Hiphop - Is It Really Mainstream?

This is an article I did for a pub called Backstage Pass Magazine down in Daytona Beach, FL. Shouts to company disorganization and being an ill journalist amidst chaos. Real shouts to the contributors of this piece. Czec -



When the Sugar Hill Gang exploded onto America’s dance floors in 1979 with “Rapper’s Delight,” partygoers were still trying to stay alive, but the soul of popular music seemed to be fading with each turn of the disco ball. Twentyfour years earlier, when Rosa Parks decided on that particular day that she was not going to relinquish her seat on that particular Montgomery city bus, historians penning a certain future were forced to adjust their journals.

If we rewind America so that we can see how the past has influenced who we are today, the human side of us should collectively concede that these events are not independent of one another – they are in fact synonymous. But they are synonymous only in the sense that they were both a result of larger forces at work.

Dr. Craig Bythewood is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida. He was recently selected by ABC television to co-host the St. Petersburg Martin Luther King, Jr. parade, and he says that African American culture and hip hop culture are not synonymous in the way that most people view it.

“Hip hop is associated with music and an age group,” he said in a telephone interview with BSP. “It was created by African American males, and because society often jumps on the vilification of the black male, as a result, we see those two ideas put together.”

By pairing them the way that many people outside of hip hop’s inner circle might do, the perception is that the whole of African American culture advocates violence, drugs, partying, lavishly spending money and a subservient view of women.

Comparisons can be drawn to the stereotyping of bikers, rednecks, homosexuals, and ethnic groups – any groups of individuals who draw the ire and scrutiny of the whole for various reasons, largely do to their perceived behavior. In each group, a few can spoil it for the rest.

Bythewood attributes stereotyping partly to human nature, with the media shouldering some of that blame.

“For whatever reason,” he said, “the more negative it is, the more interesting it becomes. Movies, television, newspapers – it’s all there. You’d like to believe that artists and record labels would promote positivity, but that’s not what happens. Hip hop tends to put [the idea] in people’s heads that a whole race is bad, which isn’t the case.”

Dean of Social Sciences at Bethune Cookman College Dr. Sheila Flemming says that Black History Month was originally intended to dispel such views and educate the populace by integrating a race’s history that was largely ignored in textbooks and discussion.

“The goal of hip hop is to entertain,” she said. “But hip hop is not black culture. It’s American culture. Hip hop is the same as R&B and jazz music – it may have grown out of black culture, but now it’s an American form. Simply because it was born in a certain place doesn’t mean those particular individuals are doing it. We don’t live and breathe different air. Separateness is what destroys a society and to think about hip hop and black culture like that is to keep it separate from everything else.

“Hip hop is a genre [belonging to] young people, and every generation has a rebellious nature. As far as America goes, we haven’t lived up to our decree of freedom, of an equal society. Hip hop is their rebellion to an imperfect society. The negative side you see is not necessarily African Americans acting out – it’s individualism. I think that idea has taken over more so than race or a specific group identity. Young people are individuals and feel a need to express this. Hip hop is a result of the American experience.”

Rosa Parks’action on December 1, 1955, was a result of her American experience. Her decision, though spontaneous, was likely rooted in her beliefs developed as an active member of NAACPand a sense that being tired of something was all right. She was tired from work that day. In the subsequent speech that the newly elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association gave in the wake of the courtlevied fine against Parks, there rang the same message: “There comes a time,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “that people get tired.”

Hip hop’s growth and evolution is a result of change within a population, regardless of its particular race. That is what makes it what it is – an expression of the soul that was fading from the music in a smoky, laser induced haze, and an expression of soul from a group of people tired of their situation.

The odd thing about music, though, is that it crosses boundaries – it just takes awhile before everything that comes with it is finally allowed to be mainstream.