HIP-HOP doesn't kill people, PEOPLE kill people...

Here's a blog that I read on the regular by a Black Moderate named Dell Gines. He has ALOT of intersting and informative stuff to say on his blog. I truly recommend it. Here's an entry that talks about Modern Hip-Hop and the original link is below.

Check it out.

http://www.dellgines.com/?p=593

=======================================================

50 Cent and The Game during their "make-up" truce.

Pro-Hip Hop Part II: Hip Hop doesn’t Kill People, People Kill People

Blogged under Social Commentary by Dell on Tuesday 27 June 2006

Although I understand where folks are coming from when they argue that hip hop creates negative behavior here is a mistake in analysis that I think they are making. They (it seems) are assuming that the elimination of ‘negative’ hip hop would dramatically reduce ‘negative’ behavior particularly amongst us blacks. I simply don’t believe that anymore after really reflecting on my previously held position. I think any form of ‘communication’ can reinforce positive or negative pre-existing potential to do a certain behavior but I really no longer believe that it is the genesis, the creation of such behavior.

I don’t think hip hop creates negative behavior, I think it simply reinforces the negative perception or the negative potential that pre-exist in an individual. When hip hop cats say ‘hip hop is just a window to the ghetto or street life’ I think they are right, but not in the way they think they are right.

For example, if my intent is to kill you, I mean I seriously beyond of shadow of a doubt want to kill you, then yes a gun might make it easier for me to do so, but if indeed it is my intent to kill then I will find a way regardless.

If the intent of an individual is to do some anti-social behavior, hip hop may be like the gun per se in that it provides a vehicle by which to shape anti-social behavior but it does not create said behavior. I believe the behavior would occur regardless because the intent of the person doing anti-social behavior was not created by the music that simply reinforces it or provides a shaping mechanism for it.

When you evaluate hip hop as a shaping mechanism for pre-existing anti-social tendencies and behavior, and not the creator of anti-social tendencies and behavior it forces you to look not at hip hop but at the root causes of the behavior that hip hop actually shapes.

Like the old saying goes, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” so it can be said that, “Hip hop doesn’t create bad behavior in people, people create bad behavior in people”. In other words, the infastructure and social dynamics in our community create an environment in which hip hop can serve as a shaping mechanism for the over abundance of anti-social behavior that our communities disproportionately produce. If we don’t correct the infastructure that produces anti-social behavior in the first place, we can eliminate hip hop, but we won’t eliminate the anti-social behavior that hip hop shapes.

Does hip hop in many ways portray us in a negative light to the world? Yep indeed. Doesn’t it also have positive aspects? Yes indeed. Do the negative aspects out weight the positive aspects? Absolutely irrelevent. When we change ourselves and our communities and rebuild our social infastructure then hip hop will cease to be the gun used with the intent to murder, because the intent simply will not be there.

=================================================================

Damn.

It keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?