Hip-Hop On The Bus

Seeing tourists in my Harlem neighborhood is nothing new. You can spot them from a mile away - their tour buses taking up a half city block; their light faces showing recognition of the Harlem institutions they've heard so much about. Sylvia's Restaurant, The Lennox Lounge and the Apollo Theatre consistently teem with out-of-towners.

But now, it seems, there's a new tourist in town. And this tourist, often white and "dressed like LL Cool J circa 1985," is checking out Harlem's hip-hop hotspots. For 70-dollars, these bus tours roll through 33 years of New York hip-hop history, making stops at such places as the Graffiti Hall of Fame at 106th Street and Park Avenue (a schoolyard featuring enormous murals by some of the city's top graffiti artists), Bobby's Happy House (a record store owned by Bobby Robinson, the onetime proprietor of Enjoy Records, which released some of the earliest hip-hop singles) and The Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, where the Notorious B.I.G. was laid to rest.

I should pony my honky self up to the next hip-hop bus and take a spin through Harlem with a new set of eyes and ears. And if I donned the purple Kangol hat, maybe being a tourist wouldn't be so bad...

According to the NY Times:

The success of Hush Tours is a sign that hip-hop has become part of New York's official cultural heritage — for younger visitors especially, a tourist magnet right up there with the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty...

"When you go to Nashville, you know that's the home of country music," [tour founder] Debra Harris said. "New York needed to step up to the plate, to say officially that this is the birthplace of hip-hop. The city was sleeping on it. I discovered that younger visitors who loved rap music were eager for more knowledge, for a different kind of tourist experience that would get them out of Times Square."