It takes an ex-football star with righteous macho credentials to lean into the camera and confess to being “conflicted about the music I love.”
Jock-turned-activist filmmaker Byron Hurt tackles the sexist, violent, homophobic side of the music he grew up on in a surprisingly personal film that pushes fellow fans of hip-hop to think again.
Just because his film is airing on PBS doesn’t mean it’s a finger-wagging put-down from overeducated critics outside rap culture. “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” is a smart, caring critique. It will be broadcast on “Independent Lens” at 10 p.m. Tuesday on Rocky Mountain PBS (Denver’s KRMA-Channel 6).
Hip-hop is now so mainstream, it was surprising the genre didn’t dominate last week’s Grammy Awards as usual. Hip-hop is so much a part of modern consumer culture, it’s the soundtrack to endless car commercials, the background noise at the mall.
But, going on 30 years old, hip-hop has evolved to celebrate a certain tough-guy posturing that celebrates violence. Some say it promotes “black death.”
“You’re nobody till somebody kills you,” as Notorious B.I.G. said (before being killed by gunshots at age 24). And for a generation, this branch of music has served to cement negative stereotypes in the minds of outsiders and those who relish rap culture.
This is a conversation that’s been going on, often in heated debate, on college campuses across the country. Hurt’s independent film, hailed at Sundance, brings the discussion to a wider/whiter audience.
Machismo hyperbole
Setting out on a personal journey, Hurt wants answers to nagging questions: Why the pervasive misogyny and homophobia in hip-hop?
Why is the all-American hyper-masculine ideal taken to such a laughable extreme in rap culture?
Who is to blame for co-opting the African-American self-image, and what’s being done, in more recent hip-hop artistic trends, to stop the self-deprecation?
Hurt makes the case that hip-hop’s emphasis on hypermasculinity has roots in American pop culture in general. The country’s twisted view of manliness is illustrated with clips from TV, movies and videogames – from “The Rifleman” (the iconic image of Chuck Connors firing from between his legs) to Rambo to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s taunting of “girlie men” to George Bush’s wartime cowboy declaration, “We’re gonna smoke ’em out.”
It’s the American way, apparently. This sort of worshipful machismo has more to do with power than race. Maybe that’s why white young males purchase 70 percent of mainstream hip-hop.
But hip-hop’s connection to race is undeniable. In the case of black men, Hurt suggests, the posturing expressed in the Bone Crusher lyric “I aint neva scared” is specifically a role learned at an early age, a defensive cover of historic powerlessness, a guise to deny one’s own frailty.
Looking for answers
Hurt puts his questions to hip-hop artists, including Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Chuck D, Fat Joe and Jadakiss. Additionally, he consults academics, including James Peterson and Kevin Powell, record company executives such as Russell Simmons, cultural critics including Michael Dyson, and fans on the street.
Sometimes he gets smart answers: Chuck D talks about the culture of “black animosity,” in which TuPac and Biggie were “used as martyrs.” Sometimes he gets zip: Busta Rhymes is so uncomfortable with a question about his attitude toward homosexuals that he turns his back on the camera and walks out of the studio.
One scholar suggests that, for blacks, racism and police brutality are still more urgent issues than sexism and homophobia. That’s a theme that rings true and cries out for further exploration.
Tim’m West, a gay rapper, notes there’s “not a lot of love” for gays in the hip-hop world. But he finds it ironic that rap culture is so homophobic at the same time that it’s obviously so homoerotic. Examples of
muscled, well-greased men looking “very thug,” and borrowing the beltless pants-dropping style from prison culture, support the claim.
The narrative follows the money and suggests we do too. The system – that is, the “white guys in suits,” and specifically corporations like Clear Channel that own the radio stations that play the music – is ultimately responsible for the spread of a certain hard, angry, mean style.
Rap with a message of peace, self-respect and enlightenment just isn’t going to win a recording contract, the artists and would-be artists say.
Some artists are aiming for more conscious lyrics, putting more emphasis on the rap and less on the gangsta. But it’s a tough sell. Similarly, don’t expect professional wrestling to opt for a more enlightened, laid-back image any time soon.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
