Unlike similar gatherings that convened throughout the 1990s, the Second Annual Hip-Hop Summit that met in New York City last week ended on a pragmatically proactive note with a package of initiatives that included a political action committee and national think tank for post-modern Beatdom. Gatherings before last week’s two-day event often attracted a cavalcade of hip-hop icons, a herd of star gazers, and not much more than coffee table discussions for the streets or essayists after the smoke cleared and mirrors dimmed behind the showy proselytizing on a dire need for B-kids to clean their own house.
For example, a hip-hop’s youngest and brightest meeting in Los Angeles during Rap Sheet music conference in the late ‘90s drafted a nine-point plan loosely patterned after the Black Panther manifesto that never saw life beyond publication and publicity in the small magapaper owned by Chicago native Darryl James.
“We realize how much power we have, and we are prepared to use it in a positive way,” hip-hop industrial Sean “P-Ditty” Combs said at a Thursday press conference announcing the initiatives. Combs Bad Boy Entertainment empire, traditionally characterized by an obsession with material wealth and brute force, is viewed by most B-kid purists as a northeastern epitome of hip-hop babylon rivaled only by southern No Limit and Cash Money records. “We have grown from boys and girls to men and women.”
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A proposed law U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) introduced calling for the Federal Communications Commission to fine record labels that market explicit lyrics to children was incentive for the summit to voluntarily draft some marketing guidelines. Television, radio, and print advertising for albums with “parent advisory” labels, along with posters and other promotional material, will begin carrying the warning label. Record labels would also ask online retailers to display that warning label on Web pages associated with those albums. But Lieberman’s spokesman says that initiative will not head off the law’s enactment before the “labeling system they use is a one-size-fits-all system that provides little information to parents.”
Meanwhile, in the wake of a long prison stretch for rapper Jamal “Shyne” Barrow on conviction of gun violation charges connected with a Manhattan club shooting last year, Def Jam is creating a mentoring program for newly signed artists that would nurture their artistic and culture development while keeping them from violence. That program would be quartered in a Harlem building the record label plans to purchase and dub the Hip-Hop House, Def Jam president Kevin Liles said. Ending hip-hop sectionalism, a popular issue at past hip-hop summits, did not come up at the open discussions for last week’s New York City gathering or in press releases announcing its results.
