Dyson’s article connecting MLK and hip-hop artists was intriguing on many fronts. I especially found the notion that were King’s life to be cut off as early as Biggie’s was, perhaps they would seem more similar. Towards the end of the article, Dyson mentions something that we have come to time and time again in class: treatment of women.
The irony of fighting for black youth to have a voice in critical and national life, only to have them use such freedoms to denigrate black women and to belittle and reject the culture mores that sustained blacks from the planation to the ghetto, is more than most black critics can abide.
Black critics focus on these aspects of hip hop, but as Dyson points out, King himself had some unsavory practices regarding women. A man of God, even the preacher Martin Luther King did not treat women with equal respect and certainly had quite a few women on the side. Dyson excuses King as being a man of his time. My question is, what excuses the rappers degrading women? I think this is a debate we can continue in class. Though I appreciate the comparison being drawn, I wonder whether any “progress” has been made.
Hip Hop and the Oral Tradition 
In 2006, the actor and rapper Common got a little nervous. He was working with Black Eyed Peas and Will.I.Am on a SONG for a movie soundtrack, and Will.I.Am had assembled the tracks using liberal SAMPLES from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
“So this was serious, you know? Now I’m collaborating with Dr. King,” Common says. “Ain’t no playing around now. Not only do I have to be good, I can’t let down Martin Luther King.”
The fact that Common speaks of Martin Luther King in the present tense is telling of the personal and conversational flow to the rhymes he applied to the song “A Dream” (from the soundtrack to “Freedom Writers”). “In between the . . . hustle and the schemes / I put together pieces of a dream / I still have one,” he coolly and reverently raps before King’s voice returns to the mix.
Even Common was at it again a few months ago. At the White House (an invitation that caused apoplexy among certain pundits over the rapper’s controversial song about a cop killer), he performed a song from his album due in November, “The Dreamer, the Believer,” using more of King’s dream speech between verses. (Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream has a place in hip-hop — but it wasn’t always that way)
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