He's soft spoken and articulate, passionate and determined. With an engaging smile and an easy personal style that people both 15 years younger and 15 years older feel at ease with, when Byron Hurt starts talking people listen. And what he's got to say could help challenge the role hip-hop plays in promoting violence, denigrating women, perpetuating homophobia, and stereotyping men.

The 36-year-old activist-filmmaker's new film, Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, shines an unwavering bright light on the shadowy side of a music that has captivated millions of young people worldwide but has done so by demeaning women and men.

In the film, conceived as a "loving critique" from a self-proclaimed "Hip-Hop Head," Hurt focuses on issues of masculinity, sexism, violence and homophobia in today's hip-hop culture, by talking with rappers, music moguls, and fans. Hurt, a member of the advisory board of Voice Male and the Men's Resource Center for Change, makes it clear from the film's first frame that he loves hip-hop. Looking straight at the viewer, he declares hip-hop has been a style of music he's loved since he first heard it as a teenager two decades ago. But now, he says, he is "very conflicted about the music I love."

Growing up in a black neighborhood in Central Islip, N.Y., Hurt was attracted to a music "created by people your age who looked like you, talked like you, dressed like you and weren't apologetic about it."

Today he is concerned about how the hip-hop market is being dominated more and more by increasingly violent music and videos that sexually degrade women and lionize the gangsta and the pimp. New York Times reporter Doug Mills, writing about the film in December of last year, cited social critics who say hip-hop's ascendancy "has coincided with the growth of the white audience for rap and the growing role of large corporations in marketing the music."

"In the past 20 years, hip-hop has become a critically acclaimed, billion-dollar industry," Hurt notes. "How do black men feel about the representations of manhood in hip-hop? How do black women and men feel about the pervasive images of scantily clad and sexually objectified women in rap music and videos? What do today's rap lyrics tell us about the collective consciousness of black men and women from the hip-hop generation?"

Since he completed the film last summer, Hurt has been barnstorming the country, screening it at colleges and high schools, for community groups and antiviolence men's initiatives. "I made this film specifically to get people to talk" about what's going on with a music that detractors claim "glorif[ies] swagger and luxury, portray[s] women as sex objects, and impl[ies], critics suggest, that education and hard work are for suckers and sissies." It features revealing interviews with rappers including Mos Def, Fat Joe, Chuck D, Jadakiss, and Busta Rhymes and hip-hop moguls Russell Simmons, Chris Lighty, and Corey Smyth, along with commentary from Michael Eric Dyson, Jackson Katz, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Kevin Powell, and Sarah Jones and interviews with young women at prestigious black Spelman College.

One of the stops on his cross-country tour was Amherst College, the elite New England school which prides itself on having a much higher enrollment of students of color than many colleges and universities. Some two thirds of the several hundred people who came to see the film were people of color, a mix of men and women including half the members of a high school young men of color leadership group. Hurt told the audience it took him five years to complete the film, which he first conceived of a decade ago. His hard work is paying off. Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, will air nationally on the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens, on Tuesday, February 20.

A quarterback on Northeastern University's football team in the late 1980s, Hurt described himself as "a typical man." Early scenes in the film include footage of him on the football field and at a hip-hop party. Everything began to change for Hurt in 1993 when, at 21, he was hired as a trainer with Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), an innovative education program operated by Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society. "I couldn't have made this film without having first learned about men and masculinity while working as a trainer with MVP," Hurt acknowledges. The program's purpose is to raise awareness about "men's violence against women, challenge the thinking of mainstream society, open dialogue between men and women, and inspire leadership by empowering people with concrete options to effect change."

One of Hurt's mentors at MVP was Jackson Katz, MVP founder and nationally acclaimed antiviolence educator and activist (see Voice Male Spring 2006). Hurt was among the first student-athletes to join MVP, playing a central role in learning to address problems that historically have been considered "women's issues": rape, battering, and sexual harassment. The MVP approach emphasizes the role of the bystander in the work of preventing violence. It sees student-athletes and student leaders not as potential perpetrators or victims, but as empowered bystanders who can confront abusive peers. Hurt believes this approach reduces the defensiveness men often experience and the helplessness women often feel when discussing issues of men's violence against women.

As more and more people are connecting the dots between men's violence against women and depictions of both in popular culture, the potential audience for Beyond Beats and Rhymes is broadening. It's not just young fans who are interested. The film, which balances its stark critique of hip-hop with insightful comments from positive hip-hop artists like Public Enemy's Chuck D, is a skillful exploration that leaves plenty of room for viewers to suggest solutions without the filmmaker problem solving for them.

In hip-hop culture, Hurt says at the beginning of the film, "You have to be strong, you have to have girls, you have to have money...you have to dominate other men." He spends much of the rest of the film allowing the viewer a chance to see not just how confining such a definition of manhood is, but how dangerous and deadening, too. The message of hip-hop doesn"t discriminate by race. White males may be major consumers, Hurt says, "but it influences black kids the most. 'What are they saying? What is the image of manhood?'"

Writer Erin Trahan, who conducted an interview with Hurt (which appears in this issue of Voice Male), appreciates how Hurt unflinchingly answered that question, weaving "personal testimony...interviews with famous rappers, street rhymers, hip-hop fans, producers, scholars, and clips from video after video..." By the film's end, Trahan says, Hurt has connected that inflated ideal to his own experience--"how critical thinking led him to a broader, more realistic view of manhood--and how he believes in the day when hip-hop will loosen its narrow hold on men, boys, and anyone listening."

Rob Okun is executive director of the Men's Resource Center for Change and editor of Voice Male. Click here to contact him.