Wanted: Hip Hop. For the murder of Christianity
When Common and John Legend performed Glory, the song that won the Academy Award in 2015 for Best Song (it was from the film Selma, about the human rights struggle in the fifties and sixties led by Martin Luther King Jr.), there was a feeling that Hip Hop, initially a voice for the maligned black community in New York, had found its roots again. Their powerful performance brought the audience to tears, and served as a reminder that the struggle for equality continues.
After nearly two decades of bad press, gang connotations and an apparent ‘lionization‘ of what can only be termed as decadence and excess, it is understandable that hip hop has received a bad reputation. It is going through a form of renaissance, a return to its roots, when it was used as a conscientious tool for exposing the way black people were second class citizens. Songs like Glory serve to remind us that this was never what hip hop was about.
Bill O’Reilly, that defender of American “core values”, recently launched into a diatribe about how hip hop has been a major contributor to the decline of Christianity in America.
Rapper and black civil rights activist Killer Mike (aka Michael Render), however, issues a riposte worthy of a presidential candidate during a debate on Real Talk with Bill Maher (sans the colourful language) where he encapsulates hip hop as thus:
“Rap, graffiti, break dancing, DJ-ing and entrepreneurship: What it did was give poor kids the opportunity to organize as an alternative to violence,” Killer Mike said. “At our core, hip-hop, every time you see a successful rapper, you’re seeing a job creator in the community.”
It is ludicrous to look at any art form and attribute it to any kind of social disobedience or immorality. Art is simply a reflection of society, holding a mirror up for us to see ourselves; whether or not we like what we see, it is what it is. Hip Hop is not about cursing or flaunting wealth. Neither is it about murder or drugs or violence.
Johnson Juma of verse5ve, a christian Hip Hop Group that is making serious waves in the Kenyan music scene, believes that O’Reilly’s comments were misplaced. “Hip Hop, like any other form of art, is simply a matter of perception. It can be corrupted but there is no way it can be blamed for the deterioration of morals. Hip Hop is a powerful medium for telling stories that would otherwise not be told, or heard.”
Take Kenya, for instance. Ukoo Flani, K-South, Jua Cali and the other Kenyan rap legends may have rapped about drugs, poverty and sex. But rather than advocate it, they are simply serving as town criers, informing the wider world what is truly going on in the less privileged parts of Nairobi and Kenya as a whole. The esteemed Mr. O’Reilly is making a generalized statement that has little basis in reality. It is difficult for this man, an old, white republican man ever sitting down to truly listen to a Nas album, or bumping to a Jay Z beat in his car. Where he draws his seemingly highly informed opinion is anyone’s guess.
Heavy Metal Music has long been associated with Satanism and hedonism, though the reality is that this was a sub-culture that simply embraced a different lifestyle and had little if anything at all to do with any form of organized religion. Killer Mike’s response captures perfectly what people who think like O’Reilly should know -art and culture are a mirror of society and certainly not the driver of what society should accept as morality. People are smart enough to make their own choices and art and culture should not be seen as drivers of morality by any definition.
