Hip Hop music has caused many young people to rebel against others and themselves.
This is the opinion of American Chapman Roberts, musical director of the upcoming Classical/Pops Festival slated for Barbados on December 12 and 13 at Apes Hill, St James.
Roberts, noted for his exploits in the world of Broadway, said he would be afraid to leave his children alone in their room to their own devices, given the subliminal messages that came from the hip hop genre.
He said people who were promoting that type of music knew what they were doing.
“There is a story on the Internet; I don’t know if it is true, I get goose pimples from it. A man said he was called into a meeting by a major corporation and they were told they want to push hip hop because we can accomplish a certain thing with hip hop and that certain thing is to keep the prisons full.”
He said the prisons in the United States were owned by major corporations and they had invested in them and that was a business.
“They get $75 000 a year per person to keep them there. That is a lot of money. So they want to push hip hop because the subject matter would convey a subliminal message to our young people to rebel; not only against the rest of the world and be uncooperative with the rest of the world, but with themselves and with their best instincts.
“Once you could get a child to work against their own best instincts, they are doomed and they are delivered into the hands of people who make their living imprisoning people.”
Roberts said his impression of how hip hop had a negative impact on the youth was reinforced when he saw a four-year-old child being encouraged by adults to dance to hip hop artiste Nelly’s It’s Getting Hot In Here.
“I am looking around the home and I am asking, does not anybody else see anything wrong with this?”
He said parents should be monitoring what their children were “listening to, memorising, what they are saying, when they say it and to whom they say it.
“When 13- and 14-year-old girls were saying, ‘I don’t care, I want a baby and I am going to get me one and I know how to get me one’, they were accommodated. And when the child came, they walked away from it and the boy walked away from the girl.
“The rest is easy because they are left in the hands of whoever comeso along to be impatient with them because it’s not their child. And when the fathers have deserted their families . . . and left a teenaged girl who is not yet mature to try to help a child become mature, she does not know what it is. How could she possibly do it?”
Roberts said one of the reasons for this deviation among the black community was because music, sports and arts programmes had been taken out of the schools.
“The black child excelled in those things . . . . There is a natural gift that we passed on through the churches, even that they decided to take out; all of the sacred music in the schools . . . .
“So the children were left to their own devices to create music because that is a natural instinct . . . but the subject matter was [also] left to the imaginations of children finding their sexuality; of being exploited in the finding their sexuality.
“So I fear that it is difficult to turn around when we have made heroes and heroines out of people who don’t deserve it,” said Roberts.
