Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes - Movie Review Example

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes The documentary film en d “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” is written and directed by hip-hop fan Byron Hurt. The 2006 video centers on the contemporary issues concerning sexism and masculinity, among others, in direct relation to hip-hop culture. Music personalities like Mos Def and Busta Rhymes, and academic professors like James Peterson and Michael Eric Dyson were interviewed. Their thoughts and perspectives on the content and influence of this type of music genre were deeply explored.

Filmmaker Hurt noticed that most of the hip-hop music videos and lyrics have similar themes and images portrayed. Men with their bling-bling paraphernalia, for instance, threw money promiscuously in front of the camera while women in scanty dress dance erotically in the background. These images imply four things: (1) Amassing a great amount of money is men’s ultimate goal. The privilege of wealth and comfort seems to belong only to men. (2) Men’s and women’s roles, as it appears, are codified through paper money.

While men search for money, on the other hand, women passively wait for men to come for their rescue. (3) The role of women is placed underneath or behind men’s. As a background, a woman only becomes a woman if she puts her place in the arms of a man. (4) Women are tagged with price on their body. Here, women are transformed into objects. In contrast to men, women seem to have no power and will. Activist Hurt realized the sharp conflict between his ideals and the ideas propagated by hip-hop culture.

He believes that life’s goal is men’s and women’s equality in the access of comfort and resources. Money is just a human invention. Like money, role-giving belongs to humans, both men and women. Hurt confessed that the more he deciphered about the reproduction of sexism and masculinity in the hip-hop songs, “the more those lyrics became unacceptable to me.”Work CitedHip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes. Dir. Byron Hurt. Perf. Busta Rhymes, Chuck D, Doug E. Fresh, Fat Joe, Jadakiss, M-1, Mos Def, Talib Kweli.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2006. DVD.