On June 26, a group of pundits and artists gathered in London to debate the motion: "Hip-hop doesn't enhance society, it degrades it." Organized by Google and Intelligence Squared, the format was somewhere between a court trial and a debate contest. Speakers included everyone from Jesse Jackson and Jason Whitlock to KRS-One and Slaughterhouse. Some argued in favor of the motion. Others argued against it. People clapped. Some booed. In the end, everyone agreed to disagree.
The whole thing lasted two hours. I watched it so you don't have to, and I did you one better and compiled 25 great quotes from the debate. They're all tweetable, in 140 characters or less (yes, I checked). If you do end up tweeting some of these, give your boy a shoutout, will ya. This awesome post was brought to you by @Rizoh. Peep game.
25. "Tony Morrison said, 'Can't I love what I criticize, criticize what I love.'" — Michael Eric Dyson
24. "Hip-hop saved my life." — ?uestlove
23. "If black people talk about killing black people, why would everyone else not do it?" - Shaun Bailey
22. "If we have power to degrade an entire society, then we also have the power to uplift it." - KRS-One
21. "Hip-hop is the lobby of the prison industrial complex." - Jason Whitlock
20. "Hip-hop is merely speaking about the situations that we have been dealing with for the last 20 to 30 years." - Toure
19. "Commercial mainstream hip-hop responds to and exacerbates and glorifies violence." - Tricia Rose
18. "To question whether rap is poetry is parochial and idiotic." - James Peterson
17. "I have a question: What the f-ck am I doing on this panel?" - P.J. O'Rourke
16. "The language of poetry is ugly. Poetry is not greeting card shit." - P.J. O'Rourke
15. "What are we gonna do? Say, 'No, you can only rap about puppies? You can't tell us how you feel?'" - P.J. O'Rourke
14. "Hip-hop teaches a respect for rhetorical genius, for oratorical wizardry, for the invention of words." Michael E. Dyson
13. "Hip-hop flips the language. Poor people lie, rich people prevaricate. Poor people steal, rich folks embezzle. Jesse Jackson
12. "There's some b----es in this universe. I know a couple of them. I can direct them your way." — Joe Budden
11. "N--ga is a very complicated word." - Q-Tip
10. "When we talk about b----es, we're talking about b----es." — Joe Budden
9. "I'm comfortable with people raising their children and not blaming hip-hop for a certain type of language." - Estelle (In response to the question, "Are you comfortable with b----es and hoes?")
8. "It would be unfair to reduce hip-hop to three words." — Jesse Jackson
7. "Rap is performance. When rappers get onstage, they perform." — John Sutherland
6. "Hip-hop speaks to and speaks for the oppressed. It gives us a voice." — Isaiah Thomas
5. "In 20 years, Tupac Shakur would be ranked with Walt Whitman as a great American poet." — John Sutherland
4. "Rap comes from the oral tradition. The oral tradition gives voice to those who would've otherwise been voiceless." — Benjamin Zephaniah
3. "The argument that hip-hop doesn't empower people is void in my region." — Deeb, Egyptian rapper
2. "There's no one-to-one correlation between a hip-hop lyric & a subsequent material condition that leads to criminality." — Michael E. Dyson
1. "The flaws in hip-hop are the flaws in us." — Jaron Lanier
HONORABLE MENTIONSThere was also a slew of great quotes that I couldn't squash into 140 characters. I've highlighted some of those below. This portion of the list was sponsored by Twitlonger.
"If the society that we're talking about is a society that starts wars all over the world, degrades indigenous cultures, is misogynistic in itself, if that's the society we're talking about, then it's not a bad thing if hip-hop did degrade that society." — KRS-One
"Now's the time to have a snooze. I'm the oldest person on this panel. I'm white. And I know less, I suspect, about this distinctively African-American music than 8% of the audience." — John Sutherland
"Self-criticism is built into hip-hop and is more true than anywhere in the black community. I certainly can't go to my pastor and check him about all the bitches and hoes in the bible the way I can go to with Too $hort or Dr. Dre." - dream hampton
"Hip-hop is a culture of rebellion, born in pain, on street corners, garages, and sometimes in jail. It exposes contradictions." — Jesse Jackson
"We are still -- as black people in this country -- licking our wounds from slavery. We're still dealing with how we view ourselves, and we do that through music." - Q-Tip
