"Both honors rap for its courage, as well as holding the producers and creators responsible for disseminating what are often degrading messages."
Gail Dines
Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, Wheelock College
"If politics has Michael Moore, then Hip-Hop -- excuse me, commercial rap -- has Byron Hurt. In the same manner that Moore stuck tough questions to the guts of politicians and company executives, Hurt hit up established and aspiring rappers, television and record label executives and even Russell Simmons.”
AllHipHop.com
"Filmmaker Byron Hurt takes the hip-hop industry--and audience--to task in his new documentary."
TimeOut Chicago
"Byron Hurt's documentary is one of the most useful tools I've come across for deconstructing "masculinity, sexism, violence and homophobia in today's hip-hop culture." Instead of taking the traditional route of blaming a vaguely defined and erroneously homogeneous hip-hop culture for women's degradation, Hurt focuses the discussion squarely on the individual men who participate in creating a limited conception of black masculinity that limits both men and women. He does so by featuring interviews with men and women who create and consume in hip-hop in various capacities, and puts the responsibility on men for developing solutions to eradicate violence."
Mandy Van Deven
Co-author of Hey, Shorty!: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets
"This film poses fundamental questions about how Hip-Hop culture represents and expresses basic attitudes in our society about love, violence, and compassion."
Orlando Bagwell
Actor
"A groundbreaking montage that questions masculinity, homophobia and misogyny in the hip-hop industry for those who live and breathe the culture."
Philadelphia Weekly
"Byron Hurt has a sophisticated and complex framing of the issues and is poised, with Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes to make a critical and long needed intervention on these very important facets of American youth music and culture."
Tricia Rose
Author, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
Associate Professor of History and American Studies, New York University
"Captivating"
Boston Globe
"Byron Hurt's ground-breaking documentary is the talk of the Hip-Hop circuit and those in the know."
National Black Programming Consortium
"Provocative and edgy"
South Bend Tribune
"I am certain [Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes] will only add to the national and international dialogues around hip-hop culture, and its tremendous effect on our era."
Kevin Powell
Activist, Hip-Hop Journalist, Author
"Invaluable for understanding not only one aspect of African American culture but how it relates to the rest of American culture as well."
San Francisco Chronicle
"Free-form, first-person docu is an ambitious collage of revealing interviews and pop-culture overviews, employed to illustrate Hurt's meditation on the uglier aspects of hip-hop culture."
Variety
"A fascinating subject rarely explored in the depth this short documentary submerges in."
Michael Ferraro
Film Threat
"Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes is a visually interesting and sociologically important examination of the gendered performance of black masculinity in hip-hop culture. ...A fast-paced, theoretically-conscious analysis of the socially significant issues of gender and race identities as performance."
Susan M. Alexander
Teaching Sociology
"Gives hip-hop an unrelenting, hard stare, questioning its stance on misogyny, hypersexuality, materialism, homophobia, homoeroticism, hypocrisy and the resultant stereotype perpetuation."
Grayson Curran
The Independent Weekly
"A tough-minded, erudite dissection of misogyny and homophobia in hip-hop -- in the tradition of Supersize Me -- this is the one that has people buzzing, 'It should be taught in high schools!'"
Scott Brown
Entertainment Weekly
"A profound analysis and self-criticism by a member of the Hip-Hop Generation."
Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com
