The High Decibels have begun a guerilla hip hop campaign, just plunking down on the streets and playing wherever people are. This photo is from a recent impromptu concert in downtown Berkeley, where the HD’s plugged in a battery powered PA and let ‘er rip. It was a shock to a neighborhood more accustomed to acoustic troubadours, but a small crowd of people coalesced and was more than into it.
At a recent street concert by the High Decibels in Berkeley, a young guy came up and asked if he could do a guest rap. We were having a minute or two of downtime, and he seemed nice enough so I said okay.
Immediately he started rapping about n*****s and b***ches, and how he was gonna spray people with bullets. As soon as I could get to the sound system, I cut the power. I guess that’s censorship for you, but I’m sorry — that’s just not going to happen on my PA.
I’m probably going to keep coming back to this topic, but how have we gotten to the point where kids think its cool to talk like this? This guy actually seemed like he might be a nice person. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he had never held a gun in his life. But the gangsta rap musical culture has made listeners believe that it’s cool to brag about killing people. Simply put, it’s glorification of violence.
Tough-talking MC’s who rap about injustices really need to take a hard look at what is one of the greatest injustices of all, that people in the black community are murdering each other, and there’s a whole genre of music that makes killing seem cool.
We’re barely through four months of the year and there have already been 48 murders in the city of Oakland. I don’t know the exact statistics, but I would bet that close to 40 of those murders have been black on black homicide.
Of course it would be wrong to say that music is responsible for murder. But if you’re an MC gleefully rapping about spraying bullets, I think you’ve got to ask yourself, “Am I part of the solution, or part of the problem?”
