Home  Music + Reviews National Hip-Hop Youth Summit
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National Hip-Hop Youth Summit |
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Written by Hennix M.
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TanzAmer Incorporated, a non-profit organization, and "The Cipher Show," a hip-hop television program, will produce a televised National Youth Summit on the fairgrounds of The Golden Gate Community Center, located at 4701 Golden Gate Parkway in Naples Florida. The event will be produced on August 12, 2006 and the theme is “Hip Hop in Progress: Changing the face of hip-hop.” It will feature live on-stage performances from hip-hop bands ranging in ages from 13-18 years old.
This is the first event of its kind to ever be produced and filmed in the history of Southwest Florida. The event organizers want to draw youth across the nation, to a safe tropical environment, away from the rush of the inner city. The event is intended to combat the glamorization of violence and immorality in hip-hop, by providing educational discussions and televising performances displaying positive hip-hop themes. The event organizers intend to utilize hip-hop activism to impact the commercial rap industry.
According to Steven Jennings, the Producer of The Cipher Show, “Hip-Hop Activism normally addresses issues like voting, equality and educational reform, but it rarely addresses the fact that most lyrics in today’s hip-hop music continue to promote moral degeneration, misogyny, murder, drug dealing and other crimes. If hip-hop music started promoting having sex with minors, I wonder if the lyrics would shock anyone?”
Jennings continued, “If one were to judge by record sales, it would appear that society may feel drugs and murder in hip-hop music is okay, but I wonder if talk of statutory rape would cause a public uproar? I’m pretty sure it would, and this is a double standard. In my opinion, rather than sexual abuse, today's rap music is moral and intellectual abuse, which may result in future criminal activity in youth. Also note that many of the murders and drug sales promoted by hip-hop music occur in the ghetto.”
The mission of “Hip Hop in Progress” is to create a positive vehicle to help At-Risk youth express themselves in a non-threatening environment, while promoting trends of positive messages and positive self-images in hip-hop. Event organizers want to positively influence commercial hip-hop, by addressing the relationship between the suggestive nature of hip-hop and criminal activities that may entangle youth, as the glamorization of violence and immorality progresses into the idolization of lawlessness.
“Many hip-hop artists compare their discussions of sex, drugs and violence to movies and television. We disagree, in that rap artists do not represent themselves as actors and pride themselves in telling the truth about their criminal backgrounds. Thus, we find these factual verbal accounts to be a glorification of crime. We must clear up this inconsistency for today’s youth,” said Jennings.
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