Gangsta r... ... middle of paper ... ...nce. Works Cited Lommel, Cookie. The History of Rap Music. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001. Roberts, Donald, et al.
American rap has changed very much over time. A big reason for that was the work of Tupac and Eminem. Although Tupac isn’t around anymore, Eminem is still changing the rap game forever. In the early stages of rap, it was mainly popular to african americans and performed by african americans but since the emergence of Eminem, rap music is more popular to all races and is being performed by all races as well. Rap has changed very much over time and the similarities and differences between Tupac and Eminem had a great impact on the American rap industry and American culture.
There are a lot of articles, books, movies and documentaries written and produced each year with hip-hop being the main subject. This great plethora of media not only affects the youth but other people as well. However, one needs to understand how the rap culture got started, and why the media found it interesting enough to give it a substantial amount of coverage. According to Webster, rap is rhythmic chanting of usually rhyming couplets to a musical accompaniment (Webster, 607). The rap subculture began in the African community residing in the Bronx during the 70’s with rappers free styling—when artists rhyme without memorization or writing down lyrics—in the park, on street corners and in apartment basements (Watkins, 63).
Another technique used in rap music is the talking over pre recorded tracks. This is defined by Grolier also in the definition of rap music, "a combination of rhymed lyrics spoken over rhythm tracks and pieces of recorded music and sounds called samples, taken from other records". This has also been traced back to Africa as noted by Relin in his article, "Musical historians say the roots of rap (chanting over a rhythmic beat) reach back into African tradition of oral history"... ... middle of paper ... ...ol, Bill. "Some Bad Raps for Good Raps." Newsweek 1 September 1986: 85.
Hip hop has become one of the most commercially promoted and financially successful forms of media in recent years. But as its profits have risen it has become a scapegoat for the many of the public criticisms of young black people. These topic have been discussed in Tricia Rose’s novel “The Hip Hop Wars What We Talk About - And Why It Matters”. The state of hip hop has fallen because the trinity of commercial hip hop has become main topic and caused a lot of controversy. 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 change in rap music has made it universal. Today you can make an instrumental for a rap song with bits and pieces of other song of any genre. In rap the only thing that matters is if someone can add words that rhyme to the instrumental that you have made. Over the years as rapping changed from “gangsta” style rap under artists like Tupac Shakur to more of a “lyrical” style rap under artists like A$AP Rocky (Rakim Mayers), the fan base grew from majority black people to white, Asian, and Hispanic and so on. Today, even though they don’t speak English, fans of A$AP rocky can be found in other countries and can sing along with every one of his songs.
1 ed. Huntington Press; September 1997 Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Music and Culture). 1ed. Wesleyan University Press; May 1994 Brewster, Bill and Frank Broughton.
The culture has become so popular that it has entered today’s fashion and modern language. Hip hop music is an extremely large part of today’s generation and a global genre, which influences the generation all over the world. The culture has entered everywhere from TV commercials to toys, video games, and also fashion industry. “Hip hop has been America’s most wanted music, both with sales and as the target of censorship. With its simultaneous focus on invention and tradition, hip hop has survived sampling lawsuits, FBI boycotts, Supreme Court obscenity hearings, mix tape raids, parody of the culture, pop crossovers, and the threat of white rappers taking over the music” (Hess 4).
Hip hop really came to the scene when block parties in New York City became really popular during the 1970s. This scene became increasingly popular in the Bronx due to the large African-American and Puerto Rican influences combined. These groups of people really became fans because hip hop music was seen as a voice or the stories of the “disenfranchised youth of the lower class areas and cultures and really talked about the social, economic and political realities of their lives. As hip hop grew more popular so did other genres such as disco. Disco started to have a slight influence on hip hop but then decided to part ways after stealing some of the loops and tracks f... ... middle of paper ... ...elp show the west coast was another viable prospect to gangsta rap compared to the east coast hip hop.