“Bridging the gap”- Hip-hop life under the microscope

By Sara Steffens
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

Does hip hop perpetuate black oppression, or is the music a tool for ending it?

That was the question of the day at “Bridging the Gap,” a Saturday conference at UC Berkeley designed to unite established civil rights activists with the younger “hip hop generation” of high school and college students.

Organized by the college’s Graduate Minority Students Project, the daylong event examined attempts to win reparations for slavery, as well as popular music’s role in shaping political consciousness.

About 90 people, most of them students, attended. Some, like doctoral student Erinn Ransom, credited hip hop with alerting them to the struggle for African-American equality.

“In high school and as an undergraduate, it really was the awakening of my consciousness,” she said. “I hadn’t learned about Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X, but I did listen to Black Star and they got me curious.”

Ransom still loves hip hop, but now finds herself more critical of artists who glorify prostitution and gang life.

“If your spirit is being dulled by the things that we’re listening to, then of course we’re not going to have any political success,” she said. “If what’s being put out is negative, then what we act on is going to be negative as well.”

Profit pressures seem to have washed away the sharp politicism seen in early groups like Public Enemy, said Brooklyn Williams, director of Our Generations Musical Curriculum, an Oakland program that uses music as a teaching tool.

“We all know what sells in America,” Williams said. “Violence, sex, money and the bling. What movies bring in the most money? The movies that have violence, or bring in sexual elements.”

Listeners shouldn’t believe everything in rap lyrics, said music promoter Sean Kennedy, who owns the East Oakland record store Moses Music. Though some artists write about things they’ve lived through, others base their work largely on imagination.

“For the world at large … that didn’t grow up in the street, it’s almost like watching a movie, and they try to emulate that,” he said.

Dave Cook, the Oakland-based radio host and journalist best known as Davey D, said hip hop’s huge commercial success has not filtered down to the impoverished communities that created the art form. Artists, he said, are lucky to get 10 percent of their work’s profits — an amount from which record labels subtract charges for items such as video production.

New media outlets and independent labels, he said, are vital to promoting more positive messages than those coming from commercial companies.

“They want you to be a consumer, not an owner,” he said. “The name of the game is not to have young black folks like yourself become dignified. The name of the game is as long as we keep you in a certain mind-state, then everyone can make a lot of money off of you.”

Other discussion focused on the recent Bay Area hip hop trend of “goin’ dumb” or “getting hyphy,” which refer to a wild style of dance and the music that inspires it.

Castlemont High student Mischa Pugh said the style has no sinister overtones, but simply represents freedom.

“If that’s how we express ourselves,” she said, “you can’t knock our hustle.”

But others worried about the dance movement’s close associations with the drug ecstasy, and fretted that its very name seems to promote stupidity and apathy.

“This dumb thing may be playing with fire a little bit,” Ransom said. “Why can’t we create some trend that affirms ourselves? I don’t want to speak my ignorance into existence, and I don’t want my brothers and sisters doing that either.”