This is somewhat disconcerting: Hush Tours leads hip-hop history sightseeing trips through Harlem and the Bronx. NYT has an article on one experience [reg req'd], lead by Grandmaster Caz (the company also employs Kurtis Blow and Doug E. Fresh, and provides booking for the Furious Five). I'm all for raising awareness about the history of hip-hop, but the tours thing strikes me as a little weird. Maybe it was this paragraph from the NYT article:
At the Graffiti Hall of Fame, there is a Disneyish touch: Caz distributes Kangol hats and fake gold chains with dangling dollar-sign pendants to the tourists, who cross their arms and strike B-boy stances for snapshots in front of the spray-painted walls. Harlem residents have seen a lot over the years, but a gaggle of white tourists dressed like LL Cool J circa 1985 is something new.
I suspect my uneasiness with this is related to a misplaced sense of the need for authenticity on my part, that liberal/yuppie disdain for anyone who needs a tour guide. Of course, I came into all of this way late (hip-hop wasn't something us whitebread farmboys in Michigan listened to in the 1970s), using Doug Pray's Scratch documentary as my own guide.
Posted by johndanseven at February 12, 2006 10:58 AMRed Alert, a longtime fixture on the New York airwaves, said: "It's great because we didn't have a platform to pass on our knowledge. The tour has given us a platform to explain the history that we experienced, the history that we set in motion."
On that chilly Saturday a few weeks back, Caz was a jovial, blunt tour guide. "Today you're going to learn what hip-hop is and what it's not," he announced at the tour's outset. "It's not just rap music, and it's definitely not just the 10 records you hear over and over again on the radio.