Today
MarkMarcelo, AJ (aka Mad the Villain), and myself conducted a workshop for UCSD's APSA High School Conference. The workshop, entitled, "Hip Hop and Misedutainment," was aimed at having the high school students take a more critical look and stance on hip hop music and culture. But, the topic and discussion of the workshop is not what's relevant in this post right here. One of the most interesting things about hip hop that I have recently learned came from one of the students in our workshop. I posed, to the students, the question, "Where did hip hop originate from?" And from one side side of the room, I noticed a hand rise from a spikey haired Caucasian male, donning a Hurley hoodie. The student mentions the Zulu Nation, and upon which I positively affirm his answer, but to my surprise, he continues his answer with something along the lines of, "The Zulu Nation started it, and it came about through devil worshipping and voodoo." Almost succinctly, Mark, AJ, and myself turn our heads to one another with a look of astonishment, bewildered to what we just heard. Of course I've heard my fair share of how rock n roll is heresy and anti-Christian, and also about how immoral aspects of hip hop music can be. But it was a first for me to hear someone say that hip hop's origins lie with Satanic values.
After the workshop, we asked the student who made the comment where he had heard that odd piece of information. He then told us that he had heard about it on a Christian video that he had seen. Automatically, the first thing to come to my mind is that some hardcore, fanatic Christian heard that some of hip hop's roots lie with Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation. So, my guess was that they saw the Zulu identity as a form of paganism and that the alliance to the African Zulu identity is an acceptance of anti-Christian heathenism. So, I can assume its on some racist colonization tip.
As soon as I arrived home, I scoured the internet to look for sites that might convey some sort of Christian message of hip hop being rooted with the devil, and within a couple of seconds I find the site:
The Truth. The site is devoted to the fight against Hip Hop culture, which the site author claims as promoting an anti-Christian lifestyle that strays from believing in God. The views on the site are just incredibly out there and present a very far fetched description of hip hop leading the way for the anti-Christ, with Afrika Bambaataa and KRS One leading armageddon. The site is amusing, but quite scary at the same time, but if anybody can give me any other examples of sites or literature that argue the Satanic roots of hip hop, please send them this way, I'm really curious to see what they have to say.
