It's bigger than hip-hop

Today I attended the hip-hop in politics forum at the Denver Convention Center featuring an expert panel including Michael Eric Dyson, writer and professor at Georgetown University. As a listener of “Political hip-hop,” I was greatly impressed with the forum. Dyson explained that hip-hop by nature is a vehicle for political movements and political change. The essence of true hip-hop is the struggle and frustration of an entire section of American society who feel they have been left out of American politics. These forgotten Americans have no outlet to express their dissatisfaction with the social situation in which they find themselves other than art. Hip-hop has become, in recent years, one of the most popular art forms in American society. Hip-hop has become so engrossed in society that privileged, rich, white suburbanites have adopted much of the materialistic qualities of this culture; giant rims, flat bill hats and ice. What has been lost is the true essence of hip-hop; the record companies foist these materialistic ideals onto suburbia which in turn hands over the cash and prompts the companies to promote this form of false hip-hop. This travesty is not limited solely to suburbia; it has trickled back and infected the birthplace of this beautiful art form. The obsession of possessions has found its way back to the very people who created this art to express their frustration in the first place; it has created the kind of backwards thinking that promotes expensive cars over quality education, infidelity over family values, empathy over responsibility. The record companies and their ilk have in effect created a permanent consumer class, unable to escape the desire for THINGS. But it is more than that, hip-hop is bigger than hip-hop; it is about freedom, justice, equality, responsibility and faith. Hip-hop is based on the American dream. Hip-hop has the potential to literally change the way politics is done in this nation. I for one hope it does. In the words of the great group Dead Prez

“Would you rather have a lexus, some justice, a dream or some substance?
A beamer, a necklace or freedom?”

One Love

NH