Lecture caps hip-hop week
By Mary Frances Czarsty, assistant news editor
Posted on December 4, 2006

P. Thandi Hicks Harper gave the keynote address during the third annual Hip-hop Summit at JMU Saturday, addressing students and faculty in Transitions on the positive influence of hip-hop on youth culture.

“Just because I’m of the black culture doesn’t mean I wear my hair in locks and like fried chicken,” Hicks Harper said. “And just because I say I like hip-hop doesn’t mean I’m not walking on campus with my calculus book in my bag, listening to a little hip-hop on my iPod and thinking about how I just aced that biology test.”

Hicks Harper, president of the Youth Popular Culture Institute Inc., also discussed the historical influences on hip-hop, including traditional African dance and drums and the severe living situation in the South Bronx that began in 1929 with the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway, displacing 60,000 residents and causing youth unemployment rate to peak at 60 to 80 percent.

“Hip-hop is amoeba-like in nature,” Hicks Harper said. “It is always growing and evolving, and it’s a reflection of what’s going on around you.”

Hip-hop is more than just music, according to Hicks Harper. It can be a tool to achieve positive results, because it goes beyond race, class, gender and ethnicity. She cited hip-hop artists that use their wealth to give back to their communities.

“There’s a whole entrepreneurial side to it,” she said. “An entrepreneur solves other people’s problems for profit. Poor people can’t help poor people; they don’t have the money or the resources.”

During the panel discussion that took place after her speech, students addressed questions to JMU faculty members as well as Hicks Harper.

Some pointed out the contradictory nature of hip-hop as a movement that at once tries to gain momentum as a positive tool for youth while promoting violence, drugs and negative female stereotypes.

Nikitah Okembe Imani, a professor of sociology and anthropology, said these negative aspects of hip-hop may stem from the profit-based attitudes of record companies.

“In the ‘90s, when record companies saw they could make a lot of money off of [hip-hop], the heads of these conglomerates began signing those artists that would make the best employees,” Imani said. “What comes out of that apparatus sometimes I wouldn’t even call hip-hop.”
Others also questioned the influence of the lyrics on children, because they are more impressionable than college students.

“They need someone to discuss the themes of the lyrics with,” Imani said. “There’s a difference between a college student listening to a song and an 8-year-old who gets his image of women from those lyrics.”

The speech and discussion were part of a weeklong effort to educate students about hip-hop and was hosted by the Black Students Alliance.

“It’s a movement. It’s a consciousness,” Hicks Harper said.