Music as a serious business in the african american society
In order to understand the themes and forms of rap music, it is important to follow the history of African-Americans from their beginnings in West Africa, to their enslavement throughout the early history of the United States, to their struggles against racial prejudice and segregation after Emancipation, to the continuing battles against de facto economic segregation and reclamation of cultural identity of many African-Americans today.
Black music is a completely different story. Read all the stories.
Race records artists
They would be killed if the slave masters heard them speaking in unfamiliar tongues. Rock 'n' roll never got to do what hip-hop does. In , Martin Luther King, Jr. Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, identity, and Caribbean music. Place all this in a country where black men are six times more likely to be murdered than whites and where one in three young black men are either in jail, on parole or on probation, and you have a potentially explosive cocktail. Labels developed street teams--corps of hungry urban youth looking for a break in the business and a few free CDs-4o get the word out. So they did what modern-day rappers do--they flexed their lyrical skillz. But these were unhappy innovations. He was perfect for radio, yet when he got a TV show of his own , it was abruptly canceled, his brown skin being too much for even the black and white of a television set. Craig Watkins further discusses the unique market position of African-American youth in his book Representing: Hip-hop culture and the production of black cinema: " [A]t the same moment black youth have become the targets of a fiercely determined social and political backlash, they have also flowered as a source of entertainment upon which the growth and cross-fertilization of the various popular culture industries--film, television, music, sports, and advertising--have enabled new regimes of cultural production, performance, and representation to emerge. Barnum made a habit of booking other troupes for his American Museum; when he was short on performers, he blacked up himself. They understand what so many of rap's critics refuse to acknowledge - that its power to influence could be harnessed to great, positive effect.This world is distinguished by its colors, the ones that identify friend or foe, and those cordoned behind yellow crime-scene tape: brown bodies with congealed blood, a lifeless maroon, and the red-rimmed eyes of a new statistic's mother. Stables of black writers, producers and musicians. It would be virtually impossible to implement a system of regulation that could be entirely objective and free of cultural bias regarding the definition and execution of blanket-definitions of obscenity and potential for harm.
However, I believe that this is because of the tremendous buying power of wealthier suburban youth and the infusion of hip-hop into mainstream culture through movies, advertising, and MTV, not because hip-hop as a whole has been taken over from inner-city youth by suburban youth.
In the growing success of the hip-hop market, musicians have struggled to maintain rap's potency as a form of resistance and empowerment. Other country artists of the genre seemed to sense this. Additionally, rap could be integrated into English and language arts curriculum as a form of both poetry and drama.
But a good time predicated upon the presentation of other humans as stupid, docile, dangerous with lust and enamored of their bondage? Finally, just as reggae has been under attack for some artists' seeming advocacy of violence to solve social, political, and economic problems, rap has become the scapegoat of the American musical fabric, as it, too, has faced mass popularity and commercialization.