Hip-hop world’s mixed messages

THANK you, Robert Hilburn (“Is bad news drowning out rap’s positive beat?” Nov. 16) for reminding readers to not blame hip-hop music in response to two recent incidents associated with the hip-hop community (the shooting of Jam Master Jay and the arrest of three of Suge Knight’s associates).

I teach hip-hop culture to middle school and high school youth throughout Los Angeles. My goal is very similar to the statements made by Hilburn: Hip-hop is an incredibly powerful and positive influence. What adults and youth alike see on television and hear on the radio is maybe only 10% of an incredibly rich musical culture. Like Hilburn, I would say that good hip-hop is as “liberating as Hendrix’s guitar or Dylan’s words.”

Joe Hernandez-Kolski

Los Angeles

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I share Robert Hilburn’s lament that all those distracting murders, attempted murders, assaults, drug arrests and gun violations in the rap community are getting in the way of celebrating Eminem’s triumph as he spreads the “positive beat” of rap music as a “vital American art form.”

People are just goofy to harbor negative feelings about rap because, as Hilburn states so musically, the Nov. 8 murder of Jam Master Jay and the LAPD shakedown of Suge Knight’s Tha Row Records are “two very separate incidents” (cough).

Of course, I’d be more confident in my (and Hilburn’s) position if it weren’t for the human carnage on display in the ever-expanding body count.

Professional showbiz nannies like Rob Reiner step over the bloody bodies of young, dead black men as they condemn smoking in movies. This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

Only if Placido Domingo gunned down Luciano Pavarotti, Bobby Short disemboweled Michael Feinstein or Alan Jackson’s band mowed down Vince Gill in a Memphis drive-by, would the music community, social do-gooders and the American public demand that something be done about such an industry of death.

As it is, the spiraling murder rate within rap music is laughably dismissed as being “very separate incidents.”

Yeah, right.

Deb McKay

Hollywood