The Nashville Film Festival has excelled at showcasing the best music documentaries, and one of this year's bombshells is "Beyond Beats and Rhymes: A Hip-Hop Head Weighs In On Manhood In Hip-Hop Culture." It not only asked questions I've been asking for years about hip-hop (especially gansta rap), it demanded answers in a powerful, undeniable voice, and it even answered a few. The director, Byron Hurt, attended the screening and spoke with an audience who seemed as spellbound as I was.
Hurt is an insider challenging hip hop culture's moral compass, perhaps not the first, but certainly a credible one...
The Nashville Film Festival has excelled at showcasing the best music documentaries, and one of this year's bombshells is "Beyond Beats and Rhymes: A Hip-Hop Head Weighs In On Manhood In Hip-Hop Culture." It not only asked questions I've been asking for years about hip-hop (especially gansta rap), it demanded answers in a powerful, undeniable voice, and it even answered a few. The director, Byron Hurt, attended the screening and spoke with an audience who seemed as spellbound as I was.
Hurt is an insider challenging hip hop culture's moral compass, perhaps not the first, but certainly a credible one. He goes places and talks to people few of us could. He's young enough to reach young people, and his film has a pace and feel that can't be dismissed by youth feigning boredom. They're going to watch this and they're going to come away changed, conflicted, moved. He also takes it on with the training of and from the point of view of a male mentor/educator who specializes in dealing with violence against women. He does not make musical judgments, and while I'd find that very difficult to do, his silence on this subject makes his film that much stronger. He definitely deals with the lyrical content, the message, the image, and the lifestyle of hip-hop. But he refused to say A Tribe Called Quest is fine, ennobling music while 50 Cent's is bad, though I think he'd agree with that statement.
What he proves fairly decisively for me is that the music and entertainment business is taking a bad social situation and making it immensely worse. Record executives' amoral posture of merely responding to demand is despicable, and Hurt shows even black moguls like Russell Simmons and BET chief Robert Johnson (the irony scares me) simply walking away from his perfectly sensible questions about violence and hypermasculinity in and around the music. Hurt meets numerous young wannabe rappers slinging the most vile and juvenile bullshit and then gets them to admit that their bile is not them, merely a front in a desperate ploy to get a record deal. Nothing but gansta will get you in the door of the major labels they all say.
Final note: The film reminded me how upset I am about music critics' complicity in the degradation of hip-hop music. En masse, they failed to notice the turn from genuine expression and reflective art toward blunt, bunk commerce. I can't peg that to a date or an artist, but just Sunday Kalefa Sanneh wrote this paean to New Orleans rappers like Juvenile, hinged largely on his commercial success. I'd point you to my post on Nik Coen's book Triksta for a different perspective - that New Orleans rap like rap in its other hotbeds is as impoverished as the neighborhoods from which it comes.
CPH
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