in real life. In Daytona Beach for Black Entertainment Television’s Spring Bling, women in tiny shorts and teeny skirts are asked what they think about the way women are depicted in music videos. In the same frame, men point small video cameras up their skirts. “Daytona made me realize,” Hurt says, “how desensitized we have become to the misogyny and the sexism and the whole objectification of women in the hip-hop culture.”

The hip-hop industry inevitably becomes central to the film’s critique. On the streets outside a gathering of big industry names and executives in New York, aspiring rap artists handing out CDs are blunt with Hurt when asked why they rhyme about rape, guns and money: “They don’t give us deals when we speak righteously,” says a young artist. “They think we don’t want to hear that.” Later, Hurt reminds his audience of the market for commercial hip hop: 70 percent of this music – with all its stereotypes – is consumed by white men.

Most worrisome for Hurt is what these images say about black men and women and how they are shaping ideas about violence and masculinity today. In his interviews with the artists it makes a difference that Hurt is an insider, born and raised with hip hop in his veins. The result is a sense of a real desire on his part to understand what drove hip hop from its creative, politicized, beat and rhyme-heavy beginnings in the Bronx in the 1970s to the dominance of pimped-out rappers and booty-heavy videos that are the multi-billion dollar industry of hip hop today.

Hurt’s intimacy and affection for hip hop provokes some of the film’s most surprising admissions. Busta Rhymes leaves the room when homophobia is discussed; a Black Entertainment Television executive takes no responsibility for his work and says, “We just play the videos we are given”; Russell Simmons can’t quite explain himself out of a scandal sparked by the way he depicted women in one of his songs; and Chuck D explains eloquently how to turn hip hop’s potent negative elements around: it’s up to black men.

Street Soldiers’ Marshall agrees. Like Hurt, who has screened the film at campuses throughout the country, Marshall says he will continue to show the film as a way of provoking conversation with young black men, and agrees with Hurt as he tells young fans, “You have a part in this. All of you have a part in this and as a fan of the music, I’m not gonna let it go by.”

Listen to an interview with Dr. Joseph Marshall

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