Hip-hop kids these days

It took a lot to make me give up on my latest attempt at talking to old black folks. A much-anticipated hip-hop political convention, held in Newark this past June, had rightly identified poor "intergenerational dialogue" as a hurdle to engaging young people in politics. So the organizers set up a town hall meeting where both sides could ask the tough questions and heal the wounds that have kept the civil rights and hip-hop generations at odds. Having spent too much time listening to my own old man bitch about the apathy and depravity of kids-these-days, it sounded like a fabulous idea to me.

I quietly accepted that the event was held in a big, old-school Baptist church, with a high wrought-iron fence dutifully shielding the congregants from Newark's mean streets.

I resigned myself to the inevitable parade of officious, suited men demanding that the restless youth crammed into rows of folding chairs maintain "control."

I even kept my cool when the sixty-something poet Amina Baraka actually broke into a Motown medley while explaining to the youth that their music wasn't "real" music, wasn't movement music.

When it was finally time for the youth to speak for themselves, the MC decided first to allow a word from the Honorable Reverend Doctor Calvin C. Butts Jr., pastor of Harlem's influential Abyssinian Baptist Church. Butts once famously steamrolled a pile of hip-hop CDs in a protest against immoral art.

When Butts finished his fifteen-minute sermon on the need for a moral center in any political movement, the MC promptly concluded the session and sent the young questioners back to their seats. There'd be notime for dialogue now, he admonished, maybe after the next panel.

That's when I threw in the towel.

The version of black youth culture that most people consume certainly contains a lot that is distasteful. Tune in to Black Entertainment Television around three in the morning--when the network airs Uncut, its popular platform for music videos that are too risque for prime time. In a genre that is all but defined by close-up shots of women's asses jiggling in thongs, it's hard to understand the distinction between prime time and uncut material--that is, until you see Nelly swipe a credit card down the bare ass of a young woman.

"Even knowing everything I know," says off-Broadway performance artist Sarah Jones, who has been both a vocal defender and critic of hip-hop culture, "when I turn on the TV and Lil' John is jumping around going 'this bitch is leaking,' I'm like, bitch is leaking?! Is that really on?"

This is the hip-hop my dad and his generation have no patience for. They recoil at its focus on material rather than political gain, its dehumanization of black women, its nihilistic celebration of violence.

They claim the hip-hop generation has sacrificed black culture in pursuit of a quick buck. As our generational martyr Biggie Smalls rapped, in one of his many paeans to wealth, "If money smell bad, then this nigga Biggie stinkin'." And they insist that the kids have blown the opportunities that the civil rights movement created.

This is not a new charge. Many of the same black patrons that orchestrated the Harlem Renaissance--hoping to showcase talent that would give the lie to Jim Crow--later cringed at the work of its most irreverent voices, and particularly at their refusal to adapt their art to mainstream black political thought of the time. Zora Neale Hurston's insistence that race was not central to her life maddened her elders. The focus of Langston Hughes and others on street corners and juke joints drove the black upper crust to distraction.

In a 1926 essay in The Nation, Hughes answered older critics with a line that could just as well have been written by Ice Cube in 1996: "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too."

Today's generational feud turns on hip-hop. Depending on your station in black life, the term "hip-hop" carries very different connotations.

When most folks my dad's age hear it, they conjure BET's bootie-driven rap videos and the defiant odes to drugs and crime of platinum-selling artists like Nas. I'm an addict for sneakers, 20's of buddha and bitches with beepers.

When I hear "hip-hop," I think about the Nuyorican Cafe in Manhattan's Lower East Side. That's where I met Baron, a twenty-five-year-old poet who spent his formative years hanging out with other young, black, and Latino queers on the Christopher Street piers. Baron is everything hip-hop is not supposed to be: a tall, thin, and unapologetically fay brother, with a quick wit drawn from both the classroom and the street. But he's one of a slew of similar performers--poets, MCs, DJs--who take the Nuyorican's stage once a month for gay hip-hop night. On his debut album, Troubled Man, he riffs rhymes about growing up a snap queen in a macho black world.