Rap marathon hopes to show positive

NEW YORK - Curtis Sherrod knows there's power in numbers. So when he decided to organize more than 100 rappers and poets in a 24-hour rap marathon where no cursing is allowed, he only saw the good that could come from it.

"There's a feeling of fellowship and communal family spirit that's generated when people are talking about positive things, about peace, about creativity," says Sherrod, co-founder of the Global Artists Coalition (GAC), a New York nonprofit organization dedicated to career development for young people.

"It affects your mentality. Just in the same way if you heard (lyrics about) bang-bang shoot-shoot, for a couple of hours, you'd leave feeling a certain way. (The positive messages) have to affect you."

Rap legend Kool Herc, credited as the founder of hip-hop, is set to kick off Saturday evening's "rap-a-thon," a fundraiser for Harlem's Hip-Hop Culture Center, the city's first permanent hip-hop exhibit and the community center established by the GAC. Tickets are $100 and will be streamed live on GAC's Web site. Organizers hope to raise some $250,000 which would enable the center to operate with daily business hours. Currently, groups can only visit the center by appointment.

The event is also an attempt to set a world record for continuous rapping. According to Sherrod, participants will rhyme freestyle in carefully staggered two-minute increments. Each MC will be partnered with another rapper who will step in if the other flubs a line. A freestyle host will also be present to pick up any additional slack, and so will the audience.

"If the host messes up, the audience is full of MC," Sherrod explains. "And they've been instructed to chime in with at any point to say `Rock, ya don't stop/Keep on, ya don't stop ...' It's a communal type thing, everyone's an MC."

Given the recent debates on the usage of the N-word and increasing scrutiny of violence and misogyny in rap in the wake of the Don Imus scandal, organizers hope this event shows hip-hop in a different light.

"We want to demonstrate that hip-hop can do something that's positive in nature ... without cursing, without foul language," says Terry Nelson, the other founder of the GAC.

"It's all about balance," Sherrod adds. "People who want record deals will make records that will allow them to get a record deal. But you can't use the rappers who choose to go that route as a blanket statement for all rappers. For every (gangsta rapper), there's ten other rappers that are trying to do positive things."

In addition to the rap-a-thon, local politicians and business owners are set to conduct a dinner seminar on the importance of young people exploring other career interests in case their aspirations of becoming a rapper or DJ don't pan out.

"We're showing kids that having a plan B is necessary, that they shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket because entertainment can be an unstable industry," says Raqiyah Mays, a host on New York City hip-hop station Hot97 (WQHT-97.1), which is a sponsor of the event. "It's important that young people think bigger, dream bigger."

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