What Stories Can a YouTube video Tell Us About Hip-Hop?

Hip-hop culture for me has always been about music and dance. But in academia, hip-hop has more often than not been about lyrics and analyzing issues of keepin' it real in the US and perhaps the exportation of hip-hop cultural values and ideals through the mass media of our Superpower. Media in some ways has been the focus. Mediation of sounds, images, words, ideas, and art.

But this video posted on the NYTimes YouTube channel. This is in the category of a REPORTER channel (Subscribers: 7,825; Channel Views: 280,125). On December 1, 2008 they posted

Break Dancing, Phnom Penh-Style

The video features a story about a deported immigrant who was born in the Khmer Rouge but grew up in Long Beach where he had some notoriety as a local breakdancer. He was a member of the Crips gang and after a felony conviction in a post-9-11 world "KK" was deported to Cambodia, a country he had never even visited. Now he teaches breakdancing to kids in a local community center program in Phnom Penh Cambodia where English is a common language. The teen center called TINY TOONES DROP-IN CENTER reminds me of the urban programming in the ghettoes in the 1970s and 80s in NYC and even where I grew up on Rockville, Maryland for minority youth.

It seems like minority group members have to get to the brink, to the edge, to prison or in this case being deported, to really get their potential to impact the future, theirs and others. What is it that has a culture that began as an escape from poverty and crime in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and other boroughs-- Afrika Bambaataa started the Zulu Nation as a way to stop gangbanging--become about crime, violence and exploitation of women and masculinity and that the redemption of our communities comes last?

So if I had to say off-the-cuff what this YouTube video tells about hip-hop it's this: Hip-hop culture has been mediated to youth of every color and consciousness. Because it's been mediated without an elder to translate it in many cases and because all of human societies tends to be about looking good or avoiding looking bad, the true essence of one's evolution as an artist not just a gangsta often gets lost. This video tells us how keepin' it real has devolved into fitting in (to gangs, being hard, felony crimes) but when you take the boy out of the hood, perhaps he'll make good on the true essence of a communal culture that was designed at least in the South Bronx to uplift, educate, bring wisdom to everyday people who were left behind otherwise.

Whether deported or locked up, hip-hop can be a salvation. I just wish it wasn't as a last resort. Hip-hop must do battle with the EGO side of the culture that lends itself to being seen but not been a contribution to SELF and others.

It may be hard to find the jewels on YouTube but once you dig in the digital crates long enough, you find it's bigger than the hip-hop we once knew. And the power of community, creativity and consciousness arises. As Afrika Bambaataa sings with James Brown, Hip-hop can be about PEACE, UNITY, LOVE, & HAVING FUN!!