The story of how Beyond Beats came to be stretches back even further, though, back to Hurt's college years. "I grew up with hip hop," says Hurt, 36. He partied with hip hop, he chilled out with hip hop – when he was quarterback of the Northeastern University football team in the early '90s, it was hip hop that got him pumped before games. It was, and is, a huge part of his life: "I still love hip hop," he says.
Hurt's relationship to some of hip hop’s lyrical content shifted soon after college, when he was hired to educate high school and college athletes about gender issues. "I didn't know anything about'gender awareness' when they hired me," he says. "It made me nervous. I was worried my friends would think I was soft for what I was doing." The training he received on the job, though, changed his life."I realized for the first time that sexism and violence against women were real issues. And I felt like I could make a difference."
Then, while watching Rap City one day back in 2000, Hurt suddenly found himself noticing that "all the videos looked very... formulaic." Thugged-out rappers, scantily-clad women, cash, and cars – it all seemed to be playing on repeat, and it all seemed to present the same message: these are the things you need in order to be a "man."
right Hurt, who already had one film to his credit, decided to make a movie about manhood and hip hop. "I took out a pen and paper and wrote up the notes for the kind of movie I wanted to make," he says.
Now, all these years later, that film is a reality. After debuting at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, Hurt is currently touring the country with Beyond Beats, earning standing ovations at many showings all while challenging audiences with the question: "What does it mean to be a man in hip hop?"
Vibe.com caught up with Byron Hurt in Brooklyn on the eve of Beyond Beats' premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), where the film was one of twelve selected to run as part of the Sundance at BAM Film Series.
Vibe.com: Beyond Beats has been met with a lot of positive reactions so far. People really seem to love it. Why do you think that is?
Byron Hurt: Well, I think part of it is that it's a smart, provocative, entertaining film from start to finish. But I think, too, that the hip hop audience is ready for a movie like this. The movie is very much timely and very much needed. You have a lot people who've grown up listening to hip hop their whole lives and as they’ve grown wiser and more mature they've started to question a lot of the things – the violence, the misogyny, the homophobia – that they’re seeing and hearing in mainstream hip hop. And I think people are a little tired of it. They're a little fed up with it.
Why do you think masculinity means what it means in hip hop? Where do you think that comes from?
Byron Hurt: I think the way you see manhood portrayed in hip hop is deeply entrenched in American culture, not just hip hop culture. Like if you watch cowboy movies, gangster movies, action movies – you can see the same elements of manhood and masculinity in those areas that you will see in hip hop. What distinguishes hip hop from the rest of the culture is that hip hop is so blatant. Also, with hip hop you have a lot of young men who come from poverty, and other situations, that make this quest for hyper-masculinity seem much more essential.
Your film is unique in that it seems to be the first to address portrayals of masculinity in hip hop head on. People have talked about the violence and misogyny in hip hop before, but no one seems to have really brought up this issue. Why do you think that is?
Byron Hurt: Most of the time when people think about gender issues, they think about women. Most people don't think "manhood" when you talk about gender issues. So you don't really ever have anybody asking,"How does it feel to be a Black man?" or,"How does it feel to be a Latino man?" No one asks "What does it really mean to your manhood to have cars, to have jewelry, to have women?"
Some A-list rappers appear in Beyond Beats - Busta Rhymes, Jadakiss, and Fat Joe, to name a few - artists who use violence and misogyny in their own work. Was it hard to get them to open up to the kinds of questions you were asking?
Byron Hurt: Because the questions I was asking were questions that people don't usually ask, I think that made the people I was interviewing more eager to open up. But I still spent about a year, before I even started shooting, just going to hip hop events, going to hip hop discussions and forums where I would meet a lot of different rappers. And so I made sure that I was already a familiar face, and I feel like now I'm very much a part of the [hip hop] community. It was important that people know me as somebody who really loves hip hop, and not someone trying to dis hip hop.
In watching the movie, I was surprised to see that the rappers you interviewed generally were a lot more honest and open with their answers than the music executives that you spoke with. For instance, Jadakiss was a lot more thoughtful than Russell Simmons, who seemed to kind of blow you off.
Byron Hurt: Well, I think you'd have to ask Russell Simmons or [BET Vice President] Steven Hill why they gave the answers they did. But I think it's for a lot of reasons. I think it is true that the rappers were more honest. I was surprised at how Fat Joe, for instance, opened up. And even though I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Jadakiss says in the movie, I think he was being honest the whole time. But I think the artists I interviewed are coming from a different place than the businessmen when they talk about these things. Talking about these issues keeps them viable. They didn’t want to shy away from them. I think that addressing the issue of misogyny isn’t a priority for Russell Simmons. At the end of the day he's a businessman and as a businessman he's clearly benefiting financially from the current state of hip hop. And I think he's benefiting from it in a greater way than the rappers are.
"Beyond Beats and Rhymes: A Hip-Hop Head Weighs in on Manhood in Hip-Hop Culture," will air nationally on PBS in 2007.
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