Hip Hop Exhibit In N.Y. Museum

Not too long ago the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York opened a controversial exhibit that featured among other things a painting of the Virgin Mary made with elephant dung.

Now it is under the microscope again with an exhibit called Hip Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage.

It examines what the museum calls the most influential phenomenon in pop culture in 25 years, reports CBS News Correspondent Russ Mitchell.

Hip hop journalist Kevin Powell, guest curator of the exhibit, says hip hop fills a void in the telling of the American story.

"This is our art," he says. "This is urban folk art. Period."

The roots go back to the late '70s and early '80s when disaffected urban kids began break-dancing on the street, writing graffiti on walls and creating a new music that required neither instruments nor training called rap.

An early pioneer of rap, Doug E. Fresh, popularized what is called the human beatbox, where all you needed to make music is your mouth.

"I would walk down the street and make up beats of things that I would hear," says Fresh.

Soon, what had begun has a way of making something out of nothing was becoming one of the hottest trends in music.

And by the mid-'90s, with the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, what was now called gangsta rap had taken a violent turn. Violence in hip hop and sexism are the things the exhibit had to address.

"We couldn't do an exhibit and sanitize it and act like this stuff didn't happen because violence, sexism, controversy is a part of what we call hip hop," says Powell.

Powell says the controversy, the edginess is at the heart of hip hop's appeal to suburban white kids, who now listen to hip hop more than they listen to rock.

"There's always been an interest in music that's rebellious, that's edgy, that speaks to the times, which is why white kids related to bebop, to rock and roll, which is why white kids are into hip hop."

And into hip hop fashion, with rappers providing the runway music from New York to Paris, and much of the exhibit consists of fashion. But is this art?

Powell says, "To me, this is significant art as the work of Salvador Dali or Diego Rivera who in the 1930s documented the art of working class people."

Rapper LL Cool J agrees, saying, "I think it's a major step in the right direction because it brings some sort of sensibility of cultural awareness into music that as of late has been absent on certain levels."

For museum director Arnold Leeman, making art relevant to the community is what a public museum should be doing. "This is your museum. That's what the Brooklyn Museum has been about… and I'm thrilled because that's my interest in museum work."

If the opening day was any indication, the community is interested. And if it is art, the only question may be whether it will stand the test of time.

Carter believes it will.

"I think that hip hop wll be around. I mean, just as I now, you know, in the year 2000, feel the need to put on a Robert Johnson record or a Billy Holiday record or listen to early Beatles stuff or Bob Dylan, someone somewhere will say, 'I really want to understand 1990s America and listen to Tupac Shakur or Ice T or NWA or Eminem…. I doesn't think its gonna disappear."

Hip hop is not just music, but is expressed in graffiti, dance and fashion.

If anybody doubts it, just check out the music many teens are listening to and the clothes they're wearing.