TonioTimeDaily

"BYRON HURT: One of the best things I’ve ever been able to do in my life was to throw a football. I was nice with mine. Before games I would listen to hip-hop to get psyched up. LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” usually got me ready to play. I grew up like a typical boy in America. I was a star high school and college quarterback, a ladies’ man, and a cue dog who listened and partied to a whole lot of hip-hop, without really questioning the lyrics I was listening to. Rap music’s lyrics and images fell right in line with my masculine identity. I was that guy. That’s who I was. And then my whole life changed. When I graduated from college, I was hired by Northeastern University’s Sport in Society to educate young men about men’s violence against women. They figured boys and men would listen to an ex-jock like me. [Byron Hurt addressing class] When I was your age, nobody came into my high school and talked to me about men’s violence against women, especially men.

BYRON HURT: When I first started doing it, I didn’t really know much about gender issues, anything like that. I was totally intimidated and totally unaware about what I could do as a man to change any of that stuff. But I started learning a whole lot about masculinity, and I became very introspective about my own self as a man. Every time I do a discussion or group, rap music always comes up. People say, what about hip-hop? Hip-hop is so violent. Hip-hop is so misogynistic. Hip-hop is always bashing gays and whatever. And I would always defend hip-hop. But the more I grew and the more I learned about sexism and violence and homophobia, the more those lyrics became unacceptable to me. And I began to become very conflicted about the music that I loved. One day I was sitting home at the crib watching music videos. And I was seeing video after video after video of rappers posing and posturing, throwing money at the camera, mad women around them dancing. And I was like yo, I need to do a film that breaks all of this stuff down. So I raised money, bought a video camera, hired a film crew, and began my journey to examine the representations of manhood in hip-hop culture."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAwTnJWPyFg (The actual documentary)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T3Trr4LvKI (Panel discussion of the documentary)

https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Hip-Hop-Transcript.pdf (The word-for-word account of the documentary)

--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/support