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Read a book, read a book: Losing My Cool - How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture by Thomas Chatteron Williams

I was drawn to this topic in the midst of studying the effects of media upon our culture, one cannot help but notice the huge popularity of hip-hop and the lifestyle it promotes.  Listen to your radio and it's all about bitches on the pole and sippin' sizzerp in the club.  Do you think it's just for fun and laughs and doesn't influence or negatively motivate young minds?  Read the book.  'Cause you're wrong. 

And if you're downplaying the influence and you're white, then you really have no idea what you're talking about - you didn't grow up having to exude "authentic blackness" and live up to the expectations of peers that held loyalty to no teachings other than those of Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls.  You grew up with a different perception of the world and how you would be recieved in it, whether you were lower, middle or upper class.  You, whitie, see the irony in hip-hop music because it was never a question of you emulating the lifestyle with any authenticity.  Am I against listening to hip-hop music?  Heck no, it used to be my favorite, but more and more I find myself gagging over the insipid repetition of the same ingredients, the collective set of pathetic yet glorified elements wearing a thin spot on my tolerance for bullshit.  I feel bad for the people the author grew up around who did not have a father to expose them to higher learning and higher thinking.  His friends pursued money, slinging drugs, supported each other in regulating their bitches 'we don't love these hoes', went to jail, had unwanted babies, and most never left their neighborhood.  The author has a degree in Philosophy from Georgetown and he wrote a great book that I consider a generous hand-out of relatable, articulate and genuine information, much of which is wisdom imparted by his father who is also a pretty cool guy.  Here are some notable sections.

Excerpts:

"If you had spent years of your life trying to do something, son, trying to rear a thoroughbred, say, a thoroughbred who would go on to run beautiful races and make you proud, if you had sacrificed everything for this thoroughbred, giving it everything you could, giving it the best you had to offer, if you hoped that this thoroughbred would represent the best that you and your people could achieve - well, after all this effort, after all this time and hard work and hope, after all that, would you be able to just sit back and let your thoroughbred run around in the mud with a herd of mules and donkeys?  I mean, it might get hurt doing that, right?  It might really get hurt.  Or - and this would be even worse, in my opinion - it might somehow start to believe that it, too, was a donkey or a mule.  Now, that would be tragic, wouldn't it?" (p. 90)

Of course I can see now that I had very different first-job concerns than Pappy had back in 1959 - I didn't worry about racial discrimination, I took for granted I could get decent work; I worried instead about how to amass and flaunt wealth. (p. 236)

Anything was possible, really - the sole unacceptable scenario was the one in which the material compensation would be less than ample enough to muffle all the player-hating.  In no way was I immune to such thinking, it is rare that you meet a black student who is.  We see images of athletes and rappers 24/7, but most of us have never seen a black person devoted to that other form of wealth, the life of the mind, and so we do not imagine that this is a feasible - let alone a luxurious - way to live.  I had seen my father strive to live this way, to live his life inside books, and still, it struck me as an impossible fate for me to win.  Part of me could not relinquish the desire to be a banker.  Wall Street was such an obvious destination for a black kid steeped in hip-hop culture to want to end up at.  The same machismo, the same allegiance to material wealth, the same condescension toward reflective thought, the me-myself-and-I world view that was so prized in the street was equally exalted in the world of finance.

I used to lie awake at night fantasizing about the day that, as a young hotshot director at Morgan Stanley or someplace like that, I would roll back to Plainfield, triumphantly, in a drop-top Modena or a tinted-up Gelandewagen.  I would be a black Caesar astride a six-figure chariot crammed full of booty and speeding toward Rome - victorious, chrome rims spinning, arm dangling out the window, gold Rolex Day-Date glistening in the sunlight, jealous jaws dropping in my glorious wake.  I would show everyone I wasn't a sucker for having gone off to college.  These images of hip-hop largesse were so vivid, I could even hear the CD I would be playing - Baby's "#1 Stunna."  I was longing to ball.

For all my powers of projection, though, I failed to anticipate the extent to which daily exposure to serious ideas and methods of thinking would alter me.  I didn't realize that once you leave home and see new and more complex things, you might just lose the desire to measure yourself by the old, provincial standards; they cease to motivate you even when you want them to. My points of reference had changed dramatically and definitely.

Concepts such as time and independence and freedom began to strike me on an intuitive level as more luxurious and precious than foreign cars and necklaces of gold.  The thought that I could make a living reading or thinking was inspiring and even humbling.  Of course, this is a kind of success that you cannot wear on your sleeve.  You cannot "floss" the fruits of intellectual labor.(p. 236)

The way philosophy worked, it occurred to me at some point, was the exact opposite of the way the black, hip-hop-driven culture operated.  Whereas the latter dealt strictly with the surfaces of things - possessions, poses, appearances, reactions - the former was nothing but the penetration of facades. (p. 232)