In Defense of Hip-Hop

By Marlon leTerrance (NightShade)


I had a dream last night that scared me. All the Black rappers in America stopped making realistic music about violence, sex, drugs and crime. The Hip-Hop community, as a whole, no longer endorsed their culturally rich tradition of fashion. Instead of wearing sagging pants and tight miniskirts they threw on Brooks Brothers suits. They exchanged their Timberlands in for Bruno Magli slippers. They stopped reading Donald Goines books (for those who happened to read) and, instead, mentally swam in the world of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

No one sold drugs on the streets in the black community. Drug dealers humbly accepted their fate in white America and found pride in shining shoes. Black males tossed aside hundreds of years of psychological conditioning and became responsible fathers, opting to stay home and become loving dads instead of running scared and leaving women to rear children alone.

Black women, chained down by the so-called negative influence of the Hip-Hop culture, no longer felt a need to align themselves with the horrible history of their race and slavery. Black women decided, quite abruptly, to never look at themselves as sex objects in the way their foremothers were seen as sex objects by slave masters. Instead, Black women walked with pride and substance, always trying to better themselves.

Black men and women no longer had casual sex. The long, complicated traditions of West Africa were tossed aside, and, with relative ease, the western culture of marriage before intercourse was accepted and upheld. Black on black crime no longer existed. The social unbalance and self-hatred that drove previous black men to hurt and kill one another stopped completely.

Everything that even remotely resembled gangsta rap was taken off the shelves of music stores. Rap music, as a genre, could not be sold unless it contained 90% Christian music. Still, young black males endorsed this change and made only White Jesus rap songs. It did not matter to young black rappers that Christianity wasn't their original religion. Nor did it concern them that it was a religion that was literally beat into the skulls of slaves as a means of brainwashing servants and making rebellious subjects more passive.

Black males and females studied hard in school and grabbed the American dream. They gladly went to college, prying open their brains to the wealth of knowledge that each white professor and black professor had to share. No more blunts. No more blasting loud music out of banging systems inside of overly expensive cars. No more disrespecting elders. No more RAP. No more Hip-Hop.

In my dream I looked around and couldn't believe what I was seeing. Everything looked so foreign, so surreal, so...fake. Then, I walked over to a newspaper stand and looked at the headlines. It read: "All the Educated, Religious, Elderly, Whitewashed black folks in America have lynched themselves!”

Shocked, I read further: "It seems that Educated, Religious, Elderly, and Whitewashed Black Folks in America have decided to end their lives today because they NO LONGER have anything or anyone to blame for their FAILURE in the civil rights struggle. Now that Hip-Hop has died, these "uppity" Negroes have nothing else to point their fingers at or accuse for their race's downfall. Understandably, they CAN NOT point their finger at Whitey, for that is no longer politically correct. So, instead of dealing with their own personal failure, instead of admitting that they sold out years ago, these worthy soldiers called it quits this morning and sought out the rope."

I awoke with sweat on my forehead and fear bungee jumping from my chest. I couldn't help but wonder if the death of hip-hop would, in a very scary way, bring forth the death of it's most elaborate critic--the Struggled-out Has-been.

Take away hip-hop and the ghetto still remains. What idiot started the rumor that racism would end if groups like Mobb Deep dropped positive albums. That's ridiculous. Cops won’t stop beating black folks down just because we change our "sagging pants" dress code. Judges won’t stop throwing innocent black men into prison for trumped-up crimes just because Hip-Hop, as a culture, stops glamorizing drug dealers. David Duke won’t change his ideology just because we change our terminology and stop calling each other niggaz. Who are these impostors (Hip-Hop Critics) trying to con, Hip-Hop fans or themselves?

Maybe the people who condemn us Hip-Hop fans are truly disappointed, but not in us. Instead, they are just disappointed in themselves---for they have marched and preached and died and kissed and brown nosed and struggled and we STILL haven’t seen the mountaintop that Martin spoke about. These elderly, Black Intellectuals seem so determined to preach about the mythical torch that was handed down to the younger generation. But the torch was never passed, it was pawned away to white America, and now they are trying to blame Hip-Hop fans for a blunder that’s before our time. Who killed Malcolm?

Are they mad because, after all these years, after all the so-called struggling, that ugly white monster is STILL sitting in our living room uninvited (not to mention that this very same monster still OWNS the whole house as well as the land outside.)? And THAT problem, dear readers, is much bigger than Hip-Hop, for it was bigger than both Malcolm and Martin.