In the words of rapper Busta Rhymes, “hip-hop reflects the truth, and the problem is that hip-hop exposes a lot of the negative truth that society tries to conceal. It’s a platform where we could offer information, but it’s also an escape” Hip-hop is a culture that emerged from the Bronx, New York, during the early 1970s. Hip-Hop was a result of African American and Latino youth redirecting their hardships brought by marginalization from society to creativity in the forms of MCing, DJing, aerosol art, and breakdancing. Hip-hop serves as a vehicle for empowerment while transcending borders, skin color, and age. However, the paper will focus on hip-hop from the Chican@-Latin@ population in the United States. In the face of oppression, the Chican@-Latin@ population utilized hip hop music as a means to voice the community’s various issues, desires, and in the process empower its people. Notably, hip-hop is the culture from which rap music emerged. According to Keyes, rap music is a musical form that makes use of rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular, which is recited or sung over a musical soundtrack (Rap Music and Street Consciousness, 1). Rap is a combination of MCing and DJing, which are two of hip-hop’s four …show more content…
The Chicana/o identity is a composition of cultural pride, consciousness, and commitment to activism. Cultural pride in the Chicano social identity emphasizes mestizaje, which is the mixture of Spanish and indigenous races. Consciousness refers to Chicanos being aware of their unfair historical and contemporary treatment while being committed to bringing change to the Mexican-American people. The commitment to social activism is bringing change to the community through education, politics, and economics. According to Lopez, Chicano Rap is a “subgenre of Rap music as well as Latin Hip Hop.” It is used as a medium to communicate the hardships and barriers faced by the Mexican immigrant community (Lopez,
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Show MoreSince the early to mid 90’s, hip-hop has undergone changes that purists would consider degenerating to its culture. At the root of these changes is what has been called “commercial hip-hop". Commercial hip-hop has deteriorated what so many emcees in the 80’s tried to build- a culture of music, dance, creativity, and artistry that would give people not only something to bob their head to, but also an avenue to express themselves and deliver a positive message to their surroundings.
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.
Rapping is simply a single element of hip hop music. Flava Flav of the group Public Enemy, speculates that rap and hip hop are sometimes differentiated by tempo.
This essay is entitled “Hip Hop’s Diasporic Landscapes of Blackness”, written by Marc D. Perry. In this essay, Marc Perry examines several different aspects of hip hop. In the introduction, Perry briefly discusses the beginning of hip hop. He is able to offer personal perspective from childhood because growing up he was able to witness the evolution of hip hop first hand. Another point in particular that Perry focuses on is how hip hop has grown from an underground form of music to a international phenomenon. He also examines hip hop movements in various countries and discusses how they relate and contribute to the African Diaspora.
I have grown up listening to Hip-Hop just as I did listening to my mother’s blaring Bachata and Merengue every Sunday morning and from what I can recall, the artists I primarily listened to were black, or Eminem. The only Spanish rappers I did listen to were Reggaeton artists, meaning I did not listen to many predominately English speaking Latino rappers. This revelation of my early musical tastes begs the question as to why I was not exposed to more Latino rappers during the late nineties and early millennium. In learning about how Latino’s have participated within the realm of Hip-Hop, one learns that allow Latino’s have played a major role in its foundations, the call for a strong identity has emerged due to various group’s rejections of the Latino presence.
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. This will then open up the discussion for the how this has influenced society, and the impact it has had in terms of race issues which hip hop itself often represents through music.
Rap is a type of music created by city African Americans during the 1970’s in the United States. This style of music consists of rhythmic music that consists of tapping sounds or criticism, or a style of music where lyrics are spoken or chanted with reoccurring musical beats. It was developed as part of hip hop culture. Rapping was commonly accompanied by dancing and rebellious art known as graffiti. Different cases incorporate testing beats or bass lines from records, combined beats and sounds, and beatboxing. "Hip-Hop" all the more appropriately means the act of the class. The term, “ Hip Hop” music is now and then utilized with the term rap music, despite the fact that rapping isn't a required for hip hop music; the class may likewise incorporate different components of hip bounce culture, including DJing, turntablism, scratching, beatboxing, and instrumental
The best way to describe it is rap is what you are saying and it is what you do. Another way to look at rap is thinking of it as a verb. For instance, one could say “Go ahead, rap.” And that would be present tense where as someone could say “Did you hear what he just rapped?” and there is also a future tense “I’ll start rapping right after you are done.” That is what rap is. Now Hip-Hop is something else. Hip-Hop is a culture. There is Hip-Hop dancing, Hip-Hop music, Hip-Hop abs, etc. Other things associated with Hip-Hop would be breakdancing, graffiti, and of course rapping. Often people get these things mixed up but they are different. Rapping dates all the way back from the civil war era. Slaves would rhyme words just to pass the time when they worked they would also sing hymns to make the time fly by. Rapping had many roots and it can be traced almost anywhere at any time. Rap could also be in spoken poetry whether people know it or not. Hip-Hop started around the 70’s mainly in block parties in New York City. And it blew up and became a hit within years. Some of the fathers of Hip-Hop such as DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, or Grandmaster Flash started out as a disc jockey at block parties. This entire music genre has real urban roots. It is funny to think that his entire musical genre happened because of a turntable and two vinyl records. Breakdancing caught on in Hip-Hop because of the spaces between the songs when a DJ would scratch a record, and that is how it got its name “Break-Dancing”. One of the first major singles of Hip-Hop/Rap was Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”. The song had a simple bass line that would get easily stuck in anybody’s head and it would make them get up and want to start dancing. The bass line has been used in commercials today, for instance Applebee’s has an ad on television that has the “Rapper’s
Some weaknesses of James McBride’s “Hip Hop Planet” include its cynical tone and his attitude towards the musical side of Hip Hop. McBride opens the essay with a reflection on what his ultimate nightmare is. He showcases the Hip Hop community in a negative light with phrases like, “music that doesn’t seem to be music—rules the world” (McBride, pg. 1). This starts the essay off negatively because it misleads the reader by letting them think he is not a supporter of the Hip Hop movement. As you read the entire essay you realize this is not the case. The article itself isn’t very inviting because tone of the entire essay is very cold and cynical. He also doesn’t agree with the typical Hip Hop sound saying things like, “It sounded like a broken record” (McBride, pg. 1). The sound of Hip Hop music is what helps define it and is a crucial aspect of
Hip hop has been a center for controversy since its forefathers foundings. Hip hop musical style can be described as stylized rhythmic, rhyming, and chanting/rapping.
In order to comprehend hip hop, one must first know the definition and its importance as a component of black culture. Hip hop culture is rap, rap a musical
What is rap music? How who rap music created? Rap music is a person can rap too the beat of a song. Rap music wasn’t created by one person, it is collection people that made this genre of music. The rap industry isn’t just a genre of music it has its own, culture. Rap music has its own lingo, and style of dress. This goes for every generation of rap including the 1970s through late 2000s. The hip hop culture didn’t just reach African American people this reached people all over the world. Rap music has become a phenomenon that people of all races can relate to the style of music.
For the past four decades, African-Americans have been highly visible in the realms of popular culture through the legacy of the hip hop nation. Hip hop culture has vast and complex formations across the country and the globe, but popular representations are most frequently tied to the “culture of poverty” and violence that many social scientists have claimed exists within poor, urban, African-American communities (Ensminger 1). The diseased language of discourse surrounding the “tangle of pathology” that pervades hyper-visible misrepresentations of particular black communities and black expressive cultures are frequently utilized to dehumanize and devalue the black lived experience. This has produced a narrow scope through which blackness is represented and understood, as well as a lingering effect in African-American self-perception that is both disempowering and limiting to self-expression. In 2003, James Spooner disrupted popular representation by examining the marginalized experience of African-Americans in the predominantly white punk scene, while also expanding the category for black cultural expression in his documentary Afro-Punk: The ‘Rock n Roll Nigger’ Experience. Today, Afro-Punk (AP) embodies an online cultural movement that represents what afropunk.com refers to as “the other black experience.” From the general AP website, to Instagram and Twitter accounts, to an active Facebook page with almost a hundred thousand likes, this small but growing community has moved beyond the confines of the punk music genre and become a cultural movement which celebrates “the creativity and freedom of spirit in alternative Black culture” by exhibiting music, art, film, fashion, and more (Afropunk, Facbeook.com). Guided by the punk pr...
Rap Music, a genre of R&B that includes rhythmic poetry put over a musical background. The background consists of beats combined with digitally isolated sound bites from other recordings. The first recording of rap was made in 1979 and the genre began to take notice in the U.S. in the mid-1980s. Though the name rap is often used back and forth with hip hop. The name hip-hop comes from one of the earliest phrases used in rap on the song “Rapper’s Delight” by Sugarhill Gang. “I said a hip hop, hippie to the hippie, the hip, hip a hop, and you don't stop, a rock it to the bang bang boogie, say, up jump the boogie, to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.”. In addition to rap music, the hip-hop subculture also formed other methods of expression like break dancing, graffiti art, a unique slang vocabulary, and fashion sense.
Hip hop has permeated popular culture in an unprecedented fashion. Because of its crossover appeal, it is a great unifier of diverse populations. Although created by black youth on the streets, hip hop's influence has become well received by a number of different races in this country. A large number of the rap and hip hop audience is non-black. It has gone from the fringes, to the suburbs, and into the corporate boardrooms. Because it has become the fastest growing music genre in the U.S., companies and corporate giants have used its appeal to capitalize on it. Although critics of rap music and hip hop seem to be fixated on the messages of sex, violence, and harsh language, this genre offers a new paradigm of what can be (Lewis, 1998.) The potential of this art form to mend ethnic relations is substantial. Hip hop has challenged the system in ways that have unified individuals across a rich ethnic spectrum. This art form was once considered a fad has kept going strong for more than three decades. Generations consisting of Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and Asians have grown up immersed in hip-hop. Hip hop represents a realignment of America?s cultural aesthetics. Rap songs deliver a message, again and again, to keep it real. It has influenced young people of all races to search for excitement, artistic fulfillment, and a sense of identity by exploring the black underclass (Foreman, 2002). Though it is music, many people do not realize that it is much more than that. Hip hop is a form of art and culture, style, and language, and extension of commerce, and for many, a natural means of living. The purpose of this paper is to examine hip hop and its effect on American culture. Different aspects of hip hop will also be examined to shed some light that helps readers to what hip hop actually is. In order to see hip hop as a cultural influence we need to take a look at its history.