3) This culture marked the turn around and somewhat advancement of the African American community.
Many of the generation grew up in working and middle class realities framed by affirmative action corporate opportunity, suburban flight, school desegregation, and other post civil rights era policies and trends. In creating hip-hop, they confounded the integrationist ideology that viewed distinctly African-American cultural movements as self-defeating. (Tyson P.3).
In addition, the author believes that there was no real agenda for hip-hop. "Negro spirituals lead African-Americans out of slavery, jazz was the soundtrack for the anti-lynching movement, and soul stirred the civil rights era."(Tyson P.4) Tyson just refuses to see the truth and actual purpose of hip-hop. "But the early hip hop music offered no agenda and did not even loosely correlate to any existing race movement." (Tyson P.4) For the most part, hip-hop had the opportunity to become a media angle and somewhat of a cultural component to a new movement necessary to "combat" the Regan-Era of conservatism, according to Tyson. Yet this opportunity was overlooked not only by the hip-hop generation, but also by civil rights generation to which many African American leaders belong. These African American leaders initially underestimated the true impact of the culture. "Disillusioned with the attack on civil rights and the ever-present shortcomings of social integration, they failed to identify hip hop as the cultural complement to the new movement they struggled to launch." (Tyson P.4) Hip-hop really was never given a chance to become something stable and positive because of the lack of attention that it was given. It was with that neglect that hip-hop began to turn and fail. How could anything be expected to be great or positive without positive attention? When the civil rights generation negatively neglected hip-hop, they then gave it over to become a victim of negative media and a societal statistic.
