Hip hop has multiple branches of style and is a culture of these. This essay will examine Hip Hop from the point of view of the following three popular music scholars, Johnson, Jeffries and Smitherman. It will delve deeper into their understanding of what hip hop is and its relation to the different people that identify with its message and contents. It will also identify the history of Hip hop and its transition into popular music. In particular this essay will focus on what hip hop represents in the black community and how it can be used as a social movement against inequalities faced by them.
Its major impact comes from the fact that it has encour¬aged a pro¬found Nation¬al¬ism in Black America.” Today’s Hip-hop & Rap artist promote the culture with guns, dope, violence and sexism instead the manhood and womanhood, support of the struggles, prisoners, and good entertainment from the roots of Afro centric culture. There may be a few that still install Black Nationalism into today’s society, like Jay-Z and P. Diddy who have built empires that will lead others to want to succeed and follow their the success route. In today’s society the youth lacks the encouragement to stand up for their rights and decides to fight to get their points across. They don’t think about the self-determination, self-defense or self-respect its all about actions, no unity.
She analyzes the use and meaning of sampling. Rap music uses sampling not to steal and mask a previously used beat or sound or lyric but instead to pay homage to its origins and the traditions that came before the artist using the sample. She states, “Rap music has dramatically changed the intended use of sampling technology, it has remained critically linked to black poetic traditions and the oral forms that underwrite them” (93). This kind of relationship between rap and technology is another way to acknowledge black history and attempts to educate the popular public of the origins of the samples and the traditions of black rap
"Rap music is a black cultural expression that prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America. Rap music is a form of rhymed storytelling accompanied by highly rhythmic, electronically based music. It began in the mid-1970s in the South Bronx in New York City as a part of hip hop, and African-American and Afro-Caribbean youth culture composed of graffiti, breakdancing, and rap music. From the outset, rap music has articulated the pleasures and problems of black urban life in contemporary America. Rappers speak with the voice of personal experience, taking on the identity of the observer or narrator.
By studying the political and historical patterns of the culture, I endeavour to discover the overall meaning which the culture has for its members and for society. It is primarily important to coin what Hip-Hop is, the dictionary definition describes Hip-Hop as: hip-hop (h p h p ) or hip hop noun. 1. A popular urban youth culture, closely associated with rap music and with the style and fashions of African-American inner-city residents. 2.
Many of the people involved with creating rap music were trained in maintaining new technologies for people with money to afford them. These new technologies were put to use in hip hop culture as primary tools for the creation of rap music that included original black culture, “This advanced technology has not been straightforwardly adopted; it has been significantly revised in ways that are in keeping with long-standing black cultural priorities, particularly regarding approaches to sound organization” (Rose, 63). Digital samplers played a key role in the development of rap music, but they often gained legal attention. DJ’s would often mix and match different pieces of music together to create a rhythm, but this often violated copyright laws and posed questioning to the legal boundaries of using musical property and phrases. These samplers helped formulate beats of songs that were hybrids from multiple sources of music.
This book is appealing to a person who want to know how hip hop has changed in the past decade and it points out many different attitudes toward hip hop in the Unites States. “The Hip Hop Wars What We Talk About - And Why It Matters” by Tricia Rose explores what hip hop has done to society in recent years and what people think it has caused. Though it has become one of the most commercially successful genres in mainstream music Tricia Rose explains that the topics in hip hop music have narrowed. Commercial hip hop mainly consist of black gangstas, thugs, pimps, and hoes. In the book she looks into the different points of views of people who think whether hip hop invokes violence or if it reflects life in a black ghetto and if it slows down advancement for African Americans in US.
Hip hop has gone from just DJ-ing, graffiti, break dancing and just rapping to self-expression, mannerisms and demeanor. Hip-hop has made its way to mainstream tv such as Wild N Out, Love and Hip-hop, and Growing up Hip-hop. Hip-hop has influenced the lives of today’s youth, mostly African American youth. The influence that hip hop has on today’s youth can be both positive and negative. Unfortunately, it has more negatives because of the lyrics can be rather aggressive, the want for material gain, and encouraging misogynistic behaviors.
However, though some rappers have violent or misleading lyrics, rap, just like other forms of music, cannot be understood unless it is studied without the framework of its history. Rap reflects its birth in the hip hop culture of urban, working class African Americans, its function as the voice of an otherwise underrepresented group and its roots in African American culture. Many rappers in the United States create songs that, through concerts and albums, spread their daily lives and dreams and attempt to inspire others to accomplish great feats despite the odds facing them. Rapper Phonte says: “I want to set a good example. Legacy is really what kids say about you because they know you best.”(Phonte, Philadelphia Tribune) Phonte knows that the goal of rap is to inspire others to do good and set a good example and he is one of the few rappers today that know... ... middle of paper ... ...out with good morals and concrete ideas that the country was built on but eventually rap like America became corrupted through certain people and ideas.
The cultural theory helps expand the knowledge of “hip hop” as an idea and influence on society. Mark Anthony Neal discusses the development of the understanding of hip hop by dissecting the layers and complexities of the culture, “Hip-hop music and culture emerged as a narrative and stylistic distillation of African-American youth sensibilities in the late 1970s,” within What the Music Said (Woldu 18). Urban history is a large, yet vital characteristic throughout the study of hip hop and its progression; Russell Potter shows how critical the representation of black musical expression and the “history of vernacular speech” is for the hip hop community in his book, Spectacular Vernaculars (Woldu 19). As decades pass and the hip hop scene expands, the history of this culture becomes influenced by more historical movements and creations. However, that is not the only historical significance that runs deep within the hip hop culture.