A Rhetorical Analysis Of Tennessee Williams 'Rap Music'

Williams writes of how the rap music of today is very negative. In the first place, he explains that most of the well-known rappers are choosing to take the worst parts of humanity and make them seem as though they are the best parts of life. Then, instead of lifting up one another and giving words of encouragement, these singers are calling themselves and others the worst words created. In reality, they encourage females to be sexually open with as many partners as possible and to allow their main man treat them however he wishes.

They are painting a lifestyle of drinking, drugs, gangs and thugs as the life that people should pursue, especially the young black man. Indeed, these songs, while catchy and often played, are so negative

and derogatory, it is shocking that civil rights leaders don't step up and beg these men to stop. Truly, the black American men and women have had difficult lives in America for hundreds of years. They were dragged onto plantations and forced to work, whipped and treated worse than dirt. Things began looking up in the 1960s when segregation finally ended and the children were finally blended together for schooling.

With this in mind, the black American no longer had to answer to anyone but themselves and their families. Nobody owned them and no longer could anyone hold any claim on them. With the eloquent speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King came the fight for freedom for all black Americans. Yet 20 years later, the children he fought for now grown and creating art on their own seem to have taken the nastiness into their own hands. It could be said it is a sense of protection, “If I call myself stupid, then when someone else says it, it doesn't hurt.” The young black Americans have taken that “n” word as their own but they continue to blend the harshness of this word with promoting the roughest and most dangerous lifestyle.

In view of these actions, it all may well be intended. For how many years did the plantation masters make the black Americans fear them? What now do the white Americans fear? The gangs, the same gangs that the rappers today are promoting in their music. It is possible that the singers today would rather dream about living a life in which they are the ones feared. Rather to have those dreams than to find the eloquence of Dr. King maybe because fear works well.