Most people don’t really think about the brutal side of the rap music they love before getting down on the dance floor or watching the latest music video.

Issues like gun violence, objectification, and hyper-masculinity are glorified and encouraged over hot, grimy rhythms that are climbing Billboard’s hip-hop charts. But as young rap artists trade their souls and their talent in for thick wads of cash, fat mansions and gold teeth, filmmaker Byron Hurt decided to make a movie about the dark side of manhood in rap music.

More than a hundred members of the hip-hop generation came to Jack Adams Hall last Thursday to take advantage of the free food, live performance from independent MC, Mandeep Sethi, and a free screening of Hurt’s documentary "Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes." An open discussion led by famed Asian American author and hip-hop cultural analyst Jeff Chang took place as well.

As students snacked on the event's free food, Sethi, an SF State student, began the evening, prepping audiences for the screening whose subjects show how hip hop once was pure and is now a corrupt commercial exploit.

The event, sponsored by KQED Community Outreach and School Services, an organization that promotes community education, SF State's Associated Students Inc. and Performing Arts and Lectures brought the importance of the film’s message to students and faculty on campus.

“Far and away, this is one of the best hip-hop documentaries I’ve seen,” said Manijeh Fata, project supervisor at the Community Outreach Program at KQED. “Byron really goes deep.”

Through interviews with mainstream hip hop’s most powerful head honchos and most famous artists, like Russel Simmons, Busta Rhymes, Chuck D, Tali Kweli and Mos Def, Byron Hurt compares rap music’s hyper-masculine, or machismo, persona to the racist characterization of African Americans in the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation.” He takes close analysis of the stereotypes that racism enforces upon African American youth, expressed through the lyrics, videos, advertisements, improvisational battles of immasculinization, and violent objectification of women.

And there was also “Tip Drill,” Nelly’s notorious single where in the music video, Nelly runs a credit card between the buttocks of a video model and also footage of Black Entertainment Television's (BET) spring break coverage, where multiple women fought off harassment by males at concert events. Though video models were willing to participate and some women simply ignored young men’s antics on the street, the film found connections with the objectification of young black women and the high number of sexual assaults that say one in four black women are raped by the age of 18.

Though Byron is apologetic in the beginning of the film, as if he was sorry for airing hip hop’s most notorious dirty laundry, his brutally honest pictorial of the-love-that-shall-not-be-named and hip hop artist’s blatant homophobia makes a huge highlight in the film.

Where Busta Rhymes and other hip hop artists refuse to even discuss homosexuality in hip hop culture, other artists use homoerotic images as ammunition against a battling MC.

Students at the viewing watched, nodding their heads to each of the claims that experts in the film were making. They occasionally burst into laughter as Busta Rhymes, sarcastically poked fun at his and others’ over-masculine, “hard” images and hissed under their breath at Russell Simmons’ cowardice over taking responsibility for objectifying black women.

But for Lawrence Festin, an SF State student at the event, where the film took no prisoners, it also left out indie artists, such as the Coup and Dead Prez, who spit nothing but social consciousness.

“It’s a good documentary,” said Festin. “But they didn’t talk about the underground.”

After the film, Chang, author of "Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: The History of the Hip Hop Generation" and editor of "Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop," led an open discussion with experts. Although the filmmaker was abesent due to a family emergency, the panel talked about the origins of hip hop's turn to violence and included everyone from a former member of the homohop group Deep Dickollective to Bay Area hip-hop DJ Davie D, and a Berkeley professor of African-American studies.

Many students left during the long-winded discussion, which lasted over two hours, but for hardcore hip hop fans and students enthused about discussing hip-hop culture it continued to be engrossing.

Davie D gave his own history lesson, which was rich with respected female MCs, like Queen Latifah, and rap music’s roots in gay culture, like Dj Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage Club or Grand Master Flash’s grandiose persona.

As mainstream hip hop is looking more and more like offensive minstrel shows of a time best forgotten, Sethi feels it is up to the urban youth to stop listening to commercial hip hop and reawaken a passion for what hip hop once was 30 years ago.

“There needs to be an awakening in the masses,” said Sethi after the discussion, “we are talking about changing what we are looking at.”

"Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes" will have its KQED premiere on channel 9.