Hip-hop artists urged to find own way

Do you.

That's what Berklee College of Music professor Bill Banfield told about 180 aspiring hip-hop artists yesterday in Roxbury during the Hip-Hop Empowerment Summit: Making Your Music Heard.

Banfield, who specializes in black music, urged youths to share their unique stories in a world that he said has become lopsided with tales of violence, drugs, and sex.

The free event included a panel of hip-hop community members and a live freestyle showcase, featuring improvizational performances. A crowd of mostly teenagers packed an auditorium in Hibernian Hall to hear how they could make their music stand out without selling out to what many consider the monotony of the mainstream.

''Keeping it real means keeping it real for yourself," said Banfield, the keynote speaker, whose Berklee course is ''Africana Studies: the Sociology of Black Music in American Culture." ''Don't concentrate on being the next 50," he said, using shorthand for the rap star 50 Cent. ''Concentrate on being the first you."

Banfield said hip-hop has become a broken record, lacking originality and innovation. While rap singers like 50 Cent and Young Jeezy are dominating music charts and radio playlists with accounts of street life that are largely similar, Banfield said art should be individual expression, not emulation.

''When you are creating a new rhyme, do something different, talk about something new," he told the audience. ''And put a new set of sounds in it. Throw some school band in it or some gospel singer, use alarm clocks, pots and pans."

Panel members lamented that representing something true to life and unique is difficult, because corporate America runs the commercial side of the industry. It is difficult, they said, for local artists who dream of being signed by major record labels but refuse to compromise their social and political messages for more salable songs about big rims on big cars.

''The suit-and-tie execs are telling rappers what to say," said rapper Das ''Metaphorick" Dreher, 31, of Dorchester. ''It's all fantasy. You have to speak a certain way," which is inhibiting, he said.

With Boston's underground hip-hop scene brimming with unsigned talent, the event, hosted by Berklee and ACT Roxbury, represented an effort to unify the community and help aspiring artists recognize the impact of a movement that dates back to the late 1970s.

The quadruple slaying of members of the fledgling rap group Graveside late last year symbolizes the need for young artists to ''channel creative energy into more meaningful directions," Banfield said.

Artists and panel members, who included a performer and a deejay, agreed that, although the commercial side of hip-hop has been taken over in the past decade, it would be just as bad if most all of the songs produced were saturated with similar revolutionary lyrics.

''If everybody rapped like us, I'd be bored," said 25-year-old Ernesto ''Eroc" Arroyo, part of the politically focused hip-hop group The Foundation.

Ideally, the industry should be a delicate balance between commercial and conscious messages, panel members said.

''There's no positive without negative," said panelist Brian ''Raydar" Ellis, a 2005 Berklee graduate who plans to release his debut album this year. ''Everyone needs to have their viewpoint heard."

Russell Nichols can be reached at rnichols@globe.com.