It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Read Online Free PDF Page B

judged by a different set of credentials—the ability to live up to his own verbal badness. To get down to the denominator, hip hop has come to understand itself in the most literal of terms,” concludes Cobb.
    “I’m trapped between me as a person and me as J.O. the rapper,” Baltimore emcee John Jones, who has just come home from serving jail time, tells me. “When I was inside [prison], I was rappin’ a lot more positive. But now that I’m out, my rhymes is more on some negative stuff because that’s what people want to hear. It’s a different kind of prison,” he explains. This prison is erected by the need to respond to stereotypical and racist portrayals of Blackness and maintained by our cultural obsession with the “real” and inability to see through the traps. This crowds and distorts not only the aesthetic space that Black artists create in, but also the average Black woman or man, like J.O. or my brother for example. Under the banner of “keeping it real,” the hip-hop generation has been conditioned to act out a way of life that is not real at all. The hip-hop
industry
(as opposed to the hip-hop
community)
has been successful in framing an authentic Black identity that is not intellectual, complex, creative, educated, or diverse, but amonolith of violence (only against other Blacks!) and sexism. These images are not just harmful domestically, but are beamed around the world as a statement about universal Blackness. As a student in London I experienced, firsthand, the effects of this global distortion when my Nepalese roommate, once he discovered we’d be living together, asked to be transferred because he “feared for his life.” After a discussion, he confessed that his irrational fears were not the result of ever being around Black folks (he hadn’t), but consuming, in Nepal, the negative images about African-Americans. “I thought you’d shoot me,” he confessed to me later.
    This ethos translates to hip-hop films, as well. Hood films, unlike, say, Italian mafia flicks, are supposed to capture and define what it means to be Black. Take, for example, the fictional film
Menace II Society
whose official tagline was “This is the truth. This is what’s real.” Filmmaker Byron Hurt, whose documentary
Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes
premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, introduces the film with this observation:
    We’re like in this box. In order to be in that box—you have to be strong, you have to be tough, you have to have a lot of girls, you have to have money, you got to be a playa or a pimp, you have to be in control, you have to dominate other men, other people. If you’re not any of those things, people call you soft or weak or a pussy or a chump or a faggot, and nobody wants to be any of those things so everybody stays inside the box
.
     
    So why do we continue to stay in these boxes? Perhaps it’s because of the American golden rule: those with the gold make the rules. So, essentially, white teenage boys, the primary consumers of rap music, spend billions of dollars on images and music produced by white corporations that reinforce these stereotypes. Fixed on meeting bottomlines, corporations in turn leverage their excessive amount of capital and power to produce, perpetuate, promote whatever’s on sale—thus employing a disproportionate influence on our minds.
    This process of white consumerism, which is age-old, has taught Blacks that there are hefty profits to be made by living
down
to white expectations. Many of today’s artists feel as prominent Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Fauset did when her first novel,
There Is Confusion
, was rejected because, as one editor put it, “white readers don’t expect Negroes to be like this.”
    “Yo, I’ll kill you nigga… I’m moving kilos of coke… I’m strapped with AKs, semis, Glocks, shit from Russia… yaddy, yaddy, yah,” J. O. tells me about the topics young Black rappers feel they have to discuss.