Read It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation for Free Online

“That’s the shit that most niggas is on. Why? Even though it ain’t true, ’Cause if it was you’d be under the jail, they know, just like I know, that that’s the shit that sells. Negativity. Drugs. Guns. Bitches. There really is not an alternative. You either rap like that or you don’t sell. That’s where you gotta come from if you wanna make it.”
    “Even if that’s not really you?” I ask.
    “Yup,” he confirms.
    My brother felt the same way.
    In the hip-hop world, keeping it real has become the measuring stick for one’s connection to the ghetto. The ghetto has become the repository of all that is real, and everything else is not. The problem with this is that the ghetto in mass media is not the real ghetto.
    The ghetto doesn’t exist and the Gulf War never happened. French theorist Jean Baudrillard shocked people when he published the book
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
. Baudrillard argued that the war was largely a TV event, experienced by the masses more like a video game than an actual situation of war. Baudrillard explained this theory as hyperreality and asserted that we can no longer distinguishbetween imitation and reality—and that we often prefer the imitations because they have been gutted of any societal consequences.
    The ghetto then, as most experience it through mass media, doesn’t exist either. It, too, is reel. Wrenched out of its sociopolitical and racial injustice context, it is transformed into an urban playground. It allows people to listen to “ghetto music,” without examining the issues that allow such a place to exist.
    “What makes it so difficult is to know that we need to be doing other things…. They want [Black artists] to shuck and jive, but they don’t want us to tell the real story because they’re connected to it,” says rapper David Banner, who is a graduate of Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he also served as president of the student government. Banner is right on; whites and even upwardly mobile Blacks who consume reel “ghetto” music have made a fetish out of Black disenfranchisement. And because the music is
lite
, they are not forced to deal with the reality that it is racist policies—exclusionary zoning laws, real estate industry discrimination, redlining, parasitic corporate development, and the Department of Transportation’s highway projects that tear apart viable Black communities—that create the ghetto in the first place.
    On the Black-hand side, Blacks in the ghetto see a highly stylized, depoliticized version of their environment, and on the other, Blacks outside of the ghetto are told their experience is inauthentic. In this market-driven environment, truly important ideas about love, caring, and service are disregarded as incidental or lost completely. For those of us who are already battling issues of inadequate education or poverty, warding off these harmful ideological ideas is even more challenging.
    This might help explain a recent article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
entitled “Suicide Rate Climbing for Black Teens: Move to Middle Class May Cause Identity Crisis,” which details a federal study thatshows the suicide rate for Black teens has been rising dramatically. Unlike white and Latino teens, the Black teens who commit suicide tend to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds than the general African-American population. Many social psychologists speculate that this increase is due to identity crises perpetuated by the mass media.
    In bell hooks’s provocative analysis on Black masculinity,
We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
, she furthers the discussion, stating:
    While we often hear about privileged black men assuming a ghetto gangsta-boy style, we rarely hear about the pressure they get from white people to prove they are “really black.”… This pressure is part of the psychological racial arsenal for it constantly lets educated black people, especially black males, know that no amount of