Excerpt: Byron Hurt: On Manhood in Hip Hop
It took Bryon Hurt six years to make the kind of movie he wanted to make about hip hop. And with his new documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes: A Hip-Hop Head Weighs in on Manhood in Hip-Hop Culture, that dream has finally been realized.
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 nineties, 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.”