Tonight the film “HipHop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” for which the banner ad is blinking up there at the top of the site, is airing on PBS. I guess it pretty much makes me a shill if I say it’s worth seeing. But it is. It’s well worth seeing!
Filmmaker and hip-hop lover Byron Hurt, after years of making excuses for hip-hop in his role as an anti-violence counselor, finally took his questions on the road—to the artists, the editors, the programmers, the fans: What happened to hip-hop? How is it, exactly, that as the number of hip-hop artists expanded and the product moved like mad contagion around the globe, that the message narrowed and the style became a puppet show of over-the-top posturing and bling-and-booty foolishness?
Hurt begins the film in Miami at Spring Bling Weekend, BET’s annual version of MTV’s spring break. The streets are all mock-gangsta puffery, with teenage wannabe rappers spitting homemade rhymes at the camera about gunplay and killin niggas and bangin hoes, while others grab at women passersby, calling them bitches and lifting their skirts. “Yo, I felt like I was in a real live music video,” Hurt says regretfully. But then something you don’t see in the videos appears on camera: three drag queens, who confess they love hip-hop and even the aggressiveness of the rappers. They also say they’re in Miami getting laid. “That thug stuff is a front for their boys,” one of the queens says. “Then they get with us on the down low.”