At the NAACP’s Freedom Weekend in Detroit on April 26, a “Hip-Hop Summit” brought together performers, music industry execs, a gaggle of politicians and thousands of listeners. As part of the festivities, industry mogul Russell Simmons received a Lifetime Achievement Award, a gesture that symbolized two things.
First, the irrelevancy of the NAACP to address today’s problems in any serious way. Second, the hypocrisy of an organization that protests speeches given by Clarence Thomas, the nation’s most distinguished black jurist, yet awards a hustler in the seamy music business who gained his wealth by purveying filth to young persons.
The Detroit newspapers, though, were beside themselves mainstreaming the event by dozens of silly stories, intoxicated with the fact that thousands of musically ignorant teenagers and young adults buy whatever these swaggering “artists” promote, and ape their dress and mannerisms.
The rappers’ cheaply ostentatious and slovenly clothing styles, their food and drink preferences are emulated by their moronic followers, making billions of dollars for companies that prey like parasites on this insanity.
If ever there was a King Pimp of hip-hop, Russell Simmons is that man. He made his fortune with a simple formula — record no-talent street people, mostly black, who can talk dirty and rhyme over primitive rhythmic background tracks, and mass-market this unsavory swill to mostly middle class white youth, who apparently have no better way to spend their time than to listen to it.
The high part of the farce is when Simmons and various politicos try to elevate this nonsense into a Renaissance-like cultural movement that in their minds translates into an inchoate political force waiting to be tapped.
Inhaling their own vapors, they yammer about mobilizing the hip-hop generation “to change the outcome of elections” and daydream about all those votes in their column. Trouble is, statistics show that most of these dimwits don’t vote in elections.
Similar claims were made in the 1960s — how the “FlowerPowerWoodstockGenerationGreeningofAmerica” youth were going to change politics and the Establishment. Although the music served as an attractive backdrop to the anti-Vietnam War movement, it had no lasting effect in informing politics.
While Jerry Rubin punched a Wall Street timecard and Rennie Davis tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at venture capitalism, the pop music scene changed. Folk was out, and post-Beatles bands became self-consciously theatrical: heavy metal, punk, satanic — narcissistic navel contemplation through a drug-induced haze, pyrotechnics and smoke machines.
When the music lost its power to inspire, musicians surrendered the high ground from which to make political pronouncements with impunity, as the Dixie Chicks recently learned.
Former NAACP President Benjamin Chavis, wanting to tap the frantic energy of rap followers as an “influential agent for social change which must be responsibly and proactively utilized to fight the war on poverty and injustice,” now heads an “Action Summit.”
Fired by the NAACP for corruption in 1994, Chavis apparently thinks the hip-hop music culture is ripe for cooption by old-fogy reformers of the 1960s who, having failed to achieve their chimerical visions 40 years ago, are now trying to learn a new tune and charge once more into the old windmills.
Besides the obvious self-interest of the promoters, what does this culture offer except the fantasy of wealth for the uncultivated and unskilled, who scheme mightily about how to get a demo made of their vulgarian drivel?
It’s bad enough that hip-hop pollution is coarse, uncivilized, unimaginative, endlessly repetitious and soul deadening. Far worse, it sends the wrong message to youth.
Rather than become educated and learn how to articulate ideas, it champions crude and destructive thoughts; instead of focusing on hard work, perseverance and achieving goals, it seduces youth into thinking they can get rich quick and live the high life with no preparation at all.
It is a pernicious, noxious anodyne for those who step into this mire and, ultimately, a dead end. It is time we scraped the Snoop Dogg dirt of hip-hop culture off our nation’s shoes and moved on.
Barrett Kalellis is a columnist and writer whose articles appear regularly in various local and national print and online publications. You may reach Mr. Kalellis at
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