Hip hop, the boardroom, and the street

Dan Little writes Hip hop, the boardroom, and the street.

Hurt asks penetrating questions about the relationship between the street, the music industry, and youth culture. The documentary takes on a powerful strand of popular culture and the pop culture industry that creates it and undertakes to piece together an interpretation of the meanings this system of lyrics and images has. Hurt wants to know how this medium influences the young men and women who follow it. But he also asks how the content of the medium itself is shaped by the profit imperatives of the music industry. And it becomes clear that this is a complicated mix of commercial interests and some young men’s distorted ideas of masculinity.

This is real social criticism, in the Frankfurt School sense. The documentary raises a crucial question: Why is it that the music industry gives the lucrative contracts to the most violent, misogynist, and degrading rappers? And why has it been increasingly difficult for more radical and critical bloggers to get contracts and distribution in the past fifteen years? A young rapper offers a striking theory: it is preferable for white America to have hip hop music glorifying violence and sex in the hood than the messages of anti-racism and class-sensitized anger that are found in Public Enemy.

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This is a complex set of issues, with causation going in many directions. The commercial interests of the major music companies drive the content of the videos and recordings; the content of the music influences the behavior and practice of young men and women in the neighborhoods; events in the street reflect back into the content of hip hop art; and realities in the neighborhoods are determined by the larger structures of power and race in our society. It is possible to see the formative power of popular culture on behavior; the media on popular culture; the business of music on the content of popular culture; the extreme behaviors that seem to result on the street; and the ideological forces that permeate all of this.

Emphasis Mine

Here we have a genuine popular art-form based on egalitarism and meritocracy moulded into a sexist and racist form by the Capitalist system for inclusion into the ideological superstructure. The purpose is to divide us and to distract us from the real problems.

Instead of the anger of young black men being directed against the Capitalist system and its agents, commercial hip-hop is being used to direct that anger against each other, and against women. It also serves to frighten white people.

And to whom do we turn we are frightened by angry black men? The system that created that violence in the first place. They both create the need and fill the need. Just like the case of Isalmophobia: they create radicalised Muslims, and use them to frighten the rest of us. And, of course, they have the only solution.

We need to break this cycle of violence that Capitalism creates and feeds on. We need to become masters of our destiny instead of being continually frightened by the bogeymen created by the system.