“Even if Dyson’s claims are not legitimate, what is the harm in attempting to build some kind of intellectual or ideological bridge between the civil rights generation and ‘Generation Hip-Hop’? Given Dyson’s immersion in black Christian discourse and hip-hop culture, he is perhaps uniquely suited for such a project.”
“Many critics have taken Dyson to task for suggesting that King had much in common with the likes of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace ,” writes Mark Anthony Neal in the music magazine PopMatters. I heard him comparing King to one of these rappers, Doggy Doggy or somebody. Both participated, in different ways, in a powerful tradition of reflecting on suffering and evil.”Ĭongressman John Lewis of Georgia, who began his political career with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told the Washington Post, “A lot of what Dyson is doing is just a fad. Even if they had vastly different answers, such a perspective binds Shakur and other hip-hoppers to King. Dyson even draws a comparison between King and rapper Tupac Shakur, another voice for black America who was gunned down in his prime: “Tupac’s plea for divine guidance is cast in thugs’ terms. confronts the civil rights leader’s plagiarism and extramarital affairs, challenging Americans to see him not as a deity but as a human being who, despite his personal flaws, became one of the great moral leaders of the 20th century. Last year Dyson took on black America’s greatest modern icon: I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s unbelievable that we still have to stand up and say it at all. Its audience does! It exists within a sociohistorical context, and it should be taken seriously. “Forget whether you like or respect or will give the aesthetic credibility to the form itself. “For black folk who have too often been dismissed, stigmatized or silenced without a hearing,” he writes, “we should be wary of repeating such rituals of repression on our own kids.”Īlan Light, editor-in-chief of Spin, thinks Dyson deserves credit simply for recognizing the cultural importance of hip-hop. In Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (1996), Dyson argues that, despite its faults, the youth culture that revolves around hip-hop has been unfairly demonized by the society whose racial and social inequities gave rise to the music.
His controversial books reexamining black popular culture and religion in America have fueled his growing reputation as the intellectual voice of hip-hop and won him a place in the circle of black social commentators that includes Cornel West, Patricia J. Books are scattered haphazardly across the floor though he lives in Hyde Park and joined the department of religious studies more than a year ago, he travels so frequently that his office serves mainly as a storage room.įor the past decade Dyson, a Baptist pastor and self-described “homeboy with a PhD,” has been trying to close the gap between high culture and low. The walls of his office are bare, the window small, his desk empty except for a phone and a computer. His neatly trimmed hair frames a face dotted with freckles, and glasses rim his deep brown eyes. Now 42, Dyson sits in his small corner office on the ninth floor of the Egan Urban Center at DePaul University’s downtown campus. So, of course, after the way was clear I did get up and run home and tell my mama I’d been robbed by a gangsta.” When you go home tonight, tell your mama you been robbed by some gangstas.’ And so they tear out of the store into a waiting station wagon and take off down the street. It seems like forever before they collect all their money in the cliched brown paper bags, and the gunman who was my personal robber–like a personal banker or something–stands at the door and says: ‘All right. Blood starts spurting everywhere, and we just fix our eyes immediately back on the ground, drilling holes into the cement. “My very good friend Jeffrey Byrd and his brother are sitting there, and his brother looks up at this gunman, and the gunman hits him on the head with his gun.
Genius gangsta rap made me do it series#
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