Students in WILL’s Youth Media Workshop wrote a letter that convinced filmmaker Byron Hurt to visit Champaign-Urbana to speak about his new documentary on masculinity and hip-hop.

Hurt and local hip-hop experts spoke to an overflow crowd for a March 13 screening and town hall discussion at the Spurlock Museum’s Knight Auditorium. The YMW students filmed the discussion as well as some of their own reaction to the documentary for a half-hour video, Beyond Beats and Rhymes: A Local Response. It airs on WILL-TV at 9:58 p.m. Friday, May 25, after a 9 p.m. re-airing of Hurt’s documentary, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes.

“For the follow-up program, the students interviewed Byron Hurt and also talked on camera about what they had learned from their hip-hop project,” said WILL’s Kimberlie Kranich, co-director of the Youth Media Workshop.

Hurt, a former college quarterback-turned-activist, is a self-described “hip-hop head” who took an in-depth look at masculinity and manhood in rap and hip-hop, where he says creative genius collides with misogyny, violence and homophobia.

The Youth Media Workshop used Hurt’s film to encourage students to take a critical look at hip-hop. One of goals of the YMW project is affirming youth who create more socially relevant hip-hop, Kranich said. “One of our own students, Nick Green, wrote a rap that was featured on the national Web site for Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” she said.

The students had a lively dialogue with Hurt when he was in town. Urbana High School student Jay Walker told Hurt he was mad when he watched the film because it seemed to show only the bad side of hip-hop. Hurt responded that he wasn’t trying to say all hip-hop was bad. “I don’t want hip-hop to be banned or to be censored,” Hurt said. “I don’t want people to stop listening to hip-hop. I just want people to listen to hip-hop from a critical perspective, so that we just don’t accept everything that we hear.”

Ninety-four percent of people who attended the town hall meeting said in feedback questionnaires that participation in the screening and discussion helped them see how the recording industry promotes a narrow range of hip-hop music to consumers. Ninety-four percent said attending helped them better see how violence against women and gay people are part of mainstream culture and mainstream hip-hop culture.

Kranich said the survey results showed that the event had an impact. “These are the kinds of discussions we want to have happen, and they are continuing,” Kranich said. “Since our event, teachers and youth program leaders have been showing the film to their students and having talks with them.”

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