IT TOOK A LOT TO MAKE ME give up on my latest attempt at talking to old black folks. A much-anticipated hip-hop political convention, held in Newark this past June, had rightly identified poor "intergenerational dialogue" as a hurdle to engaging young people in politics. So the organizers set up a town hall meeting, where both sides could ask the tough questions and heal the wounds that have kept the civil rights and hip-hop generations at odds. Having spent too much time listening to my own old man bitch about the apathy and depravity of kids-these-days, it sounded like a fabulous idea to me.

I quietly accepted that the event was held in a big, old-school Baptist church, with a high rod-iron fence dutifully shielding the congregants from Newark's mean streets.

I resigned myself to the inevitable parade of officious, suited men demanding that the restless youth crammed into rows of folding chairs maintain "control."

I even kept my cool when the sixty-something poet Amina Baraka actually broke into a Motown medley while explaining to the youth that their music wasn't "real" music, wasn't movement music.

When it was finally time for the youth to speak for themselves, the MC decided first to allow a word from the Honorable Reverend Doctor Calvin C. Butts Jr., pastor of Harlem's influential Abyssinian Baptist Church. Butts once famously steamrolled a pile of hip-hop CDs in a protest of immoral art.

When Butts finished his fifteen-minute sermon on the need for a moral center in any political movement, the MC promptly concluded the session and sent the young questioners back to their seats. There'd be no time for dialogue now, he admonished, maybe after the next panel.

That's when I threw in the towel.

The version of black youth culture that most people consume certainly contains a lot that is distasteful. Tune into Black Entertainment Television around three in the morning--when the network airs Uncut, its popular platform for music videos that are too risqué for primetime. In a genre that is all but defined by close-up shots of women's asses jiggling in thongs, it's hard to understand the distinction between primetime and Uncut material--that is, until you see Nelly swipe a credit card down the bare ass of a young woman.

"Even knowing everything I know," says off-Broadway performance artist Sarah Jones, who has been both a vocal defender and critic of hip-hop culture, "when I turn on the TV and Lil' John is jumping around going 'this bitch is leaking,' I'm like, bitch is leaking?! Is that really on?"

This is the hip-hop my dad and his generation have no patience for. They recoil at its focus on material rather than political gain, its dehumanization of black women, its nihilistic celebration of violence.

They claim the hip-hop generation has sacrificed black culture in pursuit of a quick buck. As our generational martyr Biggie Smalls rapped, in one of his many paeans to wealth, "If money smell bad, then this nigga Biggie stinkin'." And they insist that the kids have blown the opportunities that the civil rights movement created.


THIS IS NOT A NEW CHARGE. Many of the same black patrons that orchestrated the Harlem Renaissance—hoping to showcase talent that would give the lie to Jim Crow—later cringed at the work of its most irreverent young voices, and particularly at their refusal to adapt their art to mainstream black political thought of the time. Zora Neale Hurston's insistence that race was not central to her life maddened her elders. The focus of Langston Hughes and others on street corners and juke joints drove the black upper crust to distraction.

In a 1926 essay in The Nation, Hughes answered older critics with a line that could just as well have been written by Tupac in 1996: "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too."


TODAY’S GENERATIONAL FEUD turns on hip hop. Depending on your station in black life, the term "hip-hop" carries very different connotations. When most folks my dad's age hear it, they conjure BET's bootie-driven rap videos and the defiant odes to drugs and crime of platinum-selling artists like Nas. I'm an addict for sneakers, 20's of buddha and bitches with beepers.

When I hear "hip-hop," I think about the Nuyorican Café in Manhattan's Lower East Side. That's where I met Baron, a twenty-five-year-old poet who spent his formative years hanging out with other young, black and Latino queers on the Christopher Street piers. Baron is everything hip-hop is not supposed to be: a tall, thin and unapologetically fay brother, with a quick wit drawn from both the classroom and the street. But he's one of a slew of similar performers—poets, MCs, DJs—who take the Nuyorican's stage once a month for gay hip-hop night. On his debut album, Troubled Man, he riffs rhymes about growing up a snap queen in a macho black world.

While top-selling rapper DMX's vision of hip-hop would have us "show no love to homo-thugs/ Empty out, reload, and throw mo' slugs," Baron's answer is hardly a retreat: "Brothers I love you openly/ because you're beautiful."

But DMX is the one with the big league record deal; Baron self-distributes his work. It's DMX whose songs will loop on "urban" radio, whose videos will make it onto BET. And so my father holds it up as illustrative of my depraved generation.

"Their exposure to hip-hop is mostly through the mainstream media," explains author and activist Bakari Kitwana, who was among the organizers of the Newark convention. "So Lil' John and the East Side Boyz is hip-hop. Not the guy at the open mic night who is talking about the same sorts of things that they were talking about in the sixties."

Kitwana, former editor of the wildly popular hip-hop magazine The Source, notes that hip-hop's distribution is largely controlled by three major corporations: record labels under the Universal umbrella, music videos through Viacom's cable channels, and singles on Clear Channel's radio stations. So even popular performers like Mos Def, who barnstormed peace rallies during the build-up to the Iraq war, are drowned out by commercial hip-hop's obsession with "'ho's and bank rolls."

Rather than help us fight this corporate takeover of black youth culture, too many in my father's generation choose to accept the distorted image fed to them by performers like DMX. Instead of supporting the Barons, they wag their fingers about the opportunities we've supposedly thrown away.

"I'm not going to bite my tongue," Baraka lectured to the youth at the Newark convention. "In our generation, it was not just about being rebellious, it was about revolution." That's when she launched into a medley of Marvin Gaye anti-war songs (she skipped over "Let's Get it On" and "Sexual Healing," for some reason). "We have to not be about the business of destroying ourselves, but uplifting ourselves."

If only it were that the hip-hop generation invented black self-destruction. We dehumanized black women long before BET dreamed up Uncut. "The sexism that I hear as a black woman didn't begin with my generation," said hip-hop writer and activist dream hampton at the Newark meeting. "It's been in my family for decades." She's currently co-writing Jay Z's memoirs. "He uses the word nigger," she says, matter of factly, "like his father did and like his grandfather did."

What is new in my time is the unbridled fetish of consumption, the pursuit of what in hip-hop parlance is called "bling"--spacious cribs, sparkling jewels, and a roll of dead Presidents. But this particular obsession is unique to neither black people nor youth; hip-hop just expresses it with more flare. Bill Cosby swung the generational bat earlier this spring, condemning young people for "putting their clothes on backward." The Cos said, "The white man, he's laughing." But what was The Cosby Show if not a celebration of Reagan-era values? It was a bourgeois utopia, complete with luxury cars, designer furniture and private education. Black or white, young or old, in today's America equality is defined by your ability to consume as much as your neighbor.


TO KITWANA, THE BURDEN then lies on the hip-hop generation to better explain where we're coming from. "We have a responsibility to talk to people about hip-hop beyond the music, so they can see that young people aren't just simple-mindedly following 50 Cent," he says. The town hall meeting at his Newark convention was an effort at that. Though the format collapsed on itself, he hopes to see more attempts to make it work. "We can't create a hip-hop political movement that's going to be effective unless we engage the older generation."

But to converse, both sides must be listening. If the Newark meeting is any indication, young people are ready. Despite the odd setting, the stifling format, and the lectures from older panelists, the young activists in the audience—wearing the same baggy jeans, oversized hats sitting askew, and backwards shirts that Cosby so despises--listened respectfully as they were told what is wrong with them and their culture. It took current Source Culture Editor Fahiym Ratcliffe to break decorum and offer a commentary that is too often left out of the generational warfare.

"People forget that we are your children," he noted. "It's not like we're the hip-hop aliens that just landed from somewhere. So whatever we are doing, that reflects back on you, too."