Essay 3040

From The Chicago Tribune…

--------------------------------------

FROM SOCIETAL CRITIQUE TO SOCIAL EMBARRASSMENT

Feeling betrayed by hip-hop

By Lolly Bowean, Tribune staff reporter

When I was growing up, there was never a time in my life when hip-hop music wasn’t in the background.

During my childhood in Queens, New York, the music was everywhere: blaring from the radio, being performed in the parks and perfected on street corners as wannabes faced off in freestyle battles.

Most people of the hip-hop generation have stories about the time they were first moved by the music. Or the time they started their own group or started to jot down their own raps.

For me, the music was about freedom. It was about disenfranchised, voiceless people making themselves heard through a new medium. The music gave us a way to earn respect creatively by playing with words and sounds.

Before newspapers, magazines and news broadcasts were intensely reporting on violence, injustice, teenage pregnancy and domestic abuse, rappers were spittin’ about it. They were telling deeply personal stories in a clever way.

One rhyme would decry social injustices and express the rage resulting from living in violent surroundings with no access to economically sustaining work. Other rhymes would celebrate dance moves or brag about cheap sneakers worn with so much style.

The music combined sounds from old soul music and beats for a new creation. It was layered and offered multiple meanings.

Artists told us to keep rising to the top, to keep your head up and told witty stories that made us move.

For me it was oh so poetic.

“I live by the beat like you live check to check.”

-- OutKast, “Elevators,” 1996

The music made me groove and pop and jerk my body to the sounds. What it didn’t do was make a lot of money.

Soon, though, the music became consumer driven, and the scene exploded. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a piece of hip-hop. But the songs that were topping the charts weren't the ones my friends and I could relate to. They were fictional -- songs about taking drugs, killing each other, celebrating the so-called ghetto and thug life.

And women were “bitches,” “hos,” “tricks” and “golddiggas.”

The music that had once built us up was now tearing us down.

I felt betrayed. I cut it off -- never bought another recording.

As the music began selling, major corporations were taking notice. The artists who penned rhymes about the fall of a drug dealer were barely heard from again, but the ones who tossed gyrating, half-naked women into their videos were being used to promote products. They had the ears of corporate boards and marketing executives.

Like so many others, I was disgusted by it -- not just by the music, but by the way it was being embraced and financed.

Still, I couldn’t help but be impressed that a former drug dealer who couldn’t find corporate employment some 10 years ago had somehow become the head of a major entertainment company. And that guy from the block was now promoting his own fashion line and calling the shots.

I wondered, why does their success have to come from portraying negative stereotypes and glorifying poisonous images? Why do women, especially black women, have to be the steppingstone to financial well-being?

In private conversations, my female friends and I would complain about the trash on the radio. We’d mock the lyrics and joke that any song with “booty” or other derogatory descriptions of women was destined to be a hit.

But I never spoke out publicly about what I heard and saw.

“What you gonna do when you have to face the manifestation of the words that you put in space?”

-- Talib Kweli, “Where Do We Go?” 2002

When I was in Paris in 2001, a young, white Parisian told me he was tired of “American gold-digging bee-yau-tches.” It was a line he stole directly from the music.

At that moment it dawned on me that this image of black women was being broadcast to the world -- and the world was buying it. I wondered, what is so moving about women getting slammed and drug dealers, pimps and criminals being glorified that makes people pay to hear it?

Though by then we knew rap music was mainly being consumed by suburban white kids who wanted a window into another world, I couldn’t understand why people would rather invest in and promote this view of gritty, urban life rather than work to change it.

“It’s like a jungle sometimes.”

-- Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Message,” 1982

I shook my head when radio personality Don Imus tried to blame the music for his use of racist and sexist terms. But I’m glad that the incident expanded the public conversation about hip-hop's portrayal of women, with prominent voices such as hip-hop magnate Russell Simmons and Oprah Winfrey joining the debate.

I’ve had to reflect about my own conflicted relationship with the music and culture. One minute I’m celebrating an artist for selling a clothing line for $500 million, the next I’m cursing at the radio.

I can’t support the music, but I also can’t let it take the fall for society’s ills.

Hip-hop music is not the reason Imus called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team what he did. If we are serious about changing how women are perceived and portrayed, the discussion has to go beyond one music genre. We’ve got to examine why consumers slap down their hard-earned money for such images. The conversation has to include more than Simmons, Winfrey and the academics who have been shouting about these images for years.

As they say in the lyrics: Check yo’ self.

I know I have.