HERE IS A REVIEW OF A DOCUMENTARY BY BYRON HURT THAT ADDRESSES THE STATE OF HIP HOP TODAY. HE TACKLES THE SUBJECTS OF MACHISMO IN HIP HOP MUSIC, AND EVEN ADDRESSES THE HOMOPHOBIA PRESENT IN HIP HOP CULTURE. CHECK OUT A CLIP FROM THE DOCUMENTARY HERE.
Byron Hurt, producer and director of “Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” calls himself an “ex-jock.” To introduce his critique of the current state of hip hop, Hurt tells his personal story. He explains how he was formerly a football player at Northeastern University and how his life fit perfectly with the hip hop lifestyle. Only later in life, after being offered a position as a gender violence prevention educator, did he begin to realize that the messages hip hop was sending—one being violence against women—was unacceptable. Only then did he begin digging deep into hip hop culture and what it meant to be man. This personal context keeps the documentary heartfelt and fresh, as it also gives Hurt credibility—after all, he isn’t just an outsider commenting on hip hop.
Before focusing on machisma—an exaggerated masculinity—within hip hop, Hurt points out that the violent man is a fragment of the American mindset; he shows clips of Western movies, depicting the American obsession with the courageous, but violent male hero. With this paradigm of manhood within American culture, plus the added pressures within the black community, black men are expected to be tough and hide their frailty at all times. This means that it’s unimaginable to cry in front of others, but it also means, according to Hurt, that black men must somehow be “ready to die,” just like Notorious B.I.G’s album cover suggests. When being interviewed by Hurt, Fat Joe explains that this toughness that must be carried is just “part of the flaws of being from the hood.” Paul Gilroy, in his book Against Race, takes notice of this as well, when analyzing R. Kelly’s “Bump and Grind”; he says Kelly’s “cool pose [in the music video] was entirely complicit with what bell hooks identified as the ‘life threatening choke hold (that) patriarchal masculinity imposes on black men (Gilroy 183)’”. Along the same line, Gilroy finds the rapper Snoop Dogg choosing a dog to personify himself, very intriguing. He explains that it represents the historical “infrahumanity” (not quite human, but not quite subhuman either) of black people, as it is also a sign for Snoop’s victim status or his sexual habits (201- 203). However, perhaps, the dog represents this harsh and frightening persona that black men feel they need to act out—because, truthfully, Snoop Dogg couldn’t possibly call himself Snoop Bunny. One interviewee in the documentary explains that, “Every black man [who] goes into the studio, [he] always has two people in his head; him in terms of who he really is, and the thug he feels like he has to be…it’s a prison we’re in.”
Rapper Mos Def talks about this identity crisis in the documentary, “You couldn’t be a punk, you couldn’t be a pussy, and trust me, they tested you.” The way this male stereotype persisted—even magnified—within black communities, was through the structure of gangs. One rapper in Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn’s Yes Yes Y’All, explains the hip hop scene in these terms; “You had to be a part of something to get respect, to survive…Gangs were so tense that even if you said the wrong word, looked the wrong way, you were gone” (Frike & Ahearn, 35). Conformity was inherent in gang culture; one couldn’t exist by himself, he was obliged to be part of some gang.
Hip hop grew enveloped in gang culture, whose prime values were rivalry and competition. David Toop in Rap Attack 3 directly states, “Competition is at the heart of hip hop” (Toop 15). Toop goes on to explain that hip hop culture was all about my sneakers are nicer than yours, my records are more obscure than yours, and so on. In the documentary, Talib Kweli uses the word “ego-driven” to explain hip hop. Though Kweli is describing the current hip hop scene, hip hop in the late 70s and early 80s was all about battling; to be a hip hop performer, one had to exhibit this tough attitude, this confidence that they were a better MC or a better b-boy than their competitors. One example of this gang influence on hip hop is the b-boy’s Outlaw Dance, where one b-boy would come out and perform and the next b-boy would come out and try to out-dance the other.
After interviewing some of the major rappers, Hurt makes a trip to some kind of hip hop American Idol. He meets young people, aspiring to be rappers, and he asks them why they’re rapping about guns and violence. The aspirants don’t have much of an answer for Hurt and brush him off with a this-is-what-people-want-to-hear answer. It seems again here that the perpetual obstacle is the black man equating toughness and violence to manhood.
Further enhancing this male stereotype is television and media. One interviewee calls Black Entertainment Television (BET) the “cancer of the black man,” because it turns all black men into one image. Though the gang culture of the 70s and 80s imposed conformity, perhaps television has subtly replaced the gangs as the enforcer of conformity. Maybe aspiring rappers rap about violence and mistreatment of women because that’s what television makes them conform to; maybe in their eyes, there is no other alternate character for man. Ayana Byrd, in article “Claiming Jezebel,” explains that there were tons of misogynistic songs in the past, but that “the visualization of music has far-reaching effects on musical culture” (Byrd 9).
Hurt delves deeper towards the end of the documentary. He addresses homophobia within the current hip hop scene. In a revealing moment, Hurt asks Busta Rhymes how he feels about gay people. Busta lets out a nervous laugh and says, “I can’t even comment on it…what I represent culturally doesn’t condone it.” At this point, Hurt has hit a sensitive chord within the hip hop community, and it is obvious from the interviews, the insecurity and discomfort surrounding the issue. Hurt’s ability to capture this emotion of nervousness is quite laudable and representative of an even larger problem within hip hop.
Works Cited:
Ahearn, Charlie; Fricke, Jim. Yes Yes Y’All: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2002.
Byrd, Ayana. “Claiming Jezebel: Black Female Subjectivity and Sexual Expression in Hiphop” Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism.
Toop, David. Rap Attack 3: African Rap to Global Hip Hop. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000.
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