The other day while I was updating my account on Twitter, I noticed a “re-tweet” from an associate of mine. For those new to Twitter lingo, a re-tweet is when you re-post something someone already posted, including the original author to give them credit for their post. For the sake of non-name dropping I will leave their account names out. 

The re-tweet was this: 

“i HATE to say it but truly think hip hop had an adverse effect on a lotta brotha’s character development [folks gon b mad i said it]

2:07 PM Sep 15^th” 

After reading this I was positive that a debate would spawn as yes, many folks would have an opinion on this – I being one of them. My associate noted that he “didn’t agree” with the user’s statement when he posted the re-tweet. After reading it myself, I replied to both my associate and the other user with this: 

“not the culture, some of the the people maybe” 

My associate responded that he agreed with my sentiments. The user who wrote the tweet saw my response and here is where the discussion went at this point: 

User @ScholarMan “the people are a part of the culture.” 

ScholarMan @User  “Indeed, so if anything, blame the people, not the culture.” 

User @ScholarMan “the culture is the people!” 

ScholarMan @User “a couple bad apples doesn’t mean the tree is bad.. but I hear you” 

Nothing more was said. Can you really say hip-hop is the cause of the lack of growth of the young men who listen to it? I don’t agree. My argument was that yes people are the culture, in the culture but you can only blame the leaders within the movement for the negative effects the movement might have had on those within it. My analogy was “a couple bad apples doesn’t mean the tree is bad.” 

Hip-hop is huge with many layers and areas and a statement like “hip hop had an adverse effect on a lotta brotha’s character development” is too broad. If the user had said “gangster rap has had an adverse effect on a lot of brothers character development” then I would agree. I know plenty of people who have been listening to hip-hop since their days of wearing diapers (including myself) and the certain type of hip-hop they listen to has helped them much or not at all with their character development. 

This is no different than a company who has had bad management causing the quality of work from its employees to go down. The company is great, been around for years, but because of bad management the employees are disgruntle, tired, etc. What happens then? Complaints are made about the management and then eventually (hopefully) those ineffectively managing the company are removed and new personnel is brought in. So who is truly to blame, the company or the management? 

In hip-hop there are many sub-genres and styles of music, and perceptions of them. Just because a dude who listens to gangster rap 90% of the time can’t separate the music from his reality doesn’t mean hip-hop as a whole is to blame. Looking at it deeper, I blame lack of parenting and sound guidance as the REAL issue. 

Some folks were stabbed or shot after both a Jay Z and Fabolous concert recently – did hip-hop do this? No, the people did. You can’t blame hip-hop.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under essays/articles, other stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.