disRESPECT: TMZ Misrepresents Hip-Hop

Last Friday, at the height of the national anxiety to find and neutralize Boston Marathon Bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar, TMZ posted an article connecting the two brothers to hip-hop. While TMZ has never and will never be known for making flattering representations, its misrepresentation of hip-hop is especially gross. According to TMZ, listening to hip-hop and viciously maiming and murdering innocent people are related activities. This is both absurd and unacceptable.

Although hip-hop is sometimes characterized by images and messages of violence, these images do not define the entire genre of hip-hop. For every fist raised in the name of harm, there are other fists raised in the name of solidarity, justice, defiance and even just plain-old fist pumping, among other things. Furthermore, images are never static. Hip-hop is constantly on the move, expanding, transforming and evolving, just like the world we live in. To connect the actions of rogue murderers to the complex and varying themes of a vast, international and intergenerational musical tradition is bad journalism at best and gross caricature at worst.

The Boston Marathon bombings were only a week ago. The wounds haven’t even begun to scar yet. In fact, for many of the victims, the wounds won’t ever be able to scar because they are more than wounds: things are missing, irreplaceable things. With all this in mind, we can’t allow TMZ to exploit our anxieties, our fears and our vulnerabilities. Yes, hip-hop is violent at times, but to cut out that violence from the larger, more complicated genre in which it exists, is a violent move itself. Don’t believe the TMZ hype. Keep calm and hip-hop on.