Men’s Resource Center for Change invites the public to a screening of Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes. Showtime is this Sunday night, June 3, 7pm at Northampton’s Academy of Music. The screening will benefit VOICE MALE: The Magazine of the Men’s Resource Center for Change. It will include remarks and Q&A with director Byron Hurt. General Admission Tickets are $15.
Producers’ Circle Tickets are $25-$50, and include a 6pm reception with Mr. Hurt and preferential seating.
This film is a Sundance selection. Summary from Media Education Foundation:
Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes provides a riveting examination of manhood, sexism, and homophobia in hip-hop culture. Director Byron Hurt, former star college quarterback, longtime hip-hop fan, and gender violence prevention educator, conceived the documentary as a “loving critique” of a number of disturbing trends in the world of rap music. He pays tribute to hip-hop while challenging the rap music industry to take responsibility for glamorizing destructive, deeply conservative stereotypes of manhood. The documentary features revealing interviews about masculinity and sexism with rappers such as Mos Def, Fat Joe, Chuck D, Jadakiss, and Busta Rhymes, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, and cultural commentators such as Michael Eric Dyson and Beverly Guy-Shetfall. Critically acclaimed for its fearless engagement with issues of race, gender violence, and the corporate exploitation of youth culture.
“Both honors rap for its courage, as well as holding the producers and creators responsible for disseminating what are often degrading messages.”
— Gail Dines, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, Wheelock College
“This film poses fundamental questions about how Hip-Hop culture represents and expresses basic attitudes in our society about love, violence, and compassion.”
— Orlando Bagwell, actor
“Gives hip-hop an unrelenting, hard stare, questioning its stance on misogyny, hypersexuality, materialism, homophobia, homoeroticism, hypocrisy and the resultant stereotype perpetuation.”
— Grayson Curran, The Independent Weekly
“A tough-minded, erudite dissection of misogyny and homophobia in hip-hop–in the tradition of Supersize Me–this is the one that has people buzzing, ‘It should be taught in high schools!'”
— Scott Brown, Entertainment Weekly
“If politics has Michael Moore, then Hip-Hop–excuse me, commercial rap–has Byron Hurt. In the same manner that Moore stuck tough questions to the guts of politicians and company executives, Hurt hit up established and aspiring rappers, television and record label executives and even Russell Simmons.”
— AllHipHop.com
“Captivating”
— Boston Globe
“Byron Hurt’s ground-breaking documentary is the talk of the Hip-Hop circuit and those in the know.”
— National Black Programming Consortium
“Incisive, informative and entertaining… Though the film bears a viewer discretion warning, it is exactly the kind of program that should be watched by teens who embrace hip-hop music without thinking of the stereotypes it perpetuates and the thug lifestyle it endorses.”
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A profound analysis and self-criticism by a member of the Hip-Hop Generation.”
— Esther Iverem, SeeingBlack.com
“A groundbreaking montage that questions masculinity, homophobia and misogyny in the hip-hop industry for those who live and breathe the culture.”
— Philadelphia Weekly
Purchase tickets at Food for Thought Books (Amherst),
World Eye Books (Greenfield),
Odyssey Book Shop (South Hadley),
Men’s Resource Center (Amherst),
Montague Book Mill (Montague),
Broadside Books (Northampton).
For more information, see Men’s Resource Center for Change, call 413-253-9887 x16 or email main.office@mrcforchange.org.
