'Did Rap Music Destroy the Dream?' - Savannah Morning News
Library event brings discussion, debate on rap music and its influence on America?s black youth
Michael Porter is a licensed professional counselor.
He has seen first-hand the effects of rap music on America's black youth and wrote a book on the subject, "Rap Music and the Eroticizing of Black Youth."
Porter's presentation at the Live Oak Libraries' Bull Street branch on Jan. 10, followed by a debate on "Did Rap Music Destroy the Dream" was a joint effort between the library and St. Paul's School for Boys and Girls.
In Porter's view, rap music can be broken down into two types, negative and positive. "Negative rap contributes strongly to many problems affecting African-American people, even some African-Brazilian people in other countries," he said.
Porter said males and females - to their detriment - are influenced to look, act and feel like the people in rap music videos. The girls want to look like the "video whores," as rappers call them, and the boys feel they have to be like the rappers to get girls like those in the videos.
"Look at the role of women in videos. They are like the prize. Males get the message - females are for entertainment. If I want them, I need bling and a ride because you can buy this form of entertainment," Porter said.
Rap music began emerging in the 1970s and '80s. According to Porter, early forms of the music had none of the negativity that it does today.
"Being hard for a black man used to mean holding down three or four jobs, to stay there and take care of your wife and kids. Unfortunately now, to be hard is to be insensitive," Porter explained, holding up his hand like a gun and mimicking - "I got an AK with a n----- name on it."
The impersonation brings out laughter in the 70 or so middle school students and teachers who attended the event. But Porter's message is serious. Porter said there are numerous plagues spreading through the "village." HIV, single motherhood, diabetes, black-on-black murder, drug-dealing, crack cocaine addiction and many more are diseases running rampant in the black community. He said young blacks are learning about sex, aggression and materialism through rap music and their video counterparts.
"The adolescent brain does not fully develop until the age of 29," Porter stressed. "Areas of high judgment are undeveloped; areas of critical thinking are undeveloped; youth are influenced by hormonal surges. The consequences for sexually acting out lyrics and personalities contributes to early sexual behavior among children and adolescents," he said.
"Rap music is one of the things that helped to destroy Dr. King's dream. Selling cocaine, murdering each other, the Ku Klux Klan doesn't need to come lynch people; we're doing it now. We are killing ourselves," he said.
Debaters from Darryl Norman and Ricardo Newman's classes at St. Paul's School for Boys & Girls took opposing viewpoints on the points raised by Porter.
Sixth-grader Joshua Brown said, "'I'm gonna shoot this.' Dr. King wasn't about that. Kids are influenced, whatever they see they'll do."
Antonio Boggs opposed the idea that rap music has killed the dream, "That glamorous life, it's fake," he said.
What it boils down to, supporters of rap music said, is to understand what is real and what is not and also exercising discipline.
Said Richard Law, "We have a body, a soul, a spirit. Your mind controls. Be disciplined in what you are doing. Drugs, money, crime, you will see these things. The enemy will draw you after these things. The enemy is the devil."
For Linda Marchant, young adult librarian at Live Oak Public Libraries' main branch, "you have to still look at the positive. There's some good. You have to have your own mind, a strong mind. Know what's wrong and what's right. Come to the library and read. Use positive role models."
Source: Savannah Morning News
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Rap music is not what is killing the dream, sh*tty parents is. I've grown up listening to rap but still have respect for women, don't wanna shoot people or deal drugs because guess what? I had parents that taught me right from wrong. In our country all lazy parents do is blame everyone else for their kid's actions whether is rap music, violent movies or video games. In most other countries when kids fukk up, a parent blames no one but themselves and rightfully so.
With all that said, rap music these days definitely is not a good influence on kids. But if a parent is there to teach the kids what is real life and what is entertainment (which I would say 90% are too fukkin lazy to do), they will less likely want to emulate what they see on MTV.
Rap music is not what is killing the dream, sh*tty parents is. I've grown up listening to rap but still have respect for women, don't wanna shoot people or deal drugs because guess what? I had parents that taught me right from wrong. In our country all lazy parents do is blame everyone else for their kid's actions whether is rap music, violent movies or video games. In most other countries when kids fukk up, a parent blames no one but themselves and rightfully so.
With all that said, rap music these days definitely is not a good influence on kids. But if a parent is there to teach the kids what is real life and what is entertainment (which I would say 90% are too fukkin lazy to do), they will less likely want to emulate what they see on MTV.
In with this argument. Nobody wants to raise kids anymore, most of the kids growing up dont even have a father.
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Minus the Bullsh*t lifes great-Jeezy
Rap music is not what is killing the dream, sh*tty parents is. I've grown up listening to rap but still have respect for women, don't wanna shoot people or deal drugs because guess what? I had parents that taught me right from wrong. In our country all lazy parents do is blame everyone else for their kid's actions whether is rap music, violent movies or video games. In most other countries when kids fukk up, a parent blames no one but themselves and rightfully so.
With all that said, rap music these days definitely is not a good influence on kids. But if a parent is there to teach the kids what is real life and what is entertainment (which I would say 90% are too fukkin lazy to do), they will less likely want to emulate what they see on MTV.
agree 100%. it's a shame. it seems every now and then some intellectual pops up with the idea that rap music killed Dr. King's Dream. i don't agree with that. Poverty,Hopelessness and Despair is what killed Dr. King's dream.
Teen Pregnancy,Drug Abuse,Mysogny,Incarceration all killed the dream. rap may have many of these aspects involved in its music but all of these ailments existed before rap. Sometimes people forget because during the sixties all we saw from video footage was black people marching for rights. We didn't see black prostitutes(some which Dr. King slept with). We didn't see drug abusers, We didn't see extreme poverty. It seemed like every black person in America was marching and protesting. Anybody with sense knows this is not true.
In the Bible there is a verse that i like to recite it goes something like this: The sins of the forefathers will fall onto the children. After King died the (which was 1968) african americans struggled with poverty,joblessness,drug use,prostitution and still racism. If you want to look at what really killed the Dream then you can look no further than the BLAXPLOITATION ERA. In this era there were movies like Superfly (a dope dealer) and The Mack(a pimp) and the numerous Foxy Brown and Dolemite Movies.
Do I need to go any further? you all can draw the conclusion to where i'm getting at. one other era that destroyed the dream was THE CRACK ERA. that was early eighties. so who's really to blame?
Three of last summer's popular film comedies—Barbershop, Undercover Brother, and Austin Powers: Goldmember—recalled, in one way or another, the vital, action-packed, sexy, and short-lived 1970s film genre known as "blaxploitation." The hilarious Undercover Brother was a direct blaxploitation send-up; Austin Powers time-traveled to hook up with blaxploitation character Foxy Cleopatra; and Barbershop rekindled the debates on black political correctness that eventually doomed the earlier style.
Actor Ron O'Neal, as Youngblood Priest in Superfly (1972), makes a strong fashion statement.
Film still courtesy of the Independent Film Channel
Now a fourth film, the 50-minute documentary BaadAsssss Cinema, describes the era in the words of actors and directors who created it. "There were no real studies that took any of those films seriously," says Isaac Julien, visiting lecturer in Afro-American studies and visual and environmental studies, who directed BaadAsssss Cinema. "The films weren't well received by the black intelligentsia, but they were very popular with both black and white audiences." The Independent Film Channel, which sponsored the $500,000 documentary along with the Ford Foundation, broadcast the film in November; a DVD release and BBC broadcast are scheduled for 2003.
Two 1971 films—the detective movie Shaft, directed by the esteemed black photographer Gordon Parks Jr., and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a profane, X-rated sexual romp through the underbelly of ghetto life that was produced and directed by Melvin Van Peebles—launched the trend. The Black Panthers required members to watch Sweetback, which, despite its flaws, knocked Love Story off the top of box-office charts for two weeks. Sweetback, so unlike anything before it, stunned black audiences. "In the theater there was not a sound," recalls Van Peebles on-screen. "You could have heard a rat pissing on cotton." Previously, black characters—especially baad black characters—did not "make it to the end of the movie," he explains. "But Sweetback got away—that never happened in a movie before."
Elvis Mitchell, an African-American film reviewer for the New York Times, consulted on Julien's film and observes during it, "In the mid 1970s, white cinema was about defeat. There was Nixon, there was Watergate, and feminism was making men rethink their roles. These black movies had heroes who won—they could effect change, they had charisma." In an on-screen interview, actor Samuel L. Jackson says, "The black heroes were antiheroes—they were pimps, drug dealers, gangsters. But they were all fighting against The Man." Mitchell, however, remains clear-eyed about the fact that the films were made "purely from a commercial impulse—to get as many Afros in the theater as humanly possible."
That they did. Shaft, with its memorable Isaac Hayes score, grossed $12 million despite a shoestring budget estimated at $500,000 to $1.5 million (star Richard Roundtree earned a mere $13,000). Some credit Shaft with saving MGM from bankruptcy. Superfly (1972), a film detailing the urban adventures of a cocaine
Rap music is not what is killing the dream, sh*tty parents is. I've grown up listening to rap but still have respect for women, don't wanna shoot people or deal drugs because guess what? I had parents that taught me right from wrong. In our country all lazy parents do is blame everyone else for their kid's actions whether is rap music, violent movies or video games. In most other countries when kids fukk up, a parent blames no one but themselves and rightfully so.
With all that said, rap music these days definitely is not a good influence on kids. But if a parent is there to teach the kids what is real life and what is entertainment (which I would say 90% are too fukkin lazy to do), they will less likely want to emulate what they see on MTV.
co mother fukkin sign
My pops came from a village in Ghana to homes and businesses all over the world... he taught me the value of hard work and taking pride in seeking knowledge...my moms schooled me to shytty women and all that...why the fukk would I wanna follow in the footsteps of Jeezy???
Not to mention I grew up with a lot of kids 'from the hood'... a few of them were just as capable of success as me...but so far I'd say only me and one of my other friends 'made it', and it's mainly because of our parents...
I've said it a million times before...if 50 Cent is raising your kid, 50 Cent is the least of your kid's problems. I could see how saying the communities kids live in or the lack of male role models would be a detriment...but rap music? You mean kids weren't selling drugs and abandoning responsibility when Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye were who were hot in the streets?
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\\Hondo Pirelli. Curb Your Modesty. Spring 2010.//
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Rebirth is really, really good for what it is.
it's like Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus but darker, harder, and stronger.
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'Did Rap Music Destroy the Dream?' - Savannah Morning News
