Walking the tight rope
Walking the tight ropeWalking the tight rope
The recent murder of Tupac Shakur is a great tragedy and a waste of
a young, promising life. Shakur at only 25 years-old had come to
represent a volatile mixture of youthful energy, exuberance, arrogance,
self-confidence and, at times, foolishness. He represented possibility
on the one hand and self-destruction on the other. What mustn't be
overlooked as the Hip-Hop Community mourns his loss is that there
are many young Black men like Tupac Shakur who although less
well-known and less financially secure, are equally caught up in
self-destructive lifestyles. Due to a great deal of misinformation and a
changing economy, their numbers are growing, even as they are being
wiped off the planet everyday. Herein lies one of the greatest
challenges facing the Black world in the 21st century: how do we
combat the dominant public image of young Black men that has
largely been produced by mass media? Tupac Shakur's life and death
is a microcosm of the larger picture. Do we dare peer into it?
Rap music is no longer simply the local, communal form of
entertainment that it was at its inception in the early 1970s. And even
the thriving commercial entity it became by the late 1980s�as gangsta
rap moved from the margins of hip-hop culture to the center�has
already been transformed. Despite the various changes in the rap
industry over the last six years, there has been at least one constant:
rap artists who have enjoyed international fame and platinum sales due
to their ability to shock with Black pathological horror stories and
thereby entertain. Although some advance a musical art form whose
artistic, political and social implications have yet to be thoroughly
critiqued or completely understood, rap music's firmly entrenched dual
role as a corporate business and cultural artform demands that artists
primarily project stereotypes of young Black men as reality. Within
the music industry the belief persists that images of Black men as
gun-toters, drug users, drug sellers, irresponsible fathers, and violent,
misogynists are not only authentic representations of Black men, but
Black men at their best. And although the rap artform grew out of
Black culture, hip-hop culture in the mid- 1990s more often mirror a
dog-eat-dog street culture that destroys more lives that it strengthens.
As a major rap artist who had an affinity for acting (see Bishop in
Juice and Birdie in Above the Rim), Tupac often walked the
tightrope between the art and the reality . . .
Bakari Kitwana is the Political Editor of The Source: The
Magazine of Hip-Hop Music, Culture, and Politics, and the
Author of The Rap on Gangsta Rap. He is also a contributor to
National Public Radio's All Things Considered and lectures...
To view the complete essay, you be registered.