[img]583|left|Eric L. Wattree||no_popup[/img]The hip-hop community takes great pride in “keeping it real.”
Are they really keeping it real, or are they simply struttin' around saying, “look at me,” while the corporate elite have them unknowingly doing an updated version of Steppin' Fechit?
Right down to the ape-like body language?
It is not my intention to broad-brush an entire community of artists because old-schoolers make that mistake every generation. Their ears just aren't attuned to a new and different approach to music.
How They Passed the Torch
Swing musicians did it to Dizzy and Bird when they developed bebop. Many musicians and critics did it to Miles and Coltrane (especially ‘Trane) when they began to push the boundaries.
In the case of hip-hop, it's different. Dizzy, Bird, Miles and ‘Trane were well- schooled musicians with total control over content. These musicians were the best in the world. They knew more about music than a brain surgeon knew about medicine. They were totally focused on the art, not self-aggrandizement. Many hip-hoppers, on the other hand, are young, undereducated brothers off the street, paid large sums of money to portray the Black community in their own image.
While Miles and ‘Trane represented the genius within the Black community, many of these young brothers —not all, but too many — are rewarded by corporate manipulators to magnify Black dysfunction. The more dysfunctional, the better.
Do You Require Proof?
This is not just my opinion, which can be substantiated by facts. Most young people don't even have the skill to create their own music. They must “sample” the music of their predecessors who understood the importance of taking the time to learn music theory, or at least learning to play scales and chord progressions on a musical instrument. Spoken word artists like Oscar Brown Jr. and Gil Scott-Heron were actually poets. They took the time to learn the rules of English grammar to uplift and educate the community with their eloquence. Listening to one of these brothers not only constituted a class in history, poetry and English grammar, they had the ability to inspire the next generation to educate themselves.
Young brothers who pass for stars today specialize in dumbing down the Black community. Their lyrics are amateurish. Their rhymes are clumsy and predictable. Their grammar is atrocious, their message dysfunctional.
Look Where They Are Learning
They denigrate Black women, promote crime and drug abuse, and drag the community through the mud, promoting the position ignorance is bliss.
Instead of inspiring their fans to a higher level of intellectual achievement, it leaves them unable to speak simple business English, which is essential to getting through a job interview.
Not by accident is this not happening. Since the corporate elite in this country can no longer physically enslave the people, they've decided to enslave our minds. In the Sixties and Seventies, the Black community began to move forward. In the Eighties, Ronald Reagan flooded the inner cities with drugs in order to support his illegal war in Nicaragua. That effectively took out an entire generation of Black people. In the following generation, we were left with young people raised by dysfunctional parents. They were severed from everything in their heritage that took place prior to their parents. These young people are not even Black anymore, at least culturally speaking. They just have dark skin.
Am I lying?
Count the dark skinned sisters in their videos. The corporatists continued their assault on our identity by mounting a brutal attack on the nation's educational system and depriving young people of exposure to history. They took over all of our access to information by repealing the Fairness Doctrine.
Taking over the media left our young people vulnerable to corporate programming. Consequently, the same thing is happening to them, and to you, that Fox News is doing to the Teabaggers; it's just a little more subtle.
Is there any wonder why young people are prone to promote a form of “music” that's anti-Black and denigrates the very womb of their own culture? I think not. This situation has not only impacted the hip-hop community. We find ourselves in a community where Black people in general are just as racist towards other Blacks as any racist hillbilly.
Think about how you are treated on your job by your Black managers and superiors. Black people who work for the U.S. Postal Service, for example are treated so badly by their Black superiors they are praying that these Black overseers be replaced by white people.
We have a Herculean effort before us if we want to save the Black community. First, we must stop allowing ourselves to be distracted by all the little goodies that appeal to our hedonism.
We must limit the time we spend partying and shakin' our booties. Start paying more attention to your kids and what is going on around us. Excessive partying is for kids. When you're an adult, it is time to take care of business.
Being a parent is about more than sitting our kids in a room in front of the television set and feeding and watering them like plants.
One reason we often wonder why we don't understand our own kids is because they are being raised by BET, MTV and ESPN.
As I write this, they probably are being programmed by a radio or television whispering in their ear, teaching them twisted corporate values instead of your own.
Consider this. If they are being taught by the media that the only thing women are good for is sex, what kind of husbands are they going to become? If they never see the pimps on television riding around with kids in the backseat, what kind of fathers are they likely to become? If they are being taught that drugs, big cars and bling are all that makes life worthwhile, yet they are too illiterate to get a job, what do you think they're going to turn to?
That's right, crime. Now that, my people, is keeping it real.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet, and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for The Los Angeles Sentinel, The Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.”
Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com
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